Chicago Booth Review Podcast

Airport bookstores are full of volumes claiming to reveal the secrets of effective leadership, and yet business leaders often don’t seem to be getting any better at actually leading. Some people seem to be born leaders, but many executives really struggle with exercising authority, connecting with, and motivating their workforces, and many ultimately fail to do so. In this episode of the Chicago Booth Review podcast we present a discussion from 2017 how leaders can work on their leadership skills featuring, when we invited Chicago Booth’s Harry Davis, George Wu, and Nancy Tennant.

It’s no revelation that the language we use often says more about us than whatever it’s describing. But what about the number of words? The more we’re surprised by something, the more we’re likely to say about it, and that can reveal all sorts of prejudices that we might not be aware of. In this episode, we chat to Ayelet Fishbach, a professor of behavioral science at Chicago Booth, about her recent paper on “surprised elaboration.”

Rajat Gupta was one of America’s most successful Indian-born businessmen. In 1994, he became McKinsey’s youngest chief executive and the first who had been born outside of the US. Duing his nine-year leadership, McKinsey’s revenues grew from $1.5 billion to $3.4 billion, its number of consultants went from 3,300 to 7,700, and from having 58 offices in 24 countries, it expanded to 81 offices in 44 countries. But in 2010, Gupta was charged with insider trading, a crime for which he was convicted in 2012, and for which he spent two years in jail. Gupta told his side of the story in his 2019 book Mind Without Fear. In this episode, we bring you audio from 2019, when Gupta spoke to John Paul Rollert, an adjunct associate professor of behavioral science, and a columnist for Chicago Booth Review.

Most of us find it hard to achieve our goals. So how can we set better goals and follow through on them? We put that question to two experts on motivation, Chicago Booth’s Ayelet Fishbach and the University of Pennsylvania’s Katy Milkman.

How carefully do you tend your professional network? How does your network shape your ideas and your behavior? Understanding network theory can both help you become more successful professionally, and to explain political and sociological trends such as polarization, nationalism, and anti-globalization.

As hybrid work becomes increasingly common, organizations and managers are trying to come to grips with the challenges of a partly remote workforce. We consider how hybrid work will shape the labor market with three experts in the theory and practice of hybrid work: Chicago Booth’s Steve Davis and Mike Gibbs, and the University of Chicago’s Melina Hale.

What should the uber wealthy do with their money? How can they leave a lasting legacy? And what responsibilities do they have to society at large? On this episode of the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, Booth’s John Paul Rollert reflects on the role of those at the very top of the 1 percent.

Many economists agree that inequality has risen in recent decades, but that’s where the agreement ends. Measuring the trend is contentious, and it’s more than just a methodological squabble. How severe one sees the problem informs the policies proposed, from no change to a host of new taxes aimed at correcting the imbalance. In this special episode of the Chicago Booth Review podcast, we present a conversation between two economists who take very different views on inequality: Chicago Booth’s Steve Kaplan and UC Berkeley’s Emmanuel Saez.

Academic models often built on the assumption of how rational utility-maximising individuals would behave. But as behavioral scientists have long pointed out, real people don’t actually behave that way. Does that mean that we behave irrationally, and if so why? Or is our behavior actually more rational than it may appear? In this special episode, we present Chicago Booth’s Richard Thaler, an economics Nobel laureate, in conversation with Harvard’s Steven Pinker.

Do stock prices reflect all publicly available information? Are they entirely a reflection of the fundamental values of their respective companies? Or is there something else that helps to explain episodes of surprisingly high volatility, from market-wide plunges to the sudden surges of meme stocks? On this episode of the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, we explore the inelastic markets hypothesis, which suggests that fund flows and investor demand play an important role in market behavior.