Ep. 3 Talent Strategy, Ines Black, Duke

Join Suzan and Duke's Ines Black as they discuss talent strategy and labor markets while getting us to think about why we work for who we work.


January 2023
ExecU Podcast
Episode 3: Talent Strategy with Ines Black, Duke University

BRIEF SUMMARY OF EPISODE

Ines Black is an Assistant Professor in the Strategy area at Duke University, working at the intersection of firm strategy and labor markets. Her research focuses on how and when the matching process between workers and firms yields performance gains. She is particularly interested in how organizations choose hiring channels as a result of their demand for skills. 

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KEY TAKEAWAY

Ines: “... I'm interested in the relationship between workers and firms, but my questions are usually from the point of view of how a firm develops their internal strategy. So instead of asking the question of what are the decisions that workers make that lead to certain outcomes in the labor market, I ask, what are the decisions that firms make that lead to certain outcomes in the labor market?”
 
ADDITIONAL LINKS

Share the podcast: https://execupodcast.buzzsprout.com/share

Ines’ Website:
https://sites.google.com/view/inesblack

Sponsored by Viv Higher Ed: 

https://vivhied.com/

Transcript

Ines 0:00

instead of asking the question of what are the decisions that workers make that lead to certain outcomes in the labor market, I ask, what are the decisions that firms make that lead to certain outcomes in the labor market? firms have in the past decade, started reaching out to workers and invite them to apply much more often. As opposed to the traditional hiring channel, which is posting a job ad and waiting for applicants to come in.

0:26

welcome to Executive the podcast, bringing you actionable insights from faculty at the world's top business schools. I'm your host, Suzanne Brinker, and today's guest is Enis Black. She's at the Duke Fuqua School of Business, and we'll be discussing hiring strategy.

Suzan 0:42

Hi Enes. It's so great to have you on the show.

Ines 0:45

Hi. It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for the invitation.

Suzan 0:48

I, am so interested to hear more about your background and what your journey was, to the position that you have at Duke today.

Ines 0:55

I'm from Portugal originally. I grew up in a town just outside of Lis. By the ocean. And, I did my undergrad over there in Lisbon, in economics and I kind of fell in love with the subject right away and thought that I might want to be an academic, but I also thought that I was way too young to make that decision. So, while I was doing my undergrad. There was a big reform in education in the European Union that shortened most high education degrees to three years. So all of a sudden I was 20 and graduating and I thought, no, this is way, way too young to, to make a decision to go into academia. And I thought that I, I wanted to get some work experience first and then make a more educated choice. And so that's what I did. I worked in consulting for a few years. I worked in finance for a bit, for Pricewaterhouse Coopers. Then I moved to Deloitte. Where I worked in strategy and operations consulting mostly for the banking sector. And that was a really interesting experience and also one that I wasn't expecting to like for very long mostly because of the grueling hours that consulting is usually associated with. Little did I know about the grueling hours of tenure track, but that's a different conversation. Um, Yeah, so that was good experience. It got me a lot of exposure to a lot of different companies. It got me really interested in questions related to management and managers. Particularly how managers build teams, how they find the right people, cuz it seemed to make the whole difference in the different. Projects I was in, you know, we would get into a client, make a recommendation about whichever challenge they wanted us to help with. And at the end of the day, some implemented it really well and some really didn't. It felt like the biggest difference was the teams that work. You know, cast it to implement these changes. or sometimes the absence of a team that was tasked with it. And I kind of got that interest from then without really knowing that it would become my main research focus. And at a certain point I had envisioned staying in consulting for like a decade or something and then moving back to academia. But when I was. 22, almost 23. Uh, my father passed away quite suddenly from a very fast moving cancer, and it changed a little bit the outlook of my life in many ways, as as one does with such an, an important event. Yeah, I bet one. Yeah. And one of the ways it changed was like, do I really wanna wait five years more before doing something that I feel like I've been passionate about since I was 17? Maybe not. And I wondered if that was a good time for me. So I started applying. I went back to my old mentor during college, to ask him for some guidance throughout the process cuz I really didn't have, I, I, I don't know, I don't know how much listeners may be familiar with, uh, PhD applications, but usually people apply to really a lot of programs because it's a numbers game. Uh, and that's for sure that would be my advice, But I didn't follow my advice cuz I was working really long hours and I just didn't have the time. So I applied to five places. and I very much relied on advice to choose those places and then to eventually choose the program I ended up at, which was a Peachy and economics in the Barcelona School of Economics. And I. Meandered a bit through different fields in economics, and it ended up back where my first interests were, which were in, uh, questions at the intersection of labor, economics and organizational economics. So essentially things that, connect to. Work relationships between workers and firms. But I'm always very, very interested in the point of view of the firm in this research. So how the firm makes decisions and then how that impacts the labor market and eventually workers outcomes. So firms are usually the agents of my research or the main focus, whereas the space, you could consider it like labor relations in some fields it's called, or labor economics and econ, so I did my PhD in economics. I ended up with a portfolio of papers that felt to me at least that they belonged more in a business school than they did in the econ department. And therefore I applied to some, I applied to a lot of econ departments and then some business schools and ended up at Duke. So that's the, wow, what a story. I hope it wasn't too long

Suzan 5:46

No. Super interested too, in hearing, you know, when did you come to the us? Where was your consulting experience in the US or was your first position that you held

Ines 5:56

in the US? Yeah, so when I worked for, for, uh, Pricewaterhouse and Deloitte, these were both the Libo offices, and then I moved to Barcelona. Within my PhD in Barcelona. I actually ended up working with advisor from another university, which is University College London. So I actually moved to London in, the last year and a half of my PhD and finished my dissertation there. And then when I finally defended my dissertation, this was June, 2018. I had already lined up the job at Duke and then we moved here and that was the very first time I lived in the us. So I've been here for a little over four years, but it was the first time I lived here. Yeah.

Suzan 6:41

Wow. I mean, it sounds like a path. Defined by incredibly hard work and also really interesting experiences in multiple countries. And your research area by definition is probably very culture, specific. I, I don't know if you would say that too, that, when you look at labor markets and organizations that the trends and the factors that you're looking at are often influenced very heavily by the country in which they're happening or. If you're looking at firms where that's not so much the case,

Ines 7:13

so that's the thing. I think firms help curtail some of that variation. And while yes, there are a lot of, especially norms of labor market participation, labor market, discrimination as well, which is not the main focus of my research, but it's definitely a hugely important area of research. That I would say is very influenced by, the place. Whereas my research, I have found remarkable similarities across different countries. But I should also say that all of my papers are. In a particular context. So I do have papers with data from Portugal. I also have papers with data from the US and we try to make sure that we bound our results to say, this might not exactly be the same elsewhere, but in, in my experience, I have found that whenever I then. Look at the, at the same question in other countries, it's remarkably similar. And probably because I tend to look at how farms make decisions, which. Nowadays, it's so globalized that you'll see a lot more

Suzan 8:17

similarities. So you say that you work at the intersection of firm strategy and labor markets. Could you, to those of us who are not economists, explain a little bit more to what that exactly means and what kind of organizational decisions you study.

Ines 8:33

Yes, of course. so there are lots of ways of thinking about the labor market and typically how a labor economist, which is my background, would look at it, is either from an institutional lens. or from the perspective of the worker, like, what decisions lead to certain outcomes in the labor market? What are the barriers that certain workers face to progression or to, better salaries? In my case, I'm interested in the relationship between workers and firms, but I'm. My questions are usually from the point of view of how a firm develops their internal strategy. So instead of asking the question of what are the decisions that workers make that lead to certain outcomes in the labor market, I ask, what are the decisions that firms make that lead to certain outcomes in the labor market? They're very complimentary, as you can tell from how I've. Phrase them. But the locus of decisions make, makes a big difference in terms of how you look at the question, the methods you use and the type of data you use. You asked me another question, which was just

Suzan 9:33

in terms of what kind of decisions Oh, study. Is it just around who is hired, or how the organizational chart is developed, exactly what decisions I'd be so curious.

Ines 9:46

Right. So the, the main overarching decision that I look is who is chosen? Who matches with whom? What type of workers work for which types of firms? This very obviously broad question. So I have two buckets of papers. One, where I look at the hiring process and I ask what types of. Hiring, mechanisms do firms, choose considering the type of talent they are looking for. And so, for example, we have, a paper with my colleague, char Hassan, here at Duke and rem coning at at hbs, where we look at a phenomenon that we have do documented to be on the rise, particularly in the us which is the data that we have. Which is that firms have in the past decade, started reaching out to workers and invite them to apply, much more often. And as opposed to the traditional hiring channel, which is posting a job ad and waiting for applicants to come in. And you might think, well, why? Why would a firm just, if they can wait for someone, why? Costly, invest in a recruiter to do it for them. And so what we explore in that paper is that two things, drive firms to do this. One is how, much specific skills they demand. So presumably, If companies, require it, and particularly in, in fields like STEM or Big Tech, if companies require a very specific set of skills, technical skills that, are either really hard to find together or require a lot of work experience, it might be very costly to just wait for workers to self-select. Mm-hmm. because most of these workers are probably already employed and already. Happy at their jobs.

Suzan 11:40

There might be very little proactivity if they're happy with good salaries and challenging assignments.

Ines 11:46

Exactly, exactly. So if they are, if they already are employed, then they'll, and happy as you were just saying, then chances are the right candidates aren't going to respond to your job ad and therefore, The cost of forgoing, those might justify the cost of having a recruiter look for them. So that's one. That's just the benefit of this practice goes up for certain roles and for certain industries. The other thing is that we also know that it's much easier to find information on candidates online. So this is instead of a benefit argument, it's a cost argument. It's much less costly than it was 30 years ago, 20 years ago, to scour the internet for profiles and find exactly what kind of skills Suzanne has. Because I'll either find you on LinkedIn or I'll find some of your code on GitHub if you are in that space of of occupations, and I can get a pretty good sense of how qualified you are before I even meet you, before I even see your cv. Or your formal application. And so this equation between the benefit going up for some roles and the cost really going down for the, for looking for information, makes it so that for some firms, the, there's a. Much more lucrative, hiring channel, which is, we call it hunting for talent, as opposed to waiting for workers to apply. So that's the kind of decisions I, I look at. How does the hiring channel be? It. Job ads versus hunting for talent versus tapping into your current workers networks, which is also something that lots of firms do, right? Why don't you bring in the best five coworkers you had in the past so that I can interview them? Right? So I look at how those decisions affect who gets matched with whom and whether firms can derive a competitive advantage from their talent.

13:51

executive. The podcast is sponsored by ViiV Higher Education, a full service marketing agency and enrollment strategy consulting firm for colleges and universities. ViiV is passionate about executive education and lifelong learning. Today's episode is brought to you in collaboration with Duke Fuqua School of Business.

Suzan 14:12

I also get the sense that it really depends on, what industry firms might be hiring in or what skill sets they're hiring for. Absolutely. You know, in terms of what, what tactics they employ to, to find talent. It also seems to me like it would really matter what kind of a labor market we're currently in. So, you know, a recession versus. A job boom like we had after Covid that led to the great resignation in many industries. Do you study that as well? Sort of how the larger macroeconomic factors shape hiring strategy? I'm assuming The stronger the job market, the more proactive you have to be as an employer, maybe in a broad sense.

Ines 14:48

Yes. So I have a, a couple of answers to that question. The very quick answer is yes. We are looking at the connection between hunting for talent and the great resignation. I wanna give you just a little bit more detail on the data we have because when we first started looking into this question of hunting for talent, it was. December, 2019. What we realized then, was that there was really no systematic data collected on the question. That's probably a good reflection of the fact that it's quite a novel practice. Now, some of the listeners may already be thinking, well, I know of a lot of CEO searches and C-suite searches that work like this, that some head hunter is looking for a short list of candidates. And while that is true, that was very much something that was confined to the very top echelons of the company. Where we see this sort of popularization of the practice coming down, the several echelons of the company, that is the new phenomenon and that is what we see rising dramatically in the past decade. And so we're probably thinking in a different way, that this literature has looked at the question in the past, which is. Third party head hunting firms looking for executives, in the C-suite. And what we're really interested in is sort of the broader. Implications of the practice of hunting for talent in any kind of role, particularly technical roles. So, when we first started there was really no systematic data collected on this. We, we also realized that we probably needed to collect some ourselves. So we launched a survey. And we had a few pilot runs of the survey over the years until we got to a version that we were happy with and we thought was, well crafted. Survey work is quite a learning curve that I, that I didn't know before embarking on it. And it was super interesting. But, but also what this allowed us, the several pilots throughout the years, was to have surveys at different points throughout the covid. Pandemic and also one pre covid pandemic, which we did right away in December, 2019. One in February, 2020. So that was like as pre as it gets, one later that year. So very much in the middle of, of restrictions, one in the middle of 2021 where things were already starting to open. And then again, March, 2022, where we can say that not the pandemic was over, but certainly the, we weren't looking at the, the closed down economy of 2020. We were surprised by how. Similar, the results were across all of these

Suzan 17:34

waves. Oh, wow. I, I imagine there is not many people who have that data. At so many touch points, at such a large scale. That seems really useful to me.

Ines 17:42

So thank you for saying the scale. Just because, I forgot to mention, this is a representative survey of US workers, and we have about 10,000 answers. Not for every single wave, I should say. The 10,000, we have it for February, 2020 and for March, 2022. The exact numbers vary slightly across these waves probably also because the simple size, changes a bit. The order of magnitude is just right there, and we can't really reject that they're the same. So essentially what we find is that about 14 to 15% of American workers are hired through this channel of being hunted. How many? 14 to 15. Four teams to 15. Wow. Depending on the wave, which as you can see, it's not, it's not a huge variation. It kind of talks about certain sort of a stable number across these couple years. Now we're very interested in what's gonna happen next year. You've already listened to a lot of layoff of tech worker news lately. So we don't by any means take these data. We're actually not the focus of the paper, the macroeconomic trends. We by no means take these as conclusive, but it was surprising to us how similar the number was across even like the pit of The Covid uh, lockdowns. it gives us a sense that the practice of hunting for talent, which involves hiring recruiters, paying them, perhaps even training them, to find these right profile. Once you've invested in that, you are also not going to divest because of a recession. What you might do is just hire less people. But perhaps it still makes sense for the people you hire, even perhaps more so during a recession to make sure you're hiring exactly the right person.

Suzan 19:29

It sounds like it's a really substantial portion of, positions that are filled, now get filled through recruiters, but it's also true that there is obviously the majority of jobs that are still filled in more traditional ways, which is interesting too.

Ines 19:42

Yes, but it's not all job applications. So about 50% is job application, so workers responding to job applications, so only half the workers actually got it their jobs that way. And then you have also referrals, which I was mentioning before, which is tapping into the current workers'

Suzan 20:01

networks and how do you account for promotions or internal hires, or is that.

Ines 20:07

Oh, so what we asked the the Yeah, great question. What we asked the workers was how they were matched with this employer, not this position. Got it. So it's when you first were hired by whichever company you work for, how were you hired? And then eventually you might have been promoted. We're disregarding that or abstracting for that. We are just interested in switches across companies. How do, how do those happen? Cause of course, internal promotion or internal labor markets also move a lot with. Recessions versus not. So that's one of, also one of the things that we're interested in moving forward.

Suzan 20:44

Sure. That's really interesting. I have one more question about your data set, which is, do you know, um, sort of what array of company sizes is represented to, um, were you looking just at sort of the. Type of consulting firms that you mentioned earlier, or small to large size companies, is everything kind of in that, in that 10,000 responses?

Ines 21:05

So one thing I didn't do was tell about, talk to you about the other data set we use. So we actually use two data sets. One is the survey which is focused on workers, and we target, um, BLS quotas for workers on income. Race, age, and gender, which means that we get a fairly representative on all of these dimensions. A fairly representative sample of workers, which should also represent the type of companies workers in America work for. But we don't target it on companies just because, you know, technically it's a very complicated thing to do and, and, um, Response rates. Rates go way down. Now because we don't have, in the worker survey, we don't, we don't have the ability to say much about the company. We then compliment this analysis with, analysis at the firm level for which we actually have a decade of data on, uh, firm's job posting behavior. So we see all essentially the universe of job postings for companies from 2020 to 2020. And here we do cut it before the pandemic just because of making it clean comparison. So we're all in a boom period, right? 20 20, 20 10 to 2020. Economy is growing, uh, low inflation. So trying to eliminate these external macroeconomic potential confounders. And what, what we look at is through the job postings, we're able to see how firms have changed their demand for in-house recruiters because we can see either in the job title or in the job description whether they are looking for recruiters in-house. And particularly for recruiters that know how to scour the in internet for profiles. So we're able to look at the whole job description and categorize these as a hunting recruiter, if you will. And what we see is that the demand for these types of, of jobs has increased about. 20 to 25% depending on the sector you look at. This goes towards the 25% within industries, in stem. I should also say that just a parenthesis, the number, the 14% number that I told you before, that also goes up to 25%. If you're looking at places like Silicon Valley. Oh wow. So in Silicon Valley, one in every four workers is actually higher this way. So there's a lot of variation. But coming back to this firm data, what's neat about this is that we can then connect, how this demand for in-house recruiters, relates to the company's other demand for skills in other jobs. So let me give an example. I am from X and I am looking for 20 new recruits, or 15 new recruits for 2023. Mostly programmers, some analysts, and maybe some people for hr. This company has posted, two jobs for an internal recruiter. All of their other jobs require at least 10 skills. Right versus looking at company Y that posted no jobs for recruiters. And their average skill demand for other jobs is one where we're already seeing here a pattern, which is the more skills I demand for my other jobs, the more likely I am to need an in-house recruiter to look for the right candidates that fulfill those skills, which is exactly our hypothe. And we're able to test this because we have this panel of data for a whole decade, and we're able to track how firms have changed their behavior in terms of demanding in-house recruiters. And here to finally answer your question, we have the whole gamut of firms, from like the small, posting once, every five years to the Amazons and the Googles and the Walmarts posting thousands of jobs every year. Which is, which is really

Suzan 25:00

cool. Very, very cool. Yeah. So if I'm an executive, or just a leader of a team, right? And I'm looking to scale my team right now, what would you want me to know based on the research that you've conducted, why is it so important to have a, a solid hiring strategy, and how would you go about developing one if you didn't have one yet as a leader?

Ines 25:23

I think the thing before the hiring strategy is being very, very clear about what kind of roles you need to source and what kind of skills you need for those roles. So we interviewed quite a few recruiters whose job is doing what I've been describing for the past few minutes. And one thing they told us is that the hardest thing is to source for clients that don't really know what they need. They know that they need to scale their team, but it's unclear what kind of roles and depending on where you are as a company in your life cycle, it may be hard to do that. If you're a startup and you really don't have set roles yet and everybody's doing whatever comes their way, it may be really hard to sit down and jot what is the right. And I think that's probably where tapping into your coworkers networks might be a good strategy because they're, you're very small and you're counting more on people you can trust. And then once you're a little bit bigger, you can think about a recruiter. So I think that there's different. Good strategies for different times of the company, but I think what is very important is for the, the company or the ceo, if it's a small company or the HR manager, if it's a little bit bigger to really have a clear picture of what they need. And if the response to that clear picture is we really don't know, we need sort of a jack of all trades, then probably I wouldn't do just a random job posting. I would try something that gives me a, if, if it doesn't give me control over the skill set, at least over the relationship, if, if that makes sense. So let me hire someone that I feel that the trust will be hired just because they're, they're already recommended by someone I trust. So I guess in a

Suzan 27:16

nutshell, that's what I would say. Yeah. Um, it's, so in summary, you've kind of outlined three approaches to hiring for a new position outside of the company. Number one would be to just post a job, which is the really traditional way. Number two is to rely on your own or your coworker's network to bring people in for consideration, um, that, that have a relationship with someone in the firm. And number three is hire a recruiter. Who can then kind of scout talent more broadly. And what I, now that I'm listening to this would conclude for myself is kind of the more I know about who I'm looking for and what exact skill set I want them to have, the more it would make sense to either post a job or have a recruiter go after a very particular skill that I know is out there somewhere. But if I don't really know exactly what skill set or. Even level of expertise, maybe then at least I can understand the type of person that I need, right? From more of a soft skill perspective or, um, a personality perspective to add to my company because I know I need someone who's entrepreneurial, who's okay with ambiguity as we scale. Mm-hmm. would you agree with that?

Ines 28:23

I think that makes a lot of sense and it touches on Another part of my research where I look into network hiring which would be this channel of hiring through referrals. And what that is giving firms. And it turns out that it seems what it's giving firms is not necessarily better candidates on observables, but it's better matches. So better fit with the company. And we use like really long panel of all companies in Portugal to look at this. There's both an added value of that type of hiring and also a limit to that type of hiring. Once you're at a

Suzan 28:55

scale where Sure, you can fill thousands of roles in that way. Exactly.

Ines 28:58

As, As with all good academics in social sciences, my answer is it depends where, it depends on the point of the life cycle of the company, and it depends on the type of skills that the company is looking for. Where I would say the most important thing is nailing the first, the ladder, right? And then choosing the strategy that matches that, that. Of skill you're looking for, for

Suzan 29:22

example, that is really useful. I can imagine people listening to this who are making hiring decisions right now that can use this almost as a framework. You know, what skill set do I need? Do I know enough about that? Do I have access to networks? How many people do I have to hire? All of those decisions need to be made before you really choose sort of how you're going to go after talent. We're recording this in November of 2022. Last week was, full of tech layoffs at Meow, Twitter and Amazon. And so I'm just super curious too to see what the difference is gonna be in these trends. Now, you know that we're coming kind of out of the great resignation and companies having a really tough time retaining and attracting talent to potentially a new phase where we're looking at a little bit more of what we saw, 2008 or 2000.

Ines 30:09

Yes, I am very curious to see what's, what will happen as well. I'm also interested in, so there's a spillover of this strategy. A lot of this is about the company, how the company, grows. But there's an implication of introducing this very direct competition for talent, which you can almost call poaching, right? Because most of these candidates that are being sourced this way, are employed somewhere else, which means they have options, which means they have bargaining power, which means their wages go up. And then there's a question of. Is the average wage, sustainable for a company to still grow at and paying exactly those wages with all of the benefits that, that come with it? And I wonder whether some of these tech layoffs are a result of a little bit of an inflated hiring season, particularly during Covid with where most tech companies grew. By no fault of their own or by no merit of their own, I should say. Just because everyone was home and relying more on these services. It feels a little bit like a very sector specific one-off but it also brings us the question of what does this mean for the rest of the economy? And how is 2023 gonna go? And, and I'm, I bet lots of us are asking ourselves this question. Right.

Suzan 31:35

Yeah. And you continue to collect data, it sounds like, so it'll be really interesting to see how things compare across those very different years. Is there another burning question that you have that's sort of keeping you up at night that you think is going to shape the future of your academic research

Ines 31:54

there is a theme that interests me without a particular question in mind. And the theme that interests me in general is how is work going to look like in the next few decades as, There's a lot of industry shift, particularly because there is, this glooming automation, Scare, which, is kind of periodic across history. And, and I, I don't think this is, this one is going to be any different. I don't think it will erase work, but I'm very interested in what are the occupations of the future. Because while I don't think certain automation technologies eliminate work, I certainly do think that they displace. Work from one industry to another. So I'm very curious about what is the next big hiring industry, which we already kind of are seeing that it's not big tech. Probably we're getting to the end of that most likely. Part of me thinks that it might be, uh, and almost hopefully so, uh, that it might be the environment and energy transition. But I'm very interested in how that's going to play out, how occupations will shift from. One industry to another. And then there's also the question of, is there a future for just a four week work day? And all of those discussions about worker wellbeing, which are certainly very important. A bit outside of my wheelhouse in terms of research, but I am certainly interested in them. But in terms of what I do directly, I think it's, what is the next big hiring industry and how that will happen in the next few decades.

Suzan 33:32

let's talk a little bit about your teaching as well, do you teach undergrad, grad, MBA students and, and what do you teach?

Ines 33:39

Here at Fuqua, we are a grad school. We don't have undergraduate program. When I first joined, I started in the Masters of Management Studies. The populations of students of that masters is, usually, Folks who have either just finished undergrad in another major, want a degree in business or maybe have had a couple years work experience. And so it's a first immersion into the world of business for them. And I taught the core strategy course there. And then I transitioned to the course strategy course in the daytime mba, which is our flagship program. That is usually a class of a bit more experienced students in terms of having worked in outside of their student life. There's a variation in age, but they've usually been exposed to work for a number of years, which means they also bring their own experiences to the classroom. Sometimes they've worked in the industries we're analyzing that day. And so that that's really interesting. And it's essentially a case-based type of, uh, teaching, which is very different from how I was taught and, and also how I taught during my PhD years cuz I also taught some courses then. So there was a learning curve for me. And a case-based teaching is essentially you study, a firm's. Case study So how a certain company in a certain industry approach a decision or usually the CEO approached a decision and it has clear topic, for which there is a framework in strategy to think through it. And usually the structural will be, you know, half of the class we're discussing the case, and then the other half we're debriefing or what did we learn? Strategy

Suzan 35:29

Is that a really unique approach at Fuqua in terms of this case based teaching, or would you say that that's very common across business

Ines 35:36

schools? Yeah, I would say it's very common. It was institutionalized by the Harvard Business School. In fact, at hbs, it's, it's. Even more so than we do here. Here we kind of have this half case discussion, half debriefing with a professor. Whereas at Harvard, to my knowledge, it's the full class is case based and it's discussion. So it's paramount in all of the, of these modalities of how however long you discuss, it's paramount for students. Be prepared for the case. Be prepared to answer questions that I prompt them. And it's really interesting because I teach three sections of the same class throughout one day. And you might think, well, that's really boring. I'm just teaching the same thing over and over. It would be if this were a lecture, but because this is a case discussion class, the the class never goes exactly the same. In fact, sometimes it goes in very different directions and the material is exactly the same, and it depends on. My students experience on how they saw the case, and sometimes some of them actually worked in that industry. So they have a lot more to say and we spend more time in the details. So it ends up being really fun and I end up, getting a lot of insight from also how the students would've looked at this if in their own lives, in their own work lives.

Suzan 37:03

If you were to talk to someone who is considering getting an MBA or going to business school, what would you highlight to them as unique about that learning environment?

Ines 37:13

I think one unique feature of Fuqua is the emphasis in teamwork. Is something here we call Team Fuqua, which is sort of an ethos of the school. And it's meant to, On the one hand promotes teamwork and also camaraderie and collaboration, and sort of the feeling that we're not necessarily competing against each other. Even though there are situations where, you might think that's the case, we're all graduating at the same time. But because everyone has such different interests and levels of expertise there's also a feeling that I can learn a lot from someone who had a different experience and that can help me in my own recruiting process. And here at Fuco we try to foster that. And I think students really appreciate it and feel it too. So I would say that's probably our, our main differentiating factor.

Suzan 38:02

Sounds really lovely. A team based, business education versus a really competitive one I will end with the question that I ask everyone, which is, in a nutshell, what does leadership mean to you?

Ines 38:13

The first word that came to my mind was integrity. I think I'll stick to that cuz that's the first word that came to mind. Beautiful.

Suzan 38:20

One word even better than a nutshell. thank you again so much, for sharing your insights and your research, and some, content about your teaching and we can't wait to share this episode with the.

Ines 38:34

Thank you so much. It was, it was great to talk to you and, uh, you asked me some questions that got me thinking for my future research, so that's, I really appreciate that.

38:45

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