Green Spaces At and Near Harvard University

It's been a terrific week and I am enjoying being back at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University very much. Byerly Hall is where the Fellows, including the Summer Fellows, have their offices, and my office overlooks a fountain and a garden.

Since I am a tree hugger and it is now June it is wonderful to discover and to enjoy special places in Cambridge and Boston that are green! I continue to do research on sustainability and have also published on the design of sustainable supply chains for sustainable cities.

Besides the Cambridge Common, featured below,

I find the Harvard Business School, with its lovely collection of buildings, surrounded by beautiful landscaping and flowers a true gem.

A favorite discovery of mine, while taking a walk on Brattle Street, is the Mount Auburn Cemetery, which is a national landmark, and not only the burial place of numerous historical figures, but also an expanse of lovely gardens, fountains, and architecture. I saw a turkey, a bunny, and multiple chipmunks and was serenaded by birds during a walk there last week.

Another favorite green space is the public garden in Boston, which is an absolute delight.

And, after explorations and soaking in the beauty of green spaces as well as the fragrant air, it is always terrific to come back to Radcliffe where the painting below hangs outside my office.

Green spaces add so much to the quality of life in cities.

Kafkaesque Operations Management and the Good Jobs Strategy

Yesterday's Sunday New York Times was waving the flag for operations management and operations research and management science. In the Sunday Review section there was a timely OpEd by Drs. Kevin Volpp and Katherine Milkman, "How to Keep Your Resolutions," which cited their forthcoming article in Management Science, which I tracked down with the very catchy title of: "Holding the Hunger Games Hostage at the Gym: An Evaluation of Temptation Bundling." This article offered 4 tips from behavioral economics and health on how to keep your New Year's resolutions.

But another article also caught my eye - it was in the magazine section and was entitled in my hardcopy version: "A Ready-to-Assemble Business Plan"  and in the online version (no idea why the title changed) "Thinking Outside the (Big) Box," by Adam Davidson  It began with Davidson describing a trip to Ikea in Brooklyn with his wife (readers of my blog know that I love Sweden and Scandinavia and have held multiple visiting professorships there) that he said might cost him his marriage. This was a while back and was due to what he said was the lack of available sales staff to answer questions.

Well, times have changed, at least for some big box stores and their employees (and I won't in this post, revel in our great experiences of visiting Ikea when our daughter was 2, and we lived in Stockholm -- just last week, and now a teenager, she was missing Swedish meatballs with lingonberries, which we dined on last summer but in Gothenburg). Davidson and his wife did not have this meal in Ikea (perhaps they should have).

Adam Davidson's article focused on the work of Dr. Zeynep Ton, whose book, The Good Jobs Strategy, was just published and in it she argues how treating retail employees much better may make everyone (including their employers) much richer (contrary to conventional thinking).

Dr. Ton had worked in her father's apparel factory in Turkey, sewing on pockets to garments. Nothing like a difficult job to instill the value of education and good  working conditions. (I worked summers as a nurses' aide while in college (Brown University) and had lots of practice emptying bedpans but I loved the interactions with my patients, especially the elderly ones,  as well as the esprit de corps among the nursing staff).

And what do you think of the following provocative sentence by Davidson in his article: "In the last few years, Ton has become a revolutionary force in a field that would seem unlikely to generate many -- the Kafkaesque-titled Operations Management." I read a lot of Kafka (as well as Dostoevsky) as a teenager and now am propitiously a chaired professor of Operations Management. Davidson  goes on to note a study by Professor Marshall Fisher at Wharton (Volpp and Milkman also have appts. there), which noted that, for every dollar of increased wages, one retailer that was studied brought in $10 more in revenue but for more understaffed stores in the study, the boost was as high as $28. Davidson mentions that the software that is typically used considers workers as a "cost" and does not quantify the "profit" potential in terms of customer service, value added,  and quality of experience, if I may. This shows, also, the importance of selecting the right objective function that you are optimizing (or trying to)!

Since I am a researcher, I had to dig deeper and located the article that Fisher wrote that was co-authored and it is: Marshall L. Fisher, Jayanth Krishnan, Serguei Netessine (Working), Retail Store Execution: an Empirical Study, and you can read it online here.  It does have the dollar figures as noted in the Davidson article above.  More information can be found in Fisher and Raman's book, The New Science of Retailing: How Analytics are Transforming the Supply Chain and Improving Performance, which includes results for the Fisher et al. study.

Now, and this is Kafkaesque (and not found in the New York Times piece), Dr. Zeynep Ton, who received her undergrad degree at Penn State and her DBA at Harvard Business School, is an Ajunct Associate Professor at the Sloan School at MIT, and she was denied tenure at Harvard Business School where she was a very popular faculty member -- you can read more about what transpired in this article, HBS Loses 'Rock Star' Prof to MIT,  posted on the Poets & Quants website. According to the article:  Despite her sterling reputation in the classroom, Harvard decided not to promote the assistant professor who had been at the business school since 2002. The decision was a surprise to many on campus given her widespread popularity. Indeed. some students could be seen crying in the classroom when she taught the last session of a supply chain elective course.


In September, I wrote a post, Some of the First Years Had Never Had a Female Professor -- Gender Ineqality at Harvard Business School.


Perhaps Harvard will now bring back Dr. Zeynep Ton to its Harvard Business School faculty, given the visibility of her new book! Or MIT will give her tenure!


And, for those who are interested (and still reading), you can listen to Dr. Ton in her TEDx presentation.

Some of the First Years Had Never Had a Female Professor -- Gender Inequality at Harvard Business School

I was busy trying to finish writing a research paper, before putting final touches on a lecture together plus completing a presentation on supply chains that I will be giving later this week in Zurich, Switzerland, and that my hosts wanted a copy of two days ago.

My husband distracted me by saying: "you must read this -- the article is unbelievable." He was referring to the front page article in today's New York Times, "Harvard Case Study: Gender Equity," by Jodi Kantor, which then proceeds to an additional 2 full pages!.

The article is on gender issues at the elite Harvard Business School (HBS).

The article has some striking (not positive) statistics, some of which I proceeded to verify and found on the Harvard Business School (HBS) website that, indeed, there are are only 19 female Full Professors and 76 male ones at HBS.

Faculty 2012-2013 Male Female Total Professors 76 19 95 Baker Foundation Professors 6 0 6 Professors of Management Practice 15 2 17 Associate Professors 28 12 40 Assistant Professors 30 16 46 Visiting Faculty 3 0 3 Other Teaching Appointments 38 5 43 Other Research Appointments 8 2 10 Total Faculty 204 56 260 On Leave 4 0 4

The article describes what has been deemed  a two year experiment at HBS to do a "gender makeover, by changing its curriculum, rules and social rituals to foster female success."

Leading the charge has been the relatively new dean of HBS, Dr. Nitin Nohria, who, I might add, has a PhD from the Sloan School at MIT and is the father of two daughters, with assistance provided by Dr. Frances Frei, who is an Operations Management Professor, with a PhD from Wharton. I have tried to get Professor Frei to come and speak at the Isenberg School, but reading this article, I can see why she has been justifiably too busy to accept the invitation.

Several of my former undergraduate Operations Management students at the Isenberg School have gone on to receive MBAs from HBS and, since I was a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellow, I am officially a Harvard alum, so this article was very painful for me to read.

I have written, on several occasions, on this blog about MBA gender inequities. including that of salaries and The New York Times article had the illuminating graphic below, which shows how the gender MBA salary gap increases post graduation.

			Part of the gender problem is that there is an insufficient number of female faculty in the pipeline and some have left for such reasons as, according to The Times: uncertainty over maternity leave, a lack of opportunity to write papers with senior professors and students who destroyed confidence by pelting them with math questions they could not answer on the spot or commenting on what they wore.
			The filled circles in the graphic above represent tenured faculty. Among the females I could identify as one of the circles (filled in) above is a fellow Brown University classmate of mine, Professor Janice Hammond, who received her PhD from the Sloan School and whose dissertation advisor at MIT was Tom Magnanti. Her dissertation was on variational inequalities, as was mine at Brown. Jan lived on my floor freshman year. So, yes, women can be very good at math and love it, despite what the article says! Tom Davenport, in his best-selling book, Keeping Up with the Quants, mentions Jan. Jan was also an Applied Math major at Brown with me. She, as Frances Frei, has published in operations research and management science journals. Many females love equations and are very good at them and are faculty at business schools! Is Harvard scared of some of them?! Notice, from the above graphic, that only 1 female has been tenured at HBS in the last decade! Harvard hired stenographers (are we going back to the 1950s?) to take notes in classes since 50% of the course grades at HBS are due to class participation and data was needed to back up who was speaking up  in class and why female students were consistently getting lower grades although  female students were great on exams. Also, Harvard "taught" females to raise their hands -- honestly, I find this rather strange -- this is needed by the students who get into HBS? Princeton Review consistently ranks the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst where I teach as one of the top schools for Greatest Opportunities for Women -- perhaps HBS can learn from us!

Professor for a Day -- New Initiative

At the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst, we have a new initiative in which alums are invited back to the school to share their wisdom with our students (and the faculty as well).

This initiative is called Professor for a Day.

Today, I had the honor of having Mr. Jim Ettamarna, a graduate of our Operations Management program, come and speak to the students in my Humanitarian Logistics and Healthcare class. Jim had graduated in 1997 and what he has accomplished in 15 years is amazing.

He began his career with GE and had stories of having the then CEO Jack Welch (who, by the way, is also a UMass Amherst grad in chemical engineering) in the audience for one of his presentations, and  of pedaling a stationary bike next to the present CEO of GE, Jeff Immelt, at 5AM in the morning at the gym. He spoke of how one has to get the job done and to become known as an expert in an area and how one develops leadership skills.  His work at GE included bringing the opportunities of online commerce to the fore and this initiative helped him to get into Harvard Business School (HBS) from which he received his MBA. He has worked at McKinsey and was even in the cohort with Chelsea Clinton (and spoke about gatherings in the Austrian Alps).

Jim emphasized the value of networking (something which he certainly did at HBS), the importance of communication and analytical skills, and of taking advantage of opportunities and making luck turn to your advantage.

He also worked for several years in private equity and spoke about how he helped to turn around several companies and then to sell them at substantial profit.

He emphasized the importance of staying fit and healthy and of never burning bridges (he had some terrific stories about how he turned rejections around).

Jim spoke about the great faculty at UMass that he had had (this warmed my heart) and how what he learned was useful even ten years down the road.

He was inspirational and was an outstanding Professor for a Day. Afterwards, students came to my office to further discuss the numerous ideas and helpful suggestions that they had gotten from his presentation.

Thanks to a very successful alum -- as his former Professor, I couldn't be prouder. Moreover, today he gave so much of his wisdom and insights to this new cohort of students, many of whom will be graduating next month.