If/Then: Why Research Matters

Full Transcript

Note: Transcripts are generated by machine and lightly edited by humans. They may contain errors.

Kevin Cool: Hi again, everyone. I’m Kevin Cool, senior editor at the GSB and the host of If Then. We’ve had an interesting and enjoyable first season of 13 episodes, and we want to wrap up the season with a bonus 14th episode. And I’m delighted to invite into the studio today Jesper Sørensen, who’s a member of the leadership at the GSB.

Jesper is going to talk to us about research, how it gets done, what it means, why it’s important.

Kevin Cool: Welcome. Jesper, it’s a pleasure to have you here. We would like to start just by asking a very basic and fundamental question, which is why is research important? What difference does it make in the lives of everyday people?

(00:54)
Jesper Sørensen: That’s a great question, and for professors like me, it’s an important question. I think one of the things that we have to remember is knowledge is discovered over time. Human society has evolved over time to have a deeper and deeper understanding of how things work. And that’s really what we call research, right? Taking and asking questions and then being disciplined and systematic about how you answer them.

Kevin Cool: And how is that enterprise different at a business school or is it different from say, the university more generally?

Jesper Sørensen: I think it’s more similar than different, but I think there is a difference in the sense that a business school is a professional school. We train MBA students and what we call MSX students, as well as PhD students. And what we want both our MBA students and our MSX students, what we want them to do is change lives, change organizations, and change the world.

We want to take basic insights about how humans work and apply that in their day-to-day lives. I often think that the managers and the leaders that come through the GSB in some ways have a much harder job than we scholars do. My colleagues might not be happy to hear that, but sometimes putting these fundamental insights into practice is really hard. One of the hallmarks of research is trying to isolate particular mechanisms through various kinds of control. Scientists live in the world where it’s a vacuum: and so we just watch the leaf fall and we can then time it and then tell you what the answer is.

And managers live in the world where the wind is blowing and there’s all these kinds of forces getting in the way. And so that’s really what’s challenging about management, but that’s also what makes it so exciting to be in a business school: you interact with the people who are dealing with the real problems. Other parts of a university are oftentimes embedded deeply in scholarly communities and a little bit further removed from the day-to-day action, so to speak. And in business school, the real world interpenetrates the scientists’ world a little bit more, which is I think exciting.

(3:08)
Kevin Cool: Thank you. Well, speaking of real problems, that’s a good segue into my next question, which is recently the GSB has embarked on initiative they’re calling Business, Government and Society. Can you just talk a little bit about that? What are the goals and why has that emerged as an emphasis?

Jesper Sørensen: The Business Government Society initiative? I think one way to think about this is if you were to stop somebody in the street and you were going to ask them, what do you think goes on at a business school? I think they would say, well, they’re training people how to maximize profits. That’s what a business school is about, how to make a business, make as much money as possible. And I think for a long time that has been more or less explicitly what business schools have been about. And there’s no doubt that’s a very important part of what we do because profit maximization is one of the most powerful engines society has kind of uncovered for change and for positive change. But actually what happens in a lot of business schools and certainly at the GSB is a little bit different. And so I think if you look at the kinds of people that you have interviewed in the podcast this season and in general on our faculty, what you have are people who are really experts in all facets of human behavior and really are focused on trying to understand how humans work, how societies work, how groups work, et cetera. And that leads to an incredible diversity of implications.

That’s really what feeds into this business, government and society initiative because I think the way we want to think about it is the purpose of a business school is really to make the world a better place, to think about all the complicated ways in which things interact. So how do markets and institutions interact with firms, and how do they change incentives, and how can you learn to balance between the good things that come from being profit-seeking and some of the negative externalities that sometimes go along with them. And I think the Business Government and Society Initiative is kind of a way for us to deepen the school’s ability to speak to this broad range of issues. I think we’ve always been a school that’s super strong in those dimensions, but I think it’s really about accelerating that to a much greater extent.

Kevin Cool: Well, certainly one of the biggest challenges for the world, for society, business, government, everything is climate change. And Professor Bill Barnett was one of our first guests on the show, and he has completely pivoted his research in the direction of sustainability. He’s really an expert on innovation in organizations, and he’s now applying this to sustainability.

How unusual is it for a professor who’s quite veteran, Bill’s been here since the early 1990’s, to make that kind of a switch, and what does that say about the importance of climate change more broadly?

(6:05)
Jesper Sørensen: Bill’s pivot over the last couple years is really remarkable, but you’re actually seeing it among a number of our faculty. I think it’s one of the great strengths of the academic system is that you are given such freedom and you’re given the ability to really discover where your talents can best be deployed.

I think what you see with the formation of the Doerr School for Sustainability here at Stanford is really just a blossoming and a focus of interest on campus and people kind of being drawn to this. I think there’s no doubt a lot of our faculty have an individual kind of deeply personal concern for the challenges of climate change. But I think the other part of it is, it’s also intellectually a hugely stimulating kind of topic. The things that you want to challenge as a researcher are the hardest problems. And what could be a more difficult problem than climate change? And really thinking about how one can move society in the right direction in terms of addressing those challenges.

Kevin Cool: We talked to Rebecca Diamond, who’s an economist, and Rebecca uses large data sets. In the study that we talked to her about, she had used social security data to tease out information about foreign born inventors and what sort of impact they had on the US economy, on innovation and so on.

Can you talk a little bit, Jesper, about how either tools to make this data accessible or the data themselves becoming more robust has transformed research?

Jesper Sørensen: Rebecca is a great example of a real transformation that has occurred in Economics in particular over the last couple of decades, which is really a blossoming of what’s called Applied Economics, right? So essentially using empirical data in a very sophisticated kind of way to answer kind of very fundamental questions. And I think what’s really important about this is it’s easy to have ideas, but you also need facts, collect very precise data to get at a set of empirical facts.

In some way, that’s what Rebecca has been doing. She’s essentially being incredibly creative in thinking about how to combine different kinds of data sources being incredibly entrepreneurial in thinking about how to get people to agree, to allow her to combine different kinds of data sources, and then using it in a very sophisticated way to be able to make very precise statements about the contribution of immigrants to patenting behavior and so on and so forth. Anot just their individual contributions, but also to their kind of spillovers onto others.

Again, it’s only when you’re able to really be careful and be precise in that very disciplined controlled way in which great scientists go about doing research, that you’re able to kind of establish a certain set of facts. I think the policy debates around immigration at the high end, kind of a high potential high levels of education, there’s probably more consensus there than there are in other areas of the immigration debate. But nonetheless, it’s super important to be able to know, well, I don’t know that people had a clear sense of what that spillover effect was, so they might be able to say, yes, I can see how hiring or admitting the smartest people from around the world, those people are then going to stay and patent. But I think what’s beautiful about that research is then showing it’s not just that. It’s also that the people they work with become more productive, and it’s in the combination of the two that you get the real benefit.

(9:50)
Kevin Cool: Deborah Grunfeld, professor Deborah Grunfeld gave us a fascinating conversation on the dynamics of power, especially as it relates to organizations. And one of her insights was that individuals may not understand or appreciate how much power they actually have. For example, in a situation where they need to call out toxic behavior by a boss, how do insights like that get into the mainstream and become, for lack of a better word, accepted wisdom?

Jesper Sørensen: Through podcasts, like If/Then I would say is certainly one channel, but a lot of this is about, I think what I love about Deb’s research is really about how she connects her insights to people’s own lived experiences,

Kevin Cool: Including her own, including as it turns out.

Jesper Sørensen: One of the challenges of being a great researcher is that you need to move away again from kind of day-to-day reality. In some sense, you need to abstract and you need to simplify. And so it’s a gift, and I think it’s a gift that a lot of our faculty have is to be able to both live in that very abstract kind of world and then make it relatable to somebody who’s not living in that world. So it’s an act of translation. And I think part of what it does is it demystifies things. And I think if you demystify things, you empower people. Then they can start to see, ‘oh, actually not just my gut. That tells me that it might make sense for us all to send in our complaints about the bad boss on the same day. It’s actually backed up by research and there’s science that suggests that I would have success in doing this’, and that instills the level of confidence that I think is really important.

Kevin Cool: Switching gears just a little bit, Mohammad Akbarpour, also an economist, talked to us about an interesting hypothesis that he is exploring, which has to do with the relative value perceived by people in different income levels, a poor person versus in his example Elon Musk.

His premise undergirding his research is that we could make markets more fair if we accounted for that. And one of his examples was using Uber as a sort of case study. If you charged less in poorer neighborhoods and more in more affluent neighborhoods, that would make the market more fair. That does have some, what I would call, political ramifications. Essentially it’s like a redistribution model. And he acknowledged that he had some pushback about that from people. My question is, is there a place for research that essentially is advocating a policy change or a market fix that could also be viewed as a political argument?

Jesper Sørensen: Mohammad podcast is probably my favorite one from this whole season. It was the one that I listened to and it just kind of blew my mind. And so I should preface this by saying I’m not an economist. I’m a sociologist by training. The reason it blew my mind is that he was willing to go somewhere in developing this model that the kind of economic orthodoxy typically does not go. And that’s part of where he is getting the pushback.

The reason it’s relevant that he’s an economist. Now, I’m a sociologist, is one of the reasons people like me become sociologists is because we have more discomfort with the assumptions that he’s challenging. And the fact that he can do it within the confines of the discipline and do it in a way that’s very hard I think to not take seriously, is super powerful. And I think yes, those ideas can be politically controversial, but is that a bad thing? No, because I think what it does is it says the truth that we have discovered is the final truth and what he’s asking us to consider, and let’s be clear, he might be wrong. I think we should all be focused on the possibility. Great ideas initially are often wrong or look wrong, and you have to be willing to take the kind of risk that Mohammad is making to have a great idea.

Hopefully it won’t be wrong because I think there’s some really powerful insights that can be drawn from that in terms of where you want to use redistribution or where you want to not rely on the market and so on and so forth. And I think that is really opening up a set of topics and kind of maybe a can of worms, but that’s good, right? That’s what people should be doing. They should be not just taking everything for granted as if we figured everything out when we wrote down a formula 300 years ago or whenever it was that was written down.

Kevin Cool: So I want to give you here in our last few minutes, is there something about the GSB that I haven’t specifically asked about that you think is important for people to know?

Jesper Sørensen: I think the one thing I would say is it’s incredibly fun. If you listen to the ideas that get mentioned in your podcast, you might agree with them, you might not agree with them, but have fun in that and enjoy it and say, ‘ah, I don’t agree with it, but I never thought about it from this perspective.’ I do think there should be something about research that is also about consumption enjoyment of the process. I think that’s why all of the people who are here keep doing it.

The reason you become a professor at the end of the day is intrinsic motivation. You shouldn’t do it if you’re looking for people to cheer, to give you praise. And it’s not always that financially rewarding of an enterprise, because being an academic is a lot of negative feedback because of the review process and seminars where people are trying to tell you in order to make your paper better, they’re trying to tell you everything that’s wrong with it. So you also have to just have this joy in it. And I think if you’re not a researcher, you could still get that joy without the slings and arrows, and so you could just consume it and say, ‘ah, okay, that’s really cool. Who would’ve thought?’

Kevin Cool: Well, it’s interesting. Mohammad actually was one of those who said he kind of lives in the 5%; 95% of either what you’re pursuing something that turns out to be a dead end or is wrong, or people disagree with it in a massive way. But he said, if there’s that 5% chance that it’s going to make a difference, that’s enough for me.

This was delightful. Great. It was fun. I hope you enjoyed it.

Thank you for listening to our first season of If/Then we invite you to come back to listen to bonus episodes over the next few months as we prepare for season two.