Harbert College of Business
Fall 2022
The future of the workplace OFFICE SPACE
INSIDE THIS ISSUE:
FEATURES How's Work Today? Radically different but completely the same Meet Me At The Digital Water Cooler Work-Life Balance Let's try the other way around Moving Past Being Upset Our Labor Reflected
“Never let a good crisis go to waste.” -Winston Churchill
HARBERT COLLEGE OF BUSINESS EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP
JOE HANNA Interim Dean and Regions Bank Professor Harbert College of Business DUANE BRANDON Acting Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Affairs
Students headed to classes as Fall semester began, and MBA students honed their job interview skills at the Destination Harbert event.
DANIEL BUTLER Assistant Dean for Harbert Global Programs JEFF LONG Assistant Dean for Finance and Administration
JENNIFER MUELLER-PHILLIPS Associate Dean for Academic Affairs
MICHAEL WESSON Associate Dean for Graduate and Executive Programs
HARBERT COLLEGE OF BUSINESS ADVANCEMENT & COMMUNICATIONS
PATRICK ALLEN Senior Director of Advancement
COLLEEN BOURDEAU Director of Communications and Marketing
CREATED BY THE MEDIA PRODUCTION GROUP
BRUCE KUERTEN Director JASON ADAMS Illustration, Design and Production
ELY BEYER Illustration JIM EARNHARDT Editor JENNI HUNT Design and Production
CONTRIBUTORS Julie Bennett John DiJulio Tom Ensey
Rudy Gaines Teri Greene Jessamyn Saxon
Auburn University Harbert College of Business 509 Lowder Hall Auburn, AL 36849 (334) 844-4511 HarbertCollege@auburn.edu Auburn is an equal opportunity educational institution/employer. © 2022 Auburn University harbert.auburn.edu
Contents
FEATURES
AT HARBERT
RESEARCH
8 A Fare Return
Albert Wang, Associate Professor J. Stanley Mackin Distinguished Professor Department of Finance
9 Post-Pandemic Barriers Hamper Job Seekers
Jaclyn Koopman, Associate Professor Department of Management and Entrepreneurship
26
How’s Work Today? Radically different but completely the same
10 Ethical Stances Tested By Real-Life Concerns
Miles Zachary, Associate Professor Department of Management and Entrepreneurship
11 Behavior Bias Plays
Underappreciated Role In Investing Liz Wang, Associate Professor Department of Finance
HOW WE THINK 12 Our ‘Secret Sauce’ Includes Quality and Care
32 Meet Me At The
36 Work-Life Balance: Let’s try the other way around
Frank Oprandy, Graduate Career Services
Digital Water Cooler
13 Spend More Time In The Thinking Phase
Ron Martere, (’87, international business)
15 Leveraging Students’ Wisdom Deepens Learning For All
Joe Collazo, Graduate Executive Programs
RE F L OU R LA OR WAR EAGLE T H E A T R E 44 Our Labor Reflected Starring Us C T E
16 Working Against Energy Industry Won’t Solve The Problem Glenn Richey, Supply Chain Management
40 Moving Past Being Upset
SPOTLIGHTS
STA
R IN G U
CONVERSATIONS FROM THE C-SUITE 18 Bert Bean (’04, marketing) CEO, Insight Global
47 Alumni Notes
Harbert Business, Fall 2022 5
UNDERGRADUATES BY THE NUMBERS
Total Enrollment Growth 18% Growth in total enrollment over the past 5 years. 7,000 6,500 6,000 5,500 5,000
70% Internship Participation Historically, Harbert College
students participate in at least one internship.
2018–19 2019–20 2020–21
2021–22 2022–23
Enrollment By Program Pre-Business 39% Finance 14% Marketing 13% Supply Chain Management 8% Accounting 7% Business Administration 7% Management 6%
78% First Destination Students are employed in their field or pursuing additional education within six months of graduation.
TOTAL ENROLLMENT 5,620
Business Analytics 3% Information Systems 3%
The Harbert College of Business is one of the country’s most prestigious, innovative and dynamic business schools. With programs, research centers and faculty that lead the nation, our campus is a leadership hub dedicated to guiding students to the top of their field.
At Harbert
Nearly 1,000 Harbert students attended the September career fair, taking advantage of opportunities for networking and learning more about potential employers. The college was host to 85 employers at the event in Horton-Hardgrave Hall.
Harbert Business, Fall 2022 7
At Harbert: Research
Albert Wang Associate Professor J. Stanley Mackin Distinguished Professor Department of Finance
A Fare Return Tracking Taxis Can Point To Stock Trends W hat do taxi rides have to do with successful portfolio managers? A lot, it turns out. The curious discovery came about when a post-doctoral student stumbled upon a trove of transportation data — specifically, records about New York City taxi rides. At a loss for what to do with the seemingly useless information, the student approached Albert Wang , associate professor and J. Stanley Mackin Distinguished Professor in the Department of Finance at Harbert. Along with department colleague David Cicero, Wang and the post- doc student mined the reams of transportation data and unearthed something unique and timely: key insights into the behavior of successful portfolio managers. Insights that can, in turn, affect the behavior of investors. The trend among investors is to take the passive approach, Wang said. These investors settle for the best the market can offer based on what little knowledge they can find. There’s a general lack of trust in portfolio managers, who demand a percentage of earnings and who, the investors believe, can’t really reap earnings beyond the S&P performance. “Data from the past decade or two shows that active management is not very promising,” Wang said. “The question is, why do we see so many managers, and how come they are not losing their jobs? How come people
are still willing to pay them to manage their money?” He said a small percentage of portfolio managers routinely perform better than the market. They seek critical knowledge and use it to bring in substantial returns for their clients. So how do they get this critical knowledge? To get an answer, Wang and his colleagues studied transportation data, tracking successful portfolio managers as they traveled the streets of New York in taxis. It all had to do with meetings between two market participants: the manager and an insider at a firm. The researchers found that if a taxi trip occurs just before the firm’s earnings announcement, the stocks the trader/ manager buys can actually predict the results of the earnings announcement. When the portfolio manager and the corporate insider had longstanding social connections — school ties, for instance — the meeting was more likely to predict future stock performance. “. . . That taxi trip is not random; [the managers] purposely go out
and find information through their friends, or right before the earnings announcement of the firm,” Wang said. This behavior among managers is not radically unusual, but the means of tracking the behavior is, he believes, a uniquely useful innovation. One obvious benefit of the research is its potential to provide red flags to the SEC on insider trading when the portfolio manager is looking to profit personally. The SEC’s current methods rely largely on emails and phone calls between market participants. An additional, more precise and traceable method could provide another system to alert the commission to such behavior. That knowledge, Wang said, is also reassuring for those caught up in the debate about passive and active investing. Knowing there is someone out there working to obtain information that the average investor does not have could make active investing a more promising choice.
8 Harbert Business, Fall 2022
At Harbert: Research
Jaclyn Koopmann Associate Professor Department of Management and Entrepreneurship
Post-Pandemic Barriers Hamper Job Seekers T he COVID-19 pandemic had a noticeable impact on job loss as well as the difficulties people
The research examined specific obstacles brought on by the pandemic, including increased childcare and community responsibilities, that could significantly hinder the job search process. The team found a notable trend: Despite new obstacles, job seekers who felt less at risk of getting sick from COVID adapted and improved their searches to land a better job. Conversely, job seekers who felt they were more likely to contract COVID did not fare as well when faced with typical obstacles. Koopmann said this group of job seekers tended to lose hope and weren’t able to improve their job-search strategies when they encountered obstacles. “Thus, this group is particularly at risk of not having a successful search
and feeling distressed,” she said, noting that these risks were present even before the pandemic, when in some cases these individuals could seek help with the difficulties of a general job search. For this group of job seekers, these barriers will continue well after the pandemic unless action is taken. Koopmann and other researchers are encouraging employers, policymakers and employment centers to intervene to help these individuals overcome pandemic-related job difficulties. That intervention could include an improved recruitment process that more carefully follows health guidelines, as well as small actions such as presenting virtual recruitment options.
face when seeking new jobs. Jaclyn Koopmann , associate professor in the Department of Management and Entrepreneurship, led research on this topic that was recently published in the Journal of Applied Psychology . Koopmann and her team came away with insights on how the struggles of people seeking jobs can be addressed by key decision-makers, who can intervene to help. “Job seekers these days are likely facing multiple layers of barriers to their key job search activities, including barriers that they may have faced before the pandemic,” Koopmann said. With a focus on barriers specific to the pandemic, the researchers were able to unearth findings about general, pre- existing barriers.
Harbert Business, Fall 2022 9
At Harbert: Research
Miles Zachary Associate Professor Department of Management and Entrepreneurship
Ethical Stances Tested By Real-Life Concerns C ompanies often tout their virtues but sometimes fail to follow them.
“Investors really have to test their mettle,” Zachary said. “Are you really going to get rid of stock that you think might increase five or tenfold in the next five to seven years just because their CEO did something wrong or their board did something unethical?” However, the situation is becoming tougher for companies once considered immune to social speculation. They’re increasingly being held accountable through social media, often by stakeholders — who aren’t always shareholders. “A lot of people in our field are merging stakeholder theory with social movements and activism, so there’s definitely more research directed at questions like, ‘How do these other stakeholders compete for attention, given that they’re small and usually fairly diffuse?’” Zachary said. “They lack the traditional power that investors have, but they’re powerful because they can organize and their collective voices matter. “You see #metoo and Black Lives Matter, where it starts small but then gets really big. The next thing you know, those things actually make
the needle move for executives who might otherwise not really care about that. That’s not to say they don’t value what’s being said, but they’re making company-level decisions and they’re trying to do it in the best interest of the shareholder. They’re truly between a rock and a hard place there.” But stakeholders must reconcile their own competing interests, too. Ethical stances are often tested when more utilitarian concerns such as changes in real income, inflation and unemployment are at play. This makes it more difficult for investors and other stakeholders like customers and employees to reconcile ethical concerns. And it’s not getting any easier. “A stakeholder may care about what companies do and don’t do, but (for shareholders) families still need to be fed, money still needs to be saved and other life needs met,” Zachary said. He suggests one primary takeaway from his research: Practice what you preach. “No one likes a hypocrite,” he said, “and this includes any company stakeholder.”
Miles Zachary , associate professor in the Department of Management and Entrepreneurship, explores the psychological and societal aspects of how organizations “walk the talk” in their public stances on ethical issues, primarily those involving environmental, social and governance issues, or ESG. A paper Zachary recently published in the Journal of Management with Harbert colleague Brian Connelly researches the impact of companies following through on what they say. Their recent paper shows that the more companies talk about ethics before a violation, the more shareholders hold the company accountable. They argue this is because virtuous rhetoric creates expectations that, when violated, anger investors. Still, that’s not true for all companies. For a small subset of them, investors may discount or even ignore an ethics violation. What set these companies apart was their high expected future value — companies such as Tesla, or the Facebook of the early 2010s.
10 Harbert Business, Fall 2022
At Harbert: Research
Liz Wang Associate Professor Department of Finance
Behavior Bias Plays Underappreciated Role In Investing
I n her research, Liz Wang , an associate professor in the Department of Finance, explores the significance of investors’ behavioral bias, sometimes defined as irrational beliefs or practices that influence decision-making. “If investors have a better understanding of the factors that drive stock returns, it will help them make better decisions,” she said of papers she has published in the Journal of Financial Economics and other journals. “Let’s say we know that investors have a behavior bias that will lead to a certain kind of stock being systematically underpriced. Then we can buy that underpriced stock and make a profit in the future, when the stock value goes back to the fundamental value.” She says that finding structures that drive stock returns will potentially lead to better investment strategies. The traditional theory of personal investing posits that investors are more rational, using all the information they have available to analyze the stock in order to make wise decisions. But Wang and other like-minded researchers have noted that often the prediction resulting from this framework differs significantly from what can be observed in market data. “From the psychology perspective, we know in essence they’re all human beings,” Wang said. “They have all
different kinds of behavior bias which deviates from the assumptions in the classic traditional model, and these psychological factors affect stock returns in several ways.” The bulk of Wang’s research is based on prospect theory, a framework proposed by Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Prospect theory, also known as loss- aversion theory, focuses on the way investors value gains and losses. The theory says that investors consistently place more weight on perceived gains versus perceived losses. When investors are presented with two equal choices, they will choose the one that’s presented in terms of potential gains. With this theory as a basis, Wang’s research seeks to find a realistic method of understanding what drives the way people invest — a method that results in a more realistic picture of investor behavior than what has previously been observed in the market. One of her papers explores the performance of lottery-like stocks — stocks with such amazing returns that investing in them seems like winning the lottery. Tesla, for example, is often referred to as a lottery stock. With these stocks, people who put in small amounts of money early on may see returns of 1,000% or more. You take a low-risk chance, wait a while, then bring home the big money.
Wang’s findings show demand for these lottery stocks is strongest in a five-day window ahead of a company’s earnings announcements, which leads to a price run-up. At this point, these stocks outperform others by about 52 points. But five days after earnings announcements, the pattern reverses. Conversely, her examination showed a pronounced negative risk-return relation among firms in which investors had prior losses, again emphasizing the influence of behavioral bias.
Harbert Business, Fall 2022 11
At Harbert: How We Think
C areer and professional development work is important because it transforms the people we serve. Students are fundamentally changed through our programs here at Auburn, and that transformation changes the trajectories of their lives. I think about the generational impact we have. Students leave here different, elevated in some way, which filters through the rest of their lives, their families and their communities. Seeing students grow and change over time is incredibly rewarding and just plain fun to be part of. OUR ‘SECRET SAUCE’ INCLUDES QUALITY AND CARE
I try to focus on delivering a superior student experience. If the work we do with students is not adding value, why are we doing it? If it is not delivered well, with attention to detail and with care for the person, why are we doing it? People can acquire knowledge anywhere. I work with a team of people who believe that the quality of what our students experience and the care with which it is delivered is important. This way of thinking sets our team, Harbert College and Auburn apart from other places. It is part of the secret sauce here. At our core, we need to strive for excellence in all we do. Starting with the foundational stuff — the blocking and tackling — and continuing across the spectrum of all the things we do, people have to have this mindset. People who think this way create a culture that draws others in. It is why so many people want to be part of the Harbert College of Business. I want us to think about our work through an inclusive lens. We should seek out diverse students and staff, bring them all together, and make them all feel we are one group, with similar purpose. We need to think “one program, one college, one university.” I may have “my team,” but our team serves all our students, across all our different programs. When we think inclusively like this, when we think about serving the bigger organization, for the good of our students, we can co-create processes and programming that leads to student transformation. Doing that, day in and day out, allows us to deliver together on our purpose here, and the vision we have to produce highly desired graduates.
FRANK OPRANDY Director Graduate Career Services
At Harbert: How We Think
SPEND MORE TIME IN THE THINKING PHASE S teelcase is a 100-year-old company, but we see ourselves as a series of five 20-year-old companies. The reason is that companies don’t last; it’s ideas that last. Steelcase has always been an ideas-based company engaged in research and gleaning insights from that research, thinking about what’s next and trying to solve for what’s next in unique ways. We think what’s next is the hybrid workplace and a new era of hybrid work. We’ve been associated with a company called IDEO for over 30 years. It’s a fascinating company, an industrial design company. Earlier in their existence, they came up with the first mouse for Apple. We learned a lot from them, most notably about how they think through potential ideas. We’ve adopted a “Critical Thinking Model” throughout our company that prioritizes spending a lot of time in thinking through a problem before taking action. A lot of times, because of financial and competitive pressures, companies move quickly into an idea only to find out way too late in the game that it really wasn’t the best idea. We want to spend most of our time in the think phase, really poking at an idea to see whether it is really good or not. We spend a ton of time pressure-testing that, so when we get to a point of view about a service or a product, we're pretty confident that it will be successful. There’s an art to thinking. It involves research, it involves diverse points of view and pressure-testing the idea before you start to implement it. Once you get to the implement stage with a great idea, we’re confident we can do that well because we believe in the idea so much. We have a group called Workspace Futures. Our research is in three big buckets — work, workers and workplace. We look at the nature of work and how that’s evolving. We’re distributed; some people are at home, some people are in the office. It’s more digital. We’re on video more. We look at workers, at demographics, expectations about work, the relationship between people and the organization, and then how all of that manifests itself in the workplace, whether in the office or at home.
We believe in this thoughtful consideration of what people need and what the organization needs. We’re always thinking about these three things: the cultural environment, the technology environment and the physical space, designed together. Our latest research confirms that post-pandemic work environments should draw inspiration from neighborhoods. Why? Because neighborhoods exude vitality and energy. Nothing is static — places and activities adapt and change. The neighborhood is where people form relationships, feel a sense of belonging and build trust. RON MARTERE, ('87, international business) Vice President North Business Group Steelcase
At Harbert: How We Think
Achieve Your Possible.
JEVON MC ALISTER EMBA Class of 2020 Engineering Program Manager Apple
You have the drive. You've gained the experience.
Now combine them with a nationally ranked executive business education and take your career to the next level.
Auburn Executive MBA Harbert College of Business
achieveyourpossible.mba
14 Harbert Magazine, Spring 2022
At Harbert: How We Think
LEVERAGING STUDENTS’ WISDOM DEEPENS LEARNING FOR ALL P eople seek an MBA more than any other graduate degree. With over 1,000 MBA degree programs in the United States, those pursuing the degree have plenty of options to consider. Answering the
ever come their way. But there is an advantage to be found, and it’s that advantage that distinguishes Auburn’s EMBA. By design, we leverage the expertise of the cohort. We deliberately recruit a class and construct a cohort where, despite the many individual gaps in understanding business, the members of the cohort, with their diverse industry backgrounds, represent the full complement of business disciplines. And we impress upon each student the expectation, the duty, to share their expertise. By design, the cohort provides a capable think tank, where each member serves each other as part of a comprehensively competent pro bono consultancy group. We’ve found that our cohorts are remarkably durable. Class members not only stay in touch with each other, they often reach out to other classes — which means that the larger cohort continues to develop and to educate itself well beyond graduation and well past the requirements of the degree. Ultimately, we are dedicated to producing students who are not just educated, but who are energized to boldly impact their organizations and the world, students who will do the extraordinary.
question “Why should I choose Auburn?” is a challenge. Of course, a program should develop and expand a student’s functional capabilities, but by design, Auburn’s Executive MBA goes beyond the offer of a broadly respected degree. Organizations and the problems they face are inherently complex. Executives — in their area of expertise — may offer significant contributions to the corporate mission. However, those same executives may be largely unknowledgeable of corporate operations outside their expertise. In fact, this lack of a broad understanding is often the driving force behind the pursuit of an MBA. Increased business knowledge not only develops and expands an executive’s operating capability, but it also enables a comprehensive awareness of business functions, which, taken together, optimizes the enterprise’s overall performance. The dynamics of modern-day business deliver a constant stream of surprisingly new complications. In fact, some complications will arise that don’t even exist today. In the world of unknown unknowns, no MBA program can teach its graduates to solve every problem that will
JOE COLLAZO Assistant Director Graduate Executive Programs
Successful Harbert students join Collazo on graduation day.
Harbert Business, Fall 2022 15
At Harbert: How We Think
WORKING AGAINST ENERGY INDUSTRY WON'T SOLVE THE PROBLEM E arlier this year, the marketplace faced a perfect storm regarding oil and gas prices. We saw a rebound in world economic growth and related oil demand following tremendous downtime. Seasonal usage rose, and decisions by the Biden administration eliminated the U.S.’s energy independence in 2021. Doing so puts us in a position where we are dependent on foreign sourcing. Supply chain disruption impacted prices early. The trucking crisis remains an issue that the industry is working to cure. Industry-based production agreements for supply management (OPEC) keep us in a precarious position, driving and holding prices higher. Similar to Canada in 2018, interventionism in “free” markets has hit a new high in the U.S. and is likely the most significant driver of higher prices. Interventionism is also a crucial cause of inflation, reducing the dollar’s value and hurting the customer’s ability to buy anything, including fuel. Starting with their first day in office, the Biden administration took an adversarial position versus the oil and gas industry. They should repair those relationships. Attempting to lower gas prices without expanding U.S. exploration and production is not a viable long-term strategy if we want prices to come down. Moves like invoking the Defense Production Act to accelerate domestic solar panel production will not move the needle. In the U.S., the entities making the most significant strides toward alternative energy are the same companies that produce/market oil and gas. These companies know they cannot focus on the fossil fuel business forever. We should go all-in on all forms of energy. Use funds generated from the sale of fossil fuels to support green energy expansion. It is self-defeating to develop strategies of going “cold turkey” on fossil fuels before we have a
legitimate support system developed. Washington should stop sending signals to the market that they are not supporting the energy business, or the prices will never come down. Customers are not the biggest issue. The problem is that the supply chain cannot stop and will not have alternative energy as a legitimate substitute for some time. Every time the fuel price goes up, so does the cost of transportation, refrigeration, lighting and other supporting processes. Working against rather than with industry will not put the country in a better energy position. Let’s hope it doesn’t take leadership much longer to figure that out.
GLENN RICHEY Harbert Eminent Scholar and Chair Department of Supply Chain Management
16 Harbert Business, Fall 2022
Spotlights
Conversations From The C-Suite Bert Bean (’04, marketing) page 18
Throughout the business world, Harbert graduates are leading companies through new challenges to new levels of achievement. Their influence is felt across corporate organizational charts, in boardrooms and executive suites around the globe. You’ll meet one of them on the following pages.
Harbert Business, Fall 2022 17
CONVERSATIONS FROM THE C-SUITE
FEATURING Bert Bean ’04, MARKETING CEO, INSIGHT GLOBAL
Spotlights: C-Suite
It’s a shame, I think, sometimes companies don’t invest enough in de- veloping their people internally. They don’t bet on them as much as they should. I think what we’ll find is there are gems in every single company. By us giving our people the opportunity to rise up to the occasion, we get to take advantage of their talents. HM: Pursuing that a little further, when someone joins the company, what is a career path potential- ly like for someone? They come on board, and then, how would one advance? You’ve obviously progressed rapidly through the ranks of the company. BB: We have lots of different roles that we hire people into. As a staffing company, we have 4,600 employees, with $4 billion in revenue, and 63 offices across the U.S. and Canada. Ultimately, we’re a talent solutions company. We help put people to work inside Fortune 1000 companies, and even inside small and medium-sized companies, so most of the people that we hire are recruiters. Those people will start right out of college just like me. I went to Auburn, graduated and started working at Insight Global six weeks later. Some people we hire may not have a college degree. They’ll come in as a veteran of the military, or they’ll come out of a trade school or something like that. Upon starting, their job is really to learn the industry, to learn staffing, to learn how to interview candidates and how to understand positions from our customers, which are hiring managers. They learn how to find the right person with the right set of skills, who could go to work for one of our 4,000-plus customers. We are very deliberate in how we train and develop our people in their first year. From there, their career path can go a number of different directions.
HM: In that vein, tell us a little bit about IG University and how it’s helped shape the company. BB: So, believe it or not, for the first 17 years of our company’s existence, we had a training department, but we didn’t have a robust enough training department as we have now, in the form of Insight Global University. We had a few people and that was really it. We hadn’t made enough of a com- mitment to it. What we found was that the bigger we got, all of the little things that we had trained people on in the field, all the tribal knowledge if you will, had gotten diluted. It just didn’t scale. So we said we have to come in and make a huge investment in how we train people in the right ways. Every- thing from how to screen a candidate, to how to talk to a customer about filling the needs that would meet a $10 million hiring budget, we have to really dig in there. So that’s what we tackled. We built Insight Global University with the best of the best people in the field. We took some of our best performers, our best producers, and said, “This is going to hurt, but let’s go ahead and take you out of that production role, and let’s put you into this role to help run Insight Global University.” Those people are able to build and deliver amazing content to all of our people. We use Insight Global University as what we call the guardrails to our people’s careers. So much of why people stick around and stay with an organization is that they’re good at the job. We can talk about company purpose and things like that — which I’m a big believer in — but if you don’t make someone good at the job, a lot of people are going to leave that job. It’s hard doing things we’re not very good at, so we said let’s develop an organization like IGU to make our people really, really good at the job
As CEO of Insight Global, Bert Bean oversees a growing company with more than 60 offices across the country, more than 4,000 employees and annual revenue of $4 billion. In this interview, the 2004 marketing graduate discusses the emphasis on people and empowerment that has helped drive the staffing company’s success. Harbert Magazine: Insight Global is known for promoting from within. As a policy, how does the company make that work? How has that process evolved over time as the world of work has evolved? Bert Bean: The policy hasn’t really evolved over time, it’s just always been our belief that people can learn things, and that people, if given op- portunity, with the right set of work ethic and character, can learn, and they can evolve and they can grow in their careers. So, we really believe in giving our people first the oppor- tunity to be promoted from within before going to the outside. That’s what we’ve always believed since we started the company, and what we still believe today.
Harbert Business, Fall 2022 19
Spotlights: C-Suite and really, really good at developing in their career. That way we can keep them here, keep them engaged, and keep them growing personally, profes- sionally and financially. HM: Your company recently launched a new Diversity Equity and Inclusion Services Division. What are your hopes for this di- vision, and will it operate differ- ently from other divisions in the company? BB: The division you’re talking about is slightly different than our own internal efforts around DE&I. This is around helping companies and our customers grapple with DE&I, and learn how to introduce DE&I practices into their own companies. Implicit bias training for leaders,
hiring practices and things of that nature is still very much a new and emerging world. We have over 4,000 customers, and many of them are still in the very early innings of incorporating the right DE&I practices, so we do see that as an opportunity to help our customers get better there. It’ll be a separate revenue stream, and that’s great, but we’re not doing this for the revenue opportunities here. We’re doing it because we think it’s in line with our purpose, and it’s in line with helping our customers create really, really good work environments that help their people live better lives at work. HM: What’s a typical workday like for you as CEO? What do you find most challenging about the job? BB: I’m certainly a big believer in habits. I’m a big believer in getting into really strong habits that are repeatable. Every morning I get up around 5 a.m. I work out every
morning, I journal every morning, I have quiet time every morning, I make my to-do list, and then I get into my day. Some days are a little bit more rou- tine than others, in terms of meeting cadence and that sort of thing, but at the end of the day, as a CEO I’m constantly living with one foot in the present and one in the future. My team and I focus on solving problems today and ones we anticipate in the future. We ask ourselves: How do we envision a future place and lay the groundwork today in the form of projects, implementing strategies, or how we hire, that could help prepare us for the future? HM: Among your company’s stated shared values are “Leadership is here to serve” and “Always know where you stand.” Could you talk a little bit more about what those mean in practical daily work terms, and how they influence the way the company operates? BB: Our five shared values are ev- erything to us, and we actually didn’t discover those until September 2018. It was my first year as CEO, and our turnover had gotten to a point in the previous four years where it was really out of hand. Our culture was not great, our turnover was incredibly high, people were not getting success- ful. It was a little bit of a dark time in the company. We had scaled to a point where a lot of the things we’d done as a smaller company were no longer working. I believe that every company has an inner voice to it. Every sports team, every organization, has an inner voice. As leaders, we get the opportunity to listen to that voice or not. To me, that inner voice was shout- ing at me, saying, “I don’t like you, I don’t want to work here anymore, and
20 Harbert Business, Fall 2022
Spotlights: C-Suite
I don’t trust you with my career.” I was talking to my executive coach one day. I’m a new CEO and I’m talking to him like, “Man, I’ve got this big job. I’ve got to fix this turnover issue, and I don’t know how to do it.” He said, “Well, Bert, let me first ask you: What are your company’s values?” It was such a simple ques- tion, but it kind of took my breath away because we didn’t really have those. So, he said, “Well, you probably want to start there.” So I did what any CEO would do in my shoes, I started Googling values. But I learned pretty quickly that’s not it. Instead, I said I need to push myself away, and really figure out who we are, and what mat- ters most to this company, and what should our values be? I like the American West, so I found this house in the middle of nowhere in Utah, and I went there with the top 28 people that helped me run the company. We sat around and we figured some serious stuff out. I wanted to try this thing I’d done once outside of the company. I want- ed to try to bring elements of it into the company and see if it would work. In essence, it’s a big vulnerability exercise. It’s where everybody goes around in a big circle and shares, let’s say, their proudest moment in their career and their lowest moment in their career. As these things happen in any vulnerability exercises like this on whatever the topic is, people generally have a PG13-rated version of that answer, and then a rated-R version of that answer. People tend to go with whatever version the leader goes with first. So, in that case, I had to go first. I went and I let it rip. I went with the rated-R version. Then everybody else went and they shared theirs, and this crazy thing happened. Everybody cried multiple, multiple times. This was old people, young people, men, women, it was a really powerful moment.
That was so important because for the first time ever we really under- stood who we were as a leadership team. We really understood what we cared about. We could once and for all take off the mask and see each other for who we were, and who we wanted to become. So the next day we said let’s create our shared values. What should our values be? How do we at least get to who we are, and then try to start putting into place things and projects and solutions like Insight Global Uni- versity and others to help turn this turnover thing around? So we crafted what we called our shared values. We created them in about 30 minutes. It took no time at all because we knew who we were. To your question about “Leadership is here to serve”: As a company that mainly promotes from within, we very much believe that we are going to be a player-coach type organization. We’re going to be a company where we want to get down in the trenches and do the job with our people, because we’ve had that job before, we know exactly what it takes, so leadership is here to serve. “Always know where you stand” was the fifth shared value that we includ- ed, and we were very intentional with that one. As we were all reflecting on some of our lowest moments in our careers, it was when we didn’t know where we stood. It was when maybe we weren’t performing that well, and maybe our numbers weren’t so great, but nobody was leveling with us. Or maybe we were performing well. Maybe we were thinking we were in line for a promotion, but it wasn’t coming, so that was very frustrating. That concept around making sure people always know where they stand, while that is a big check to write as an organization, it’s one we’re comfort- able writing because that’s the type of company we really want to be.
HM: You’ve been quoted as saying that Insight Global is “dedicated to empowering people through the value of opportunity.” Could you talk a little bit more about that approach, and how that makes this company different than your competitors? BB: We don’t believe in putting limitations on people. We believe in what we call a “growth mindset” over a “fixed mindset.” We are always going to give people an opportunity to grow personally, professionally and financially. More than that, we’re really going to lean in and try to take out blockers, those things that get in peo- ple’s way and we are going to push them to grow. That inherently comes with giving them opportunity. I think when you give people opportunity to succeed, it’s a really empowering thing. I know that when I was coming out of Auburn, all I wanted was an opportunity. I just wanted somebody to take a chance on me and to give me an opportunity. I would supply all the effort and the grit and the work ethic. I just needed that opportunity. That’s what we try to do here for people. HM: People often work for many different employers over the course of their careers, but In- sight Global hires people, again quoting, “based on the assump- tion that it’s for life.” Given that, can you outline for us how em- ployees are evaluated and how they advance in the company? BB: Our employee review process is very extensive and it is robust. How we evaluate our people is much the same. We believe in letting people’s effort and their production and their results speak for themselves, so those are very clear ways to evaluate them. For the most part, we like to also keep
Harbert Business, Fall 2022 21
Bean's tattoo reflects the company’s commitment to taking its shared corporate values into the world through charitable work.
it very simple and say you need to be aligned with our five shared values. We think that if you’re aligned with our five shared values — Every- one matters, We take care of each other, High character and hard work above all else, Leadership is here to serve, and Always know where you stand — then you’re always going to have a job here. It’s hard to live out those five shared values and not be really successful here. HM: You rose quickly through the ranks of the company to become CEO. Can you tell us about your own journey at Insight Global, and what you learned along the way? BB: I think I’m really blessed to be hired when I was, by our founder and former CEO. I can’t not acknowledge that I took advantage of some really good timing. That said, I really bought into this idea that you can be whoever you want to be here, as long as you’re will- ing to put in the effort and as long as you’re willing to take the risk. Maybe what some folks forget to do, or shy away from, in their career, is to take the bet, moving for that opportuni- ty within the company that’s a little scary, raising your hand and saying, “Yes, I want that opportunity to go for this promotion.” I think this is what I did particu- larly well, finding yourself in a room
where all of a sudden your voice will matter if you use it. Most people still don’t use their voice. They think, “Well, what do I know?” I used my voice in those moments. HM: Company culture is obviously important at Insight Global. How has that emphasis contributed to the company’s success? BB: I think the secret of Insight Global is how we use our company culture as a causation for success. What I mean by that is culture is in many ways simply shared habits about what a company values. So if a company values gossip and backstab- bing, that’s going to be the habits and the culture of that company, and it’s going to be a toxic culture. We value things like our shared values, which I just spoke about. We value this ten- sion of taking care of each other, plus accountability, and our culture forms around that. What winds up happening, if you get the culture right, is you get people who have bought into the culture. What that really means is you get people who are really engaged. So much of why companies succeed or fail is how engaged their people are or are not. We like to say, how can we use our culture and our values to drive ultimate engagement? If we can do that, then I can get more production
out of my people, just because of how engaged and how aligned they are. The idea of interest alignment is really, really big. That’s the next step after engagement. If you can get your people aligned with the goals of the company and with the mission of the company, then that’s everything. HM: The words “so they can be the light to the world around them” now appear in your company’s statement of purpose. What led to that decision and how has it influenced the way the company operates? BB: Our company’s purpose, our why, is to grow our people personally, pro- fessionally and financially so they can be the light to the world around them. That last phrase, “so they can be the light to the world around them,” we added in 2020. At first, it was just, “To grow our people personally, professionally, and financially.” We thought if we do that really well, then everything else will take care of itself. But what we saw was that was a little selfish. We saw people start to lean in to the world around them. In some ways, it was al- most like they were taking their shared values to the world around them. In the pandemic, one of the reasons why we were able to actually grow 8% in revenue when our industry shrank 25% was because our people really leaned into this concept of being the
22 Harbert Business, Fall 2022
Spotlights: C-Suite
“As CEO, and as any leader, if you’re going to be effective, you need to understand how to hear from all sides.”
light to the world around them. As we saw the mass layoffs during the pandemic, our people said, “We’re a staffing company. While that certainly hurts us too, we can do something about that. We can work really hard to stay in business, to help put other people to work and to be the light for them.” Around the same time, we started thinking to ourselves, “We’re doing really well from a business standpoint, so how can we do more for others?” We’re involved with a lot of charities here locally, but one of the things that we wanted to do was to try to help beyond the U.S. and Canada. There’s an organization called One World Health, and they build sustainable healthcare clinics, hospitals, in places like Uganda and Nicaragua. I say sustainable in that they can build the actual hospital, hire and train local health care professionals, and get them running those clinics. After about two years, they are self-sustaining. We just love the hiring and develop- ing from within, which is what they do with healthcare workers in these impoverished countries, so we made the commitment to invest the money to build a few of these clinics in early 2020. Last year, the first one opened in Uganda. We’ll do $4 billion in revenue this year. Is anybody going to care if we do a few million less in earnings from that revenue to build a few more
hospitals? No. So let’s get really, really good as a business at growing in revenue so we can turn around and do more things like building more clinics, helping more people locally in this country, and just being the light to the world around us. HM: How did your time at Auburn prepare you for this success? What advice would BB: As CEO, and as any leader, if you’re going to be effective, you need to understand how to hear from all sides. It’s not to say you can’t be rooted in certain principles, but you certainly need to have an ability to listen and understand the other side. With the people I was around at Auburn, the groups I was involved in, the College of Business where I studied, I found that I was always surrounded by people who some- times thought differently than I did, who sometimes believed different things than I did. It helped me to not graduate thinking with such a one-track mind, and it helped me to be a lot more open to things. Wheth- er it’s feedback I receive on how to grow in my own career, or whether it’s approaches I need to listen to, or feedback I needed to hear to become a better leader, I think Auburn really prepared me for that. you give current Auburn students who will soon be entering the workforce?
I crave a diversity of thought, and that’s really helped me as a leader, especially in this company. I can abso- lutely say that I learned that diversity of thought in my time at Auburn. HM: What do you know now that you wish you had known when you began your career? BB: That it’s going to be all right, that it’s going to be OK. I graduated and I was so ready to get into the workforce, I was so amped up and I was so ready to take on the world that I think I put a lot of unnecessary pressure on my- self, as probably a lot of college grads do. Much easier said than done, but I wish I would have just known that I’m going to be fine. I’ve got a great work ethic, I’ve got a strong belief system, I want to be successful here. This is a marathon, it’s not going to be a sprint in terms of a career. I probably would’ve enjoyed the ride a little bit more in some of those early years and not been so stressed out about trying to launch my career. HM
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Features
The pandemic altered the outlooks of employees and employers and changed the workplace in many ways. What’s different now? What remains of the tried and true we used to know? The following pages offer some insights.
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FEATURE
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How’s Work Today? Radically different but completely the same
The conversations that follow between a writer and interviewee have been selected for their relevance to the new world of work and the future of work. The conversations were real. They’ve been edited for focus and brevity and kept anonymous to protect the innocent. And the guilty.
Writer: Did he not trust you and your team? Interviewee: I don’t know. By all measures, our process, year after year, yielded a market- leading product. We push for continuous improvement. He blew in, never asked, never listened, assumed he knew better how to manage the process, just imposed. Writer: And? Interviewee: It cost more, took longer and wasn’t up to the standards of previous production. Writer: Your opinion or his? Interviewee: Well, cost and time are quantifiable. And quality? That’s the feedback from customers. Writer: Well, he’s the boss. Isn’t it your responsibility to adapt to his vision? Did you
With the pandemic, for many of us came work- from-home. Virtually overnight, business operations became decentralized. Suddenly, the familiar processes that had evolved in the office were gone, replaced with Slacks and Zooms and Hangouts. Communication, if not demolished, was certainly impaired. The pressure of the new environment not only accelerated the pace of technological change, it also cracked the small imperfections in our operations into major fractures. Employees, variously, enjoyed a new-found freedom or stressed out over endless workdays and continuous meetings. Managers struggled with command and control, attempted to impose order and found talent exiting left and right. To hire and retain talent, empathy became important. Empathy, really? What ever happened to, “Do what I tell you to do and deliver it when I tell you to deliver it?” No doubt some managers miss those days. But today, knowledge workers (they’re supposed to be knowledgeable, right?) don’t need or want to be told what to do and how to do it. And they certainly don’t want to be monitored (when did we ever?). They want to be an active part of an organization, a culture, to understand, if not contribute to, strategic goals and worthwhile purposes and — above all — be trusted to act professionally and get the job done. They don’t like working for bosses who watch the clock, count hours, kick chairs and interject themselves in processes they don’t take the time to understand. These new age workers believe that they should be judged by the quality and quantity of their output. And by the way, that quantity and quality have everything to do with how well bosses communicate goals, listen to the professionals they manage and give those professionals the resources and the latitude to accomplish goals efficiently and effectively. And what’s wrong with that? Workers in a remote or hybrid working environment now must structure and organize their working day. It used to be that working in an office designed your day for you. No work-life balance necessary. You made the drive in the morning, worked and came home in the evening. Nice clear lines. Now, if you’re working from home — or some other remote location — you’ve got to structure your own day and balance your kids, your dog and the ever- present pull of the refrigerator. All by yourself. No wonder wine and liquor sales rose dramatically in the first months of pandemic lockdown. If you’re not used to that level of self-imposed organization, you’re gonna stress out. If you’re still stressed out, maybe remote work isn’t for you. But now — more than ever — the choice is yours. And what’s wrong with that?
achieve his goals and objectives? Interviewee: No idea. He never communicated those to us.
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