A Better World in the Making

ISSUE 06

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SPRING 2022

A Better World in the Making

June 2021 marked the successful conclusion of the MIT Campaign for a Better World.

As part of that campaign, MIT Sloan’s call to action was to make a better world our business. And working toward the shared goal of a better world over the last 10 years, we found ways to create stronger partnerships and collaborate more deeply with colleagues and students around the Institute and with alumni and friends around the world.

Since the earliest days of my tenure as dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management, I have thought about the long-term future of the school, about the tools and resources the school needs, and the people who, through their work at MIT Sloan and what they learn here, are building a brighter tomorrow. Thanks to your support and dedication, the MIT Campaign for a Better World has enabled the school to seize myriad opportunities, and grow programs that will ensure the school’s position well into the future. It was remarkable, though no surprise, to see this MIT Sloan community respond to the priorities set forth in the campaign, with nearly 15,000 of you supporting our goals and contributing significantly to the $6.24 billion Institute-wide campaign total.

It is your philanthropy that enables MIT Sloan to develop leaders who will invent the future and to support research that is impactful for all. Your generosity during this capital campaign established professorships, revolutionized MIT Sloan’s spaces, and expanded fellowship funding. It enabled the school community to invent ideas made to matter, develop new curricula, and grow our partnerships with institutions and individuals around the globe. Your support of our many research centers and initiatives helped the school to leverage the thought leadership being cultivated here to create change for the better. And even when the final years of the campaign brought us a global pandemic and its many unexpected challenges, your commitment to the school only strengthened. Your dedication to MIT Sloan and to each other helped to bring us to a more resilient and more hopeful place.

In the pages that follow, you will find highlights from the decade-long MIT Campaign for a Better World and the important work that has stemmed from it. I hope you enjoy reading about the profound impact you have made through your generosity.

David Schmittlein John C Head III Dean MIT Sloan School of Management

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MIT SLOAN CORE

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At the core of the MIT Sloan School of Management are our faculty, students, and staff—all of whom contribute to the community, programs, and research that make MIT Sloan capable of making a better world.

Throughout the Campaign, essential support for faculty and students was provided through endowed fellowships and professorships, and current-use, unrestricted funding via the MIT Sloan Annual Fund, including the more than $1.7 million raised by the Lewent Challenge since 2017, enabled the school to pursue programs and activities as opportunities arose. With these critical resources, faculty and students can explore their innovative ideas, together and separately, in real time and without limitation.

Students can experiment and put their ideas into action; faculty can, as our mission states, pursue and surpass the boundaries of current knowledge.

Thanks to support for these core priorities, MIT Sloan can continue to be at the forefront of inventing solutions to the world’s greatest challenges.

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Impostor Syndrome and Its Surprising Upside Basima Tewfik (Class of 1943 Career Development Professor; Assistant Professor of Work and Organization Studies) examines the psychology of the social self at work.

Already, her work is changing the conversation around common workplace assumptions.

In “The Impostor Phenomenon Revisited: Examining the Relationship Between Workplace Impostor Thoughts and Interpersonal Effectiveness at Work,” Tewfik addresses what is popularly known as “impostor syndrome,” which she instead calls “workplace impostor thoughts,” and shows that it may have a surprising interpersonal benefit.

Tewfik defines these impostor thoughts as the belief that others overestimate one’s competence. For example, those who harbor such thoughts think to themselves, “I think other people think I’m smarter than I think I am.” Historically, these thoughts are correlated with negative outcomes like decreased self-esteem and stress. But Tewfik theorized and found that employees with more frequent workplace impostor thoughts may also be seen as more interpersonally effective at work and no less competent than those with fewer of such thoughts.

She tested her theory across four studies that featured survey, video, and pre-registered experimental data. In the first study, more than 150 employees at an investment advisory firm self-reported how frequently they had experienced workplace impostor thoughts.

After matching these employees with supervisor ratings, Tewfik found that those with more frequent impostor thoughts scored higher on interpersonal effectiveness. In a second study, she examined more than 70 physicians in training. Those with more frequent workplace impostor thoughts physically adopted a more other-focused orientation (i.e., demonstrating focus on others via eye contact, gestures, etc.) in

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their patient interactions. As a result, patients rated them more highly with regard to interpersonal dynamics. Impostor thoughts did not negatively affect doctors making the right diagnosis.

These two studies established a positive correlation between impostor thoughts and interpersonal evaluations. In the following two studies, Tewfik aimed to establish causation: If you cause someone to have impostor thoughts, does it lead to a greater other-focused orientation, which can explain higher interpersonal effectiveness ratings?

Indeed, she found this to be the case when randomly assigning employees to a control condition or an impostor thoughts condition. Tewfik asked the latter participants to recall a time when they had impostor thoughts at work. She then assessed their other-focused orientation in a pre-interview and found that it was higher than those in the control condition. As a result, interviewers perceived the impostor thought employees to be higher in interpersonal effectiveness.

In short, Tewfik found that people with impostor thoughts seemed to turn to another domain—social interaction and relationships—to compensate for their perceived deficit in competence, which, ironically, produces an interpersonal upside without seemingly impacting performance. Importantly, however, although she did not find detriments with regard to performance, she cautions from concluding that impostor thoughts may be all upside: “We need to better develop a holistic picture of the phenomenon, one that simultaneously considers competence-related, interpersonal, and well-being outcomes.”

In 2019 and 2021, Tewfik was a winner of the MIT Junior Faculty Research Assistance Program (JFRAP) award, which champions new faculty and incorporates their creative research approaches into the MIT Sloan community. In addition to impostor thoughts, her research includes “request declining”: how to say no to work in such a way as to preserve one’s professional relationships and reputation.

More broadly, her research seeks to shape new conversations that inspire academics and workplace practitioners to rethink workplace dynamics for the better.

We need to better develop a holistic picture of the phenomenon, one that simultaneously considers competence-related, interpersonal, and well-being outcomes.

Basima Tewfik, Class of 1943 Career Development Professor

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Can Food Become Renewable Biofuel?

According to the USDA, food waste makes up 30 to 40 percent of the food supply in the United States. That’s 131 billion pounds a year, not to mention billions of dollars and a vast waste of labor and resources. Despite the development of tools aimed at addressing the problem, food waste remains a massive contributor to the climate crisis.

Brittny Chong, MBA ’22, finds the impacts of food waste deeply troubling—and it’s spurring her into action. Using machine learning analytics and the latest in computer vision, she’s created a smart food waste bin called WiRa to tackle the problem. WiRa is two things: a food “sorter” that identifies which food products are often discarded and an analytics app that reduces the cost of inventory for food service operators by improving procurement forecasting. In turn, they’ll be able to better gauge the supplies needed and buy less food that would otherwise be thrown out.

Eventually, WiRa’s goal is to turn food waste into biofuel—a local, renewable energy source. Chong and her team of climate scientists and engineers in computer vision and machine learning hope that WiRa will become an important puzzle piece to combat food waste, particularly in island communities across Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. In a 2020 MIT Spectrum article, she explained, “Their primary source of income is tourism … they will be impacted first by climate change even if they’re not contributing to it at the same rate.”

WiRa is Chong’s third startup developed at MIT Sloan. Her first, ONA (meaning “ownership” in Jamaican Patois) uses augmented reality (AR) to help consumers improve their socially conscious spending with analytics. The second, Two Breaths,

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uses AR and machine learning to provide calming Snapchat filters that assist with anxiety. When Chong joined the MIT Entrepreneurship and Maker Skills Integrator (MEMSI) hardware bootcamp in Hong Kong, she saw the waste management problems that were affecting poor members of the community and felt compelled to take action.

Chong collaborated with Joseph Hui, SB ’81, SM ’81, PhD ’83, an inventor, president and CEO at the award-winning renewable energy company Monarch Power, and a pioneer in climate change solutions. Hui served as a mentor and advisor while she participated in MEMSI, providing guidance and support as she developed her ideas.

With the help of faculty, alumni, and other resources, she’s been incubating and expanding WiRa. Chong hails from Jamaica and grew up in New York City. She’s always been focused on social impact, both in her undergraduate work at Amherst College and in her careers as a social worker in New York City and a management consultant at Deloitte.

MIT Sloan has helped her bring her entrepreneurial spirit to action. Chong explains that MIT was always her school of choice, thanks to its unique “hunger for innovation, combined with the humility that I was raised with, and the relatable, self-effacing, open curiosity.” Receiving fellowship funding from MIT Sloan, including the Beatrice Ballini (1986) Fellowship, gave her the opportunity to pursue her dreams.

Chong says she wants to spend her career designing tools that “help communities take accountability for their role in climate change.” For her, WiRa is just the beginning.

The biggest thing that I want to move forward with in my career is building tools that help communities take accountability for their role in climate change.

Brittny Chong, MBA ’22

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New Endowment Deepens Commitment to Diversity Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) have long been important at MIT Sloan—even more so after events in 2020 underscored urgent, widespread societal issues.

The MIT Sloan Endowment for Enduring Diversity and Inclusion (EED), established in 2020, reflects a strengthened commitment to DEI at MIT Sloan. Fellowships established by donors as part of the EED directly encourage and empower students from underrepresented populations and are designed to increase diversity, not just in the accepted student population but also in the yield of those diverse applicants.

But what does this look like practically?

In short, the aim is to expand and deepen DEI across all facets of students’ experience from orientation to beyond graduation. In the classroom, funds provided through the EED will diversify materials and experiences, including classroom content like case studies and simulations, Action Learning Labs, co-curricular activities, and the MIT Sloan Intensive Period. The EED will also contribute funds toward creating an ongoing diverse speaker series and expanding the diversity of existing speaker events.

MIT Sloan alumni have already been showing their support through the establishment of fellowship funds matched by the EED. Dr. Tamara (Lucero) Rajaram, MBA ’01, and Gokul Rajaram, MBA ’01, chose the EED as a way to help future students experience the same educational opportunities they did.

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Mindy Hsu, LGO ’06, and David Lee, MBA ’04, decided to support the EED after seeing the underrepresentation of women in STEM via the experiences of their two young daughters. Chris Chia, MBA ’98, and his wife Karen created the Chris and Karen Chia Fellowship Fund as part of the EED to give back, particularly to those impacted by the pandemic. Yu-Ting Kuo, SM ’94, made a gift to the EED to remove obstacles and fuel a trend where graduate schools truly value diversity.

David Gitlin, SF ’03, and his wife Stephanie were also inspired to establish the Gitlin Family Sloan Fellowship Fund to support at least one MIT Sloan Fellow in perpetuity. “With this fellowship, we hope to encourage more representation at MIT Sloan in order to put more Black leaders in C-suites everywhere. It is very important that people see themselves represented on their company’s senior leadership team,” said David.

To date, alumni and friends have established 16 fellowships for students from underrepresented backgrounds and allocated $11 million in matching funds towards DEI through the EED. Thanks in part to these efforts, the incoming class of MIT Sloan MBA students was one of the most diverse ever. Through the end of the fiscal year (June 30, 2022), MIT will match endowed fellowship gifts two to one, which continues to strengthen the EED’s efforts.

“The impact that fellowships make on the composition of the incoming class is significant,” said Dawna Levenson, SB ’83, SM ’84 (Assistant Dean, Admissions).

“Candidates we admit to our programs are often in demand by other schools as well. Our goal is to ensure that funding is not a factor for someone to turn down our offer.”

With this fellowship, we hope to encourage more representation at MIT Sloan in order to put more Black leaders in C-suites everywhere. It is very important that people see themselves represented on their company’s senior leadership team.

David Gitlin, SF ’03

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HEALTH OF THE PLANET

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Sustainability, as defined by the MIT Sloan School of Management, isn’t just about one area of focus.

Environmental concerns are critical, of course, but sustainability also includes societal and economic issues. How do we build a sustainable future that enables a robust economy without compromising the health of the planet? MIT Sloan’s research in system dynamics, applied economics, and organizational design plays a role in this vision, combined with the deep scientific research across the Institute. The MIT Sloan community envisions a world in which both humans and nature can thrive—and is working toward that goal.

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Building Better, More Transparent Supply Chains Because of significant global supply chain delays over the past few years, consumers have a greater awareness of how goods reach them and the impact on the climate.

They may understand the interconnectedness of sourcing goods, paying people fairly, and managing waste, but there’s still not much transparency in global supply chains— even internally.

“It’s not only that consumers don’t have visibility, but companies often don’t know where products come from or how things are made,” says Yanchong (Karen) Zheng (George M. Bunker Professor; Associate Professor of Operations Management).

“Traditionally, they at best know their first tier of suppliers, and have little knowledge beyond that.”

Her work studies fundamental and emerging operations and supply chain problems, with a particular focus on creating environmental and social responsibility in global supply chains. But, at the core of the work, in the simplest possible terms, “I like to apply math to figure out how we can improve the world,” she explains.

Zheng, working with Retsef Levi (J. Spencer Standish (1945) Professor of Operations Management; Faculty Co-Director, MIT Leaders for Global Operations) and in collaboration with the government of the Indian state of Karnataka, completed an empirical assessment of their new digital market platform designed to unify agricultural trading in the region. The government created the platform as an effort to get wholesale traders to pay smallholder farmers the fair worth of their products, but the assessment showed there wasn’t a uniform price increase for all goods.

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To further enhance the benefit of the platform to farmers, the researchers designed a two-stage auction, adding a second round of bidding to those traders who offered the highest amounts in the first round. In a pilot program during spring 2019, average prices increased 4 percent, which positively impacted more than 10,000 farmers. Their continued research utilizes AI to develop tools for farmers, including generating accurate, unbiased information around crop planning, pricing, and market selection.

This is just one of Zheng’s research directions, and a microcosm of her interest in modeling real-world problems to find practical solutions. She became motivated to study labor practices with an eye toward improving practices from both a labor and an environmental perspective, citing the Dhaka garment factory collapse in 2013 and mass suicides at a Chinese Foxconn plant in the 2010s.

Through modeling, on-the-ground studies, behavioral experiments, surveys, and using brands like Patagonia as a positive example, Zheng has been studying the benefits of supply chain visibility. “We find differences, in that companies with better visibility into their supply chains gain more trust from their stakeholders,” she says.

Zheng has a lofty goal: to engage a coordinated response among companies and suppliers to establish end-to-end transparency and more responsible supply chain practices. It can be challenging to motivate organizations to change their internal practices, but a collective effort is the catalyst for long-term change. This system that generates “value for all,” as Zheng puts it, is something she sees as challenging—but ultimately feasible.

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Building the ESG Data “Skyscraper” According to Roberto Rigobon, PhD ’97 (Society of Sloan Fellows Professor of Management; Professor of Applied Economics; Co-Faculty Director of the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative), we can’t just rely on government regulations to save the planet.

A crucial element lies in the business sector: holding organizations accountable and incentivizing responsible investing, which requires accurate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data.

The problem is: ESG ratings vary in terms of values and how much each attribute is weighed.

Rigobon and MIT Sloan research associates Florian Berg and Julian F. Kölbel found a total of 64 measurable ESG attributes. “If you’re a company and you have 64 different categories in which you might improve, which are the ones you prioritize?

The ones that are easier, not necessarily the ones that are impactful,” explains Rigobon.

The Aggregate Confusion Project, launched in 2020 by the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative and headed by Rigobon, aims to decipher the “noise” in ESG data, presenting information in a simpler and more easily measurable way. Jason Jay, PhD ’10, (Senior Lecturer, Sustainability; Director of the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative) said, “There’s exponential growth in assets under management that are trying to incorporate ESG considerations, particularly climate change risks and opportunities. This trend is like a skyscraper we’re building as fast as possible.”

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“The Aggregate Confusion Project is working to fix some of those cracks and holes by creating more reliable measurement, not just in climate change but also in a suite of essential issues that include women’s empowerment, racial justice, corruption, labor standards, and human trafficking,” he added.

Rigobon firmly believes that shareholder power is the fastest, most effective way to force companies to change—especially for the country’s three to five biggest polluters, where changing behavior would make a major difference. “We need to get our hands dirty,” he said. “We want to measure the consequences of companies’ actions and say, ‘Here is evidence of your damage. Let’s fix it.’ And the financial system will be able to say, ‘Actions A, B, and C are unacceptable.’”

In 2021, the Aggregate Confusion Project accepted four new investment firms as founding members: MFS Investment Management, AQR Capital Management, Qontigo, and Asset Management One. They join the Massachusetts Pension Reserves Investment Management (Mass PRIM) Board, which signed on in 2020, to consult with Rigobon’s team about better approaches to sustainable investing and provide financial support. The project is looking for more firms to participate, and Rigobon gives regular updates via the Sustainability Initiative newsletter.

Rigobon also works with students on multiple interconnected facets of corporate responsibility (including human trafficking), creating what he terms an “army of able individuals” who will work towards this long-term goal of raising the bar on corporate behavior and investor influence now and into the future.

“It’s a thankless job, but that spells MIT—multidisciplinary, important, and thankless,” he quips.

The Aggregate Confusion Project is working to fix some of those cracks and holes by creating more reliable measurement, not just in climate change but also in a suite of essential issues that include women’s empowerment, racial justice, corruption, labor standards, and human trafficking.

Jason Jay, PhD ’10, Senior Lecturer, Sustainability

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Simulations to Predict Climate Change Most people care about climate change, but it can be tough to change behavior.

To the average person, the challenge feels insurmountable—and they may not feel the urgency of action until it’s too late.

John D. Sterman, PhD ’82, (Jay W. Forrester Professor of Management; Faculty Co-Director of the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative) explains that “a lot of people still hold a mental model that says, ‘Let’s wait and see how badly climate change is going to hurt us before acting.’ Folks think it’s like putting the kettle on the stove to boil water. They think you can wait until you hear the whistle to take the kettle off the flame.”

But that’s not how climate change works—people need to take action before they feel the most severe effects. Much like the training of a pilot or heart surgeon, learning needs to happen before experience. “In such settings, people learn best in simulations,” says Sterman.

Enter En-ROADS (Energy Rapid Overview and Decision Support), which provides interactive climate policy simulation models. Created with Climate Interactive, a nonprofit think tank, En-ROADS shows which policies will have the most effective and decisive impact on global warming and the climate crisis.

The team initially launched C-ROADS (Climate Rapid Overview and Decision Support) in 2009 to show how emissions affect climate change outcomes. Both models are free and interactive, with users being able to choose different actions

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and assess the results. En-ROADS and C-ROADS are key aspects of the MIT Climate Pathways Project, which aims to influence top decision-makers to advance the adoption of evidence-based climate policy.

The Climate Pathways team is already pushing forward on this mission as they bring interactive En-ROADS briefings to senior policymakers and other stakeholders—including governors and members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. This coordination has been made possible thanks to fellow MIT alumni, including Michael Sonnenfeldt, SB ’77, SM ’78, Bethany Patten, EMBA ’13 (Lecturer, Sustainability; Senior Associate Director of the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative), Andrew Jones, SM ’97, and Ben Wolkon, MBA ’16.

According to their research, using En-ROADS increased knowledge about the climate crisis, brought a sense of urgency and hope, and engendered a need to do more to address the problem. Using both simulation models can also elicit strong emotional responses—across the political spectrum—and that’s critical to eliciting change. “Motivating people to act isn’t just about information,” explains Sterman. “The evaluative studies showed that it’s emotional engagement that drives people’s desire to learn more and to take action.”

Sterman spoke about MIT Sloan’s impact on addressing this problem urgently, citing the significance of principled, entrepreneurial leadership. “Within the lives of our children, we will know whether or not we succeed—we can do it, but there’s no time to waste. And if not us—then who?”

Motivating people to act isn’t just about information.

The evaluative studies showed that it’s emotional engagement that drives people’s desire to learn more and to take action.

John D. Sterman, PhD ’82, Jay W. Forrester Professor of Management

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HUMAN HEALTH

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What makes for a healthy humankind? It’s a surprisingly nuanced and complicated quandary, and one that requires economic theory, data analytics, and management science alongside biomedical science. From identifying innovations in biotech to developing better global systems of healthcare, members of the MIT Sloan community are working to hack the complex issues keeping people from living healthy lives and getting the care they need in timely and cost-effective ways. It requires profound work and resources to create a future with improved healthcare data and analytics, operational and organizational improvements, and economic incentives for affordability. Decreasing cost while improving outcomes is a lofty goal, but MIT Sloan faculty, researchers, and students are up for the challenge.

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Fixing the Biotech “Valley of Death” Finance influences—and in many cases hinders—drug development. For Andrew W. Lo (Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor; Professor of Finance; Director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering (LFE) at MIT Sloan), there’s a better way to do things.

As Lo says, “Shouldn’t the science drive the financing rather than the other way around?”

His research in the fields of biotech and pharma, galvanized a decade ago by losing six people he loved to cancer in the span of four years, is working to make the relationship between the science and business of drug development more productive.

“Finance plays a huge role, sometimes way too big a role, in how drugs get developed,” Lo said in a 2021 seminar at Princeton University, and fixing the model could have “tremendous impact.”

He focuses on the “valley of death,” where promising, and potentially transformative, ideas are left to languish due to a lack of capital to sustain their growth and development. Advocating for greater funding diversity—financing a portfolio of therapeutic development projects in order to de-risk investment—led to him becoming co-founder of BridgeBio Pharma Inc. in 2015. The company is now valued at $1.5 billion, with two drug approvals to its credit and more than 30 in the pipeline.

Lo also studies the impact of academic technology transfer—an increasingly important component of the biomedical ecosystem—and mission-driven investments, to better inform decision-makers in their allocation of resources. In one recent study, Lo, along with former MIT Technology Licensing Office director Lita Nelsen, SB ’64, SM ’66, SM ’79, MIT students, and LFE research affiliates, assessed MIT’s intellectual property (IP)

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portfolio. It was the first systematic analysis of a portfolio of therapeutics companies that has licensed IP from one specific academic institution.

Their research suggests that MIT licensees may have been more innovative than the industry average, and that academic IP can contribute critically to a company’s success. “The link between academic IP and drug approvals isn’t a straight line, and our analysis doesn’t capture all aspects of MIT’s contributions to therapeutic innovation. But with examples like Alnylam, bluebird bio, Editas Medicine, and Sangamo—all companies that have licensed MIT IP—it’s clear that MIT is creating innovative therapeutics on a regular basis,” Lo says.

In 2019, in a pair of studies co-authored with MIT research affiliates Kien Wei Siah, SM ’17, PhD ’21, and Chi Heem Wong, SM ’17, PhD ’21, Lo highlights the role of data science and machine learning in improving the efficiency of the clinical development process, specifically filling in the gaps around missing values to develop more accurate predictions about the outcomes as well as estimates of clinical trial success rates.

He notes that “more accurate risk metrics will eventually lead to fewer big failures, faster approval times, greater cost savings to the entire healthcare system, and more investment capital for developing breakthrough therapies.”

Ultimately, Lo’s goal is to help address the bottlenecks in how new therapies get developed and accelerate biomedical innovation through better financing. As he said in the seminar, “The more financing that comes into the industry, the faster the scientific progress we’re going to make will be.”

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KATE KELLOGG

Institutional Change from the Bottom Up Institutional change can be tough. How do managers make organizational and workflow improvements effectively, and activate employees’ willingness to change their habits and manage their resistance? Kate Kellogg, PhD ’05, (David J. McGrath jr (1959) Professor of Management and Innovation; Professor of Work and Organization Studies) has come to some surprising conclusions in her work, specifically about instituting micro-level change from the bottom up.

Kellogg isolated two primary care departments in two U.S. hospitals that were part of the same parent organization and that did similar work. They were at an inflection point: Both departments had been given $750,000 to implement national-level patient-centered medical home (PCMH) reforms. This meant a change from a more reactive to a more preventive care model—conducting more vaccinations, colonoscopies, Pap smears, etc.—and treating patients with chronic illnesses with evidence-based guidelines. This shift would result in significant workflow changes.

In an ethnographic study of the primary care departments, Kellogg observed interactions between managers, doctors, and medical assistants for two years before and after the PCMH changes. She shadowed and interviewed more than 80 professionals and analyzed the documentation used to roll out these changes.

Interestingly, Kellogg found that one of the hospitals was far more successful across three phases of her study—an adoption rate that jumped from 6 to 65 percent—than the other in implementing PCMH reforms. In a 2019 Harvard Business Review article, she explained the most significant factor for success.

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“On the teams that were most successful, managers had enlisted the aid of medical assistants to help change the doctors’ behaviors,” she said. “At both facilities, the medical assistants were responsible for bringing patients from the waiting area to the exam room, weighing them, and taking their blood pressure. And yet, despite having no formal authority over doctors, the medical assistants had a high capacity for influence because they had a lot of structural power.”

Kellogg found that this power lay in the assistants’ purview around the doctors’ workflow, work tasks, peer networks, and position as intermediary between patients.

But equally important were specific tools like visual prompts and favor scripts to remind the medical assistants about the changes and how to frame them to the doctors effectively—without making the physicians feel threatened in their expertise or decision-making. Giving the assistants dedicated time to handle the changes and two-way communication to discuss and make alterations to workflow as needed was also crucial. With the medical assistants acting as change agents in a structured way, this also fostered a more team-based approach.

These results suggest that—when implemented correctly—engaging lower-level semiprofessionals can potentially be an effective tool to help leverage work practices, and not just within healthcare. “For example,” said Kellogg, “could a law firm more effectively alter the behavior of its lawyers by enlisting the aid of its paralegals in the change initiative? And might companies do the same with their administrative assistants when implementing organizational change?”

On the teams that were most successful, managers had enlisted the aid of medical assistants to help change the doctors’ behaviors. At both facilities, the medical assistants were responsible for bringing patients from the waiting area to the exam room, weighing them, and taking their blood pressure. And yet, despite having no formal authority over doctors, the medical assistants had a high capacity for influence because they had a lot of structural power.

Kate Kellogg, PhD ’05, David J. McGrath jr (1959) Professor of Management and Innovation

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Bridging the COVID-19 Data Gap COVID-19 remains a global crisis—with new variants causing spikes in cases and changing guidelines that complicate everyday life. Having correct data about the virus and tools to make operational decisions is critical, both now and in the future.

The COVID Analytics Project is led by Dimitris Bertsimas, SM ’87, PhD ’88 (Associate Dean for Business Analytics; Boeing Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management; Professor of Operations Research), and includes the work of 25 doctoral students in the MIT Operations Research Center. The project uses data from studies run in hospitals and derives insights about patients, treatment, and mortality rates; they also use the data to make daily case predictions and policy evaluations. The work started on March 16, 2020, just as lockdown began in the U.S., and the group continues to provide information so that people and organizations can make better decisions.

As a part of their project, the researchers developed a DELPHI (Differential Equations Lead to Predictions for Hospitalization and Infections) model. When the vaccines were first rolled out, Bertsimas says, “There were questions: How should the nation prioritize delivery of vaccines? Which states? How many vaccines?, and so forth. I worked with FEMA to decide which centers, how many centers, and how many vaccines to allocate, and they have directionally followed our advice.”

Starting in May 2020, the group worked closely with Johnson & Johnson on the location of clinical trials in countries like Brazil and South Africa with high case rates at the time.

By Bertsimas’s calculations, they helped accelerate the initial trials by eight weeks.

There were questions: How should the nation prioritize delivery of vaccines? Which states? How many vaccines?, and so forth. I worked with FEMA to decide which centers, how many centers, and how many vaccines to allocate, and they have directionally followed our advice.

Dimitris Bertsimas, SM ’87, PhD ’88, Associate Dean for Business Analytics

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Bertsimas also collaborated with Dr. Barry Stein, EMBA ’17, Vice President and Chief Clinical Innovation Officer at Hartford HealthCare System in Connecticut, to determine how many ICU beds they should have, how they should roll out the vaccine, and how to make ongoing operational decisions in response to the variants.

To this day, the group updates the website and provides more detailed COVID-19 data for countries that request it—they’ve already worked with Peru, India, and Brazil.

They also work with companies to help make decisions about employees returning to work. “Because it has daily predictions, not only of what is happening now in terms of hospitalizations, but what will happen one month, two months, three months [from now] at a reasonably detailed level, these companies have used it to map a returning strategy,” explains Bertsimas. He’s also found that individuals use the site to determine whether they should go to the hospital if they’re experiencing symptoms, based on the availability of hospital resources in their area.

The impacts of the COVID Analytics Project will be long-lasting. The team was named a finalist for the 2022 Edelman Award and won the 2022 Innovative Applications in Analytics Award. Separately, the team has already worked with Johnson & Johnson on developing a vaccine for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).

Bertsimas uses the site and its model as a part of his undergraduate course, “Analytics for a Better World.” And he’s in the process of writing a paper using the group’s insights to help countries prepare for pandemics in the future.

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INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP

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Innovation is central to MIT. We generate the ideas that lead to groundbreaking inventions, and we have the means to quickly deliver impact. At MIT Sloan, this means taking on the greatest business challenges—working towards increased diversity, sustainability, profitability, and prosperity, just to name a few. Our courses, hackathons, competitions, and conferences aren’t just designed to increase knowledge. They lead to myriad business innovations: entrepreneurs bringing disruptive goods and services to market, new ways to do business, and new models for markets. Fostering ecosystems of innovation and discovery around the world, the MIT Sloan community is working to build a better future.

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Using the Scientific Method on Business MIT Sloan students learn that opportunities and ideas can run counter to conventional wisdom. Pierre Azoulay, PhD ’01, (International Programs Professor of Management; Professor, Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management) understands this all too well. His research on academic entrepreneurship results in a more comprehensive understanding that can upend our preconceived notions about business.

How do immigrants impact the U.S. economy? In a 2020 study he completed with J. Daniel Kim, SM ’16, PhD ’20, Benjamin F. Jones, PhD ’03, and Javier Miranda, they found that immigrants act more as “job creators” than “job takers” in the United States. More so than native-born citizens, immigrants appear to be more entrepreneurial—by a whopping 80 percent—and the resulting businesses create 42 percent more jobs. These businesses extended even to the largest businesses in the country.

In response to the previous White House administration’s anti-immigrant sentiment in labor and wage markets at the time, Azoulay explained in a 2020 article, “The fact that the numbers are what they are, at least should make you worry that if you close the country to immigration and if you make the life of immigrants harder than it needs to be once they’re here, it makes it plausible that this might have negative repercussions on entrepreneurship writ large, and for job creation.”

What’s the best age to start a business? Azoulay, Kim, Jones, and Miranda discovered that it’s not necessarily the oft-thought stereotype of a 20-something disruptor (like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg). The research team found that middle-aged founders are far more likely to be successful than younger entrepreneurs.

Specifically, their research found that a 50-year-old founder is almost two times more likely than a 30-year-old founder to achieve upper-tail growth. Between 2007 and 2014, the average age of founders who started companies was 41.9; for companies with the highest growth, the age was 45. Founders’ experience and knowledge, particularly in the field they’re hoping to start a business in, were significant drivers of success.

“We find no evidence to suggest founders in their 20s are especially likely to succeed,” explains Azoulay. “Rather, all evidence points to founders being especially successful when starting businesses in middle age and beyond.”

In future research, Azoulay is interested in studying the extent to which VCs’ investment decisions deviate from what would be predicted from talent considerations and the quality of entrepreneurs’ ideas alone. For example, in the life sciences, startup founders tend to be overwhelmingly middle-aged. Only with the credibility of an established scientific reputation can they hope to attract external funding for a venture

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idea. Does this reflect that seasoned scientists tend to make better founders or that their VC investors have flawed assumptions about the traits, skills, and experiences necessary to succeed?

The answer is not obvious, which is exactly why Azoulay finds this type of research project exciting. “One would think that VC investors have strong incentives to fund the most promising ideas. Yet, one is struck by the demographic similarity of founders and founding teams who find support, particularly in the biotech space.

Could the investment heuristics followed by well-informed investors lead to some promising ideas forever remaining unexploited?”

PIERRE AZOULAY

We find no evidence to suggest founders in their 20s are especially likely to succeed. Rather, all evidence points to founders being especially successful when starting businesses in middle age and beyond.

Pierre Azoulay, PhD ’01, International Programs Professor of Management

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MIT REAP Fosters Global Innovation and Entrepreneurship The MIT Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program (MIT REAP), an initiative of MIT Sloan, provides opportunities for communities around the world to engage with MIT in an evidence-based, practical approach to strengthening innovation-driven entrepreneurial (IDE) ecosystems. Every year for the past decade, MIT REAP has admitted a cohort of up to eight regions to participate in its two-year learning engagement with MIT. The program is designed to translate research insights from leading MIT Sloan faculty into practical frameworks, educate innovation ecosystem leaders from across disciplines through team-based learning, and impact regions through the development of new programs and policies that support innovation-driven enterprises.

“We facilitate collaboration as a convener between a mix of stakeholders who are the connectors and influencers in their region to come up with something that will really transform their innovation ecosystem with the right frameworks and insights,” explains Travis Hunter (Director, MIT REAP).

But what does this actually look like in practice? In the case of a team from Nova Scotia, Canada (Cohort 4, 2016–2018), it led to the development of ONSIDE, a nonprofit with a mission to “galvanize a prosperous Nova Scotia” through inclusive IDE. In 2014, the regional government formed the One Nova Scotia Coalition to assess the future of the province’s economy. MIT REAP guided them in exploring and executing on this goal.

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Like all teams, the participants utilized the MIT REAP Innovation Ecosystem Stakeholder Model: bringing together representatives from entrepreneurial ventures, risk capital, corporations, government, and universities to develop and execute a shared strategy for IDE ecosystem acceleration. Championed by Dalhousie University and funded by the private sector, the Nova Scotia team identified the province’s comparative advantage— in their case, a strong post-secondary system, its ocean-based economy, and a budding culture of innovation.

The work helped them identify their “must-win battle”: the Ocean Supercluster—a cluster model in Canada designed to foster innovation and drive the economy through crosscollaboration with various industries, including fisheries, marine renewables, defense, and technologies. The team’s application for funding this regional supercluster led to an investment of more than $300 million from public and private sources. The project is expected to generate $14 billion in GDP and create 3,000 jobs over the next decade.

ONSIDE was launched in 2019 to independently extend the impacts of the MIT REAP team.

More recently, MIT REAP has launched its Focus program, which employs targeted IDE strategies within a single region, utilizing a bespoke timeframe to strengthen innovation and entrepreneurship. Nova Scotia is one such Focus program cohort, extending MIT REAP Team Nova Scotia’s experience more broadly to regional leaders across the province. Working with key stakeholder partners like the One Nova Scotia Collective, ONSIDE has mobilized five teams from across the province to participate in this targeted IDE ecosystem acceleration model over a one-year period.

MIT REAP’s current cohort (Cohort 8, 2021–2023) includes diverse teams, ranging in location from Caldas, Colombia, to the Eastern Province, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. To date, MIT REAP has helped over 70 regions worldwide strategize and execute initiatives that contribute to their economic growth, job creation, and social progress; their alumni community numbers nearly 700 people.

Fiona E. Murray (Associate Dean for Innovation and Inclusion; William Porter (1967) Professor of Entrepreneurship; Co-Director, MIT Innovation Initiative; Faculty Director, Legatum Center; Faculty Co-Director, MIT REAP) explains, “MIT REAP brings the ‘mens et manus’ mission to the wider global community. Each team applies theory from the classroom to its region’s distinct resources and drives forward its innovation ecosystem.”

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A Bra for Heart Disease There is evidence of sex differences in the cardiovascular system. Some women with heart disease don’t necessarily experience the same symptoms as men—and some don’t experience any typical signs. But because scientists have studied fewer women than men in research trials (and fewer female models in animal studies), we know less about women’s treatment and mortality. Rates of heart disease for women are on the rise.

An MIT Graduate Women of Excellence Award recipient and a 2017–2018 MIT Legatum Fellow, Alicia Chong Rodriguez, SM ’18, is motivated to improve women’s health not only as a scientist, but as a person. She lost her grandmother, an obstetrician, to a heart attack when Chong Rodriguez was just 13 years old. Chong Rodriguez realized as a student that women were deeply underrepresented in heart-related studies—excluded from cardiovascular trials until 1993—leading to a lack of sufficient data and medical information about this disease in women.

“As artificial intelligence helps turbocharge digital health, there’s a danger that algorithms mostly trained with male data and biases will actually perpetuate the problem,” Chong Rodriguez explains.

She founded Bloomer Tech with Aceil Halaby, SM ’17, and Monica Abarca, who was only 12 years old when she lost her mother suddenly to a stroke. Named after Amelia Bloomer, the women’s rights activist who advocated against health-damaging corsets, the group has been aiming to make a better, more dependable medical and healthcare device for women—something that’s not uncomfortable, won’t break easily, and is molded directly to the body.

As a 2017 MIT delta v team, they designed a washable bra that women can wear, which uses flexible and washable circuits to continuously read metrics like their ECG, respiration, heart rate, and more. “It’s in the right place on a woman’s body—around the core and heart,” Chong Rodriguez says. “And the diversity of bras allows us to

As artificial intelligence helps turbocharge digital health, there’s a danger that algorithms mostly trained with male data and biases will actually perpetuate the problem.

Alicia Chong Rodriguez, SM ‘18

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ACEIL HALABY AND ALICIA CHONG RODRIGUEZ

fit each woman and mold our technology around the curvature of her body. It’s not a one-size-fits-all device, and it can collect huge volumes of valuable data.”

The team developed an algorithm that integrates the collected data and sends information to the wearer’s smartphone, generating insights and digital biomarkers about the wearers’ bodies including abnormalities that might be an early sign of a heart problem. The information is available to be shared with medical professionals of their choosing. The creators at Bloomer Tech also collaborate with researchers and, in turn, help develop better health management, treatments, and early detection of heart disease in women.

Clinical testing of the bra began in 2018. Ben Linville-Engler, SDM ’18, helped the team with the regulatory strategy process, and they are already working with partners who also aim to advance women’s health. According to Chong Rodriguez, joining forces with others to impact women’s health positively and enabling easier participation in clinical trials will collectively generate breakthroughs in digital diagnostics and therapeutics to address some of the biggest healthcare challenges humanity faces today.

Currently, the Bloomer Tech team is recruiting individuals who want to join their mission to prevent deadly and often overlooked medical challenges by becoming early adopters and wearing the device, which comes in multiple sizes.

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INQUIRY AND DISCOVERY

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Inquiry and discovery have always been core to MIT Sloan, but never more so than in today’s rapidly changing world. At MIT Sloan, we are relentless in our pursuit of solutions to the toughest global challenges. Driven by discovery, we bring our passion for problem-solving and purpose to bear on these fundamental issues. It’s not just about what happens in the classroom or in literature; our work is meant to be applied within organizations, across communities, and in online spaces. We invest in our students, faculty, centers, and initiatives because their work—in the digital economy, finance, healthcare, sustainability, and other fields—is shifting how we approach the world and is creating a better future for all.

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Burnout? There’s a Way Forward Most people would probably agree: The pace of modern work is relentless. But workers may not feel they have the power to address their own workload, much less receive support from their senior managers to change the situation.

Erin L. Kelly (Sloan Distinguished Professor of Work and Organization Studies; Professor, Work and Organization Studies; Co-Director, MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research) has a different approach to addressing the breakneck pace of professional life.

She’s the co-author of the appropriately titled book, Overload: How Good Jobs Went Bad and What We Can Do about It. With her co-author, University of Minnesota sociology professor Phyllis Moen, Kelly explores how workers have trouble keeping up.

In her research, even people with “good jobs”—those with good pay, benefits, and working environments—may suffer from an overwhelming workload. The globalized economy means that employers often expect workers to be available whenever needed, including for stakeholders in various time zones. This became worse with the rise of video meetings; the “standard” workday could now last from early in the morning to very late at night. In fact, workers and managers cite burnout as one of the motivators behind the Great Reshuffle, during which many workers have left their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic.

As part of a larger research team called the Work, Family & Health Network, Kelly and Moen studied a Fortune 500 company, focusing on the firm’s IT division and studying over 1,000 employees and managers. They implemented and evaluated a organizational

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change initiative called STAR (Support. Transform. Achieve. Results.), a “dual-agenda work redesign” to benefit employer and employees alike.

STAR training involved asking managers to increase their communication of personal and professional support for employees, as well as a series of team workshops to address important questions, such as how the team could best accomplish their work together while allowing employees more freedom around when and where they did their work.

Researchers urged the participants to think creatively and collaborate.

Researchers then studied the impacts on the STAR employees against a control group doing the same type of work. After the work redesign, the researchers observed that the STAR group of workers experienced higher job satisfaction and less burnout and psychological distress. “These jobs were still challenging, and the work was still somewhat intense, but people felt they could manage better,” Kelly explains.

Thus, the problem isn’t insurmountable. Employers should look out for low employee retention and burnout—and then recognize that excessive work demands and unsupportive conditions may be driving those patterns. “The problem of overload is driven by a set of company strategies and management decisions about running lean and, in the case of the company that we studied, trying to stretch work all over the world in a global labor chain … [it’s] management decisions and staffing strategies that we believe are driving this sense of overload,” says Kelly. She encourages leadership to seek employee reflections on current practices, looking beyond wellness benefits (like yoga classes or exercise incentives) that try to help people cope with job stress to addressing the stressful work conditions together.

This kind of work redesign, Kelly notes, “requires managers who are both open to stepping back and letting go of some of the ways they’ve managed in the past, sharing decisions with employees, and letting employees have more control or autonomy.”

This kind of work redesign requires managers who are both open to stepping back and letting go of some of the ways they’ve managed in the past, sharing decisions with employees, and letting employees have more control or autonomy.

Erin L. Kelly, Sloan Distinguished Professor of Work and Organization Studies

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DAVID RAND DAVID G. RAND

Misinformation Research in Latin America Since 2013, MIT Sloan has sought to expand its relationships with alumni, businesses, and other universities in Latin America via the MIT Sloan Latin America Office (MSLAO), the school’s first physical space outside Cambridge. One of the MSLAO’s primary functions is its global reach through seed funds to MIT researchers. With up to $25,000 awarded for each project, researchers focus on addressing critical issues in the region.

In 2020, the MSLAO received a record number of applications and awarded funds to six projects that ranged from a point-of-care device for early cancer detection to a mobile remote measurement technology that manages major anxiety and depression disorders. One of those six projects, executed in 2021, was “Fighting Online COVID-19 Misinformation in Latin America,” led by David G. Rand (Erwin H. Schell Professor; Professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT; Director of the Applied Cooperation Team).

The project is particularly relevant to the MSLAO’s goal of promoting long-term collaboration around its three areas of focus (sustainability, innovation and entrepreneurship, and productivity and growth) as Latin America shifts toward knowledge work and away from economies based on natural resources. Rand’s research focuses primarily on understanding online COVID-19 misinformation and the psychology behind it, as well as working to increase human cooperation.

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Outside of the United States, there aren’t as many fact-checking organizations, and they’re not scalable for the massive amounts of misinformation that exist.

With co-authors at MIT and the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics in Aguascalientes, Mexico, Rand took a global perspective on misinformation— working to understand why people shared misinformation and what to do to reduce it—and included Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico in their study. The research team recruited 2,000 social media users in each of 16 countries to complete an online survey that tested their ability to spot misinformation and the likelihood to share it online.

The participants from Argentina and Mexico scored similarly to their U.S. counterparts in identifying true versus false headlines, with Brazil performing better. From there, the researchers analyzed the factors that determined participants’ behavior and were able to draw conclusions about that performance.

Participants who had a stronger pro-democratic stance performed better on the survey, for example. Generally speaking, participants were less discerning when it came to sharing on social media—although those from all three Latin American countries had a smaller disconnect than those from other countries.

What we need is many different tools in the anti-misinformation toolkit.

David G. Rand, Erwin H. Schell Professor

Potential interventions explored by the researchers were crowd-sourced factchecking and detection, nudging people to focus on accuracy in sharing on social media, and providing digital literacy tips. “None of these approaches is a silver bullet that’s going to completely solve the problem,” said Rand. “What we need is many different tools in the anti-misinformation toolkit.”

The 2021 MSLAO seed funding for projects to be conducted in 2022 continues to support relevant, cutting-edge research, from the unequal socioeconomic impact of COVID-19 in Mexico to climate change and mining in Chile.

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Economist Receives Inaugural Miriam Pozen Prize Stanley Fischer, PhD ’69, is a world-renowned economist. Among other achievements, Fischer shaped financial policy as the vice chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, and governor of the Bank of Israel. His ties to the Institute are strong: Between 1977 and 1988, he was a professor of economics doing groundbreaking work in economic theory. Now, he’s also the first recipient of the Miriam Pozen Prize: $200,000 awarded every two years, recognizing outstanding contributions to research or practice in financial policy.

Deborah J. Lucas (Sloan Distinguished Professor of Finance; Director of the MIT Golub Center for Finance and Policy) said, “Both in theory and practice, Dr. Fischer’s career has greatly improved financial policy, bringing both scholarship and compassion to the challenging issues that affect the economy, with impacts that ranged from groundbreaking works in economic theory to teaching and mentoring a generation of scholars and practitioners.”

Fischer has had a great influence over the economics profession. He co-authored the popular textbooks, Macroeconomics, Lectures on Macroeconomics, and Economics, and authored the paper, “Long-Term Contracts, Rational Expectations, and the Optimal Money Supply Rule.” He also has advised prominent financial leaders, including Former Chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke, PhD ’79.

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At the inaugural Miriam Pozen Prize Address in 2021, Fischer said, “It would be difficult to overstate the role that MIT has played in my life and the life of my family. The genesis of my interest in economics came when as a high school student in South Africa, one of my friends started telling me about Paul Samuelson’s economics textbook. It was the fifth edition, and it was a big part of the reason I later chose MIT as the place to get a PhD.” Samuelson, Institute Professor Emeritus and Nobel Laureate, later served as a mentor to Fischer.

Announced by the MIT Golub Center for Finance and Policy (GCFP) in 2020, the Miriam Pozen Prize is MIT Sloan’s first-ever prize in financial policy, and helps further the GCFP’s mission for “the improved evaluation and management of government financial institutions, regulation of financial markets and institutions, and measurement and management of risk.”

A distinguished panel of judges determined the winner. Co-chaired by Lucas and Robert C. Merton, PhD ’70 (School of Management Distinguished Professor of Finance), the panel included Mohamed A. El-Erian, Kristin J. Forbes, PhD ’98 (Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Professor of Management and Global Economics), Ronald P. O’Hanley, Henry M. Paulson, Jr., Raghuram R. Rajan, PhD ’91, and Robert Zoellick.

The Prize is in remembrance of Miriam Pozen, late mother to former vice chair of Fidelity Investments Robert C. Pozen (Senior Lecturer, Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management). At the time of the announcement, Pozen said, “Having held senior positions in academia, government, and business, Dr. Fischer embodies the kind of engagement in all aspects of financial policy that is needed if we are to continue integrating theory and practice in this field.”

Having held senior positions in academia, government, and business, Dr. Fischer embodies the kind of engagement in all aspects of financial policy that is needed if we are to continue integrating theory and practice in this field.

Robert C. Pozen, Senior Lecturer, Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management

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TEACHING, LEARNING, AND LIVING

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Learning by doing: There’s no better teacher than hands-on experience. MIT’s history of experimentation and discovery continues into the present. From day one, MIT Sloan students are encouraged both formally and informally to collaborate with industry leaders, experts across disciplines, alumni, and partners. Similarly, opening our “global doors” means more opportunities to foster collaboration and reach people around the world. Finding practical solutions to management challenges has never been more important. Even in the most challenging of circumstances, MIT Sloan’s focus on “learning by doing” remains as strong as ever.

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JANELLE HESLOP

Making the Next Generation of Manufacturing It’s one of the most important, time-sensitive questions facing businesses today.

How do you make and sell products that lead to business profitability—without further damaging the environment? Janelle Heslop, LGO ’19, didn’t just tackle this in her graduate thesis at MIT. She’s planning on making a career out of it.

It started with youthful passion: Heslop has been vocal about protecting the environment since she was a middle school junior docent at the Hudson River Museum. She has matched her passion with expertise, first at environmental consulting firm GreenOrder, where she advised companies like General Electric, and then at Veolia, the world’s largest environmental services firm. There, she worked with organizations like the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, saving them $150 million and bringing tech innovation to civil servants.

Heslop decided to pursue continuing education to effect change by furthering her technical engineering education and environmental leadership—spurred on by her father, who argued that she could make a greater impact from within industry instead of outside it. So, she decided to participate in the MIT Leaders for Global Operations (LGO) program, earning a dual master’s degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering and an MBA from MIT Sloan. Her fellowship was endowed by a fellow LGO alumnus, Augustus “Gus” O. Tai, LGO ’91.

The program includes a six-month internship with an LGO partner; Heslop worked with biotech company Amgen to help them improve their drug manufacturing

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process. The company was interested in understanding the long-term operational, economic, and environmental impacts of their manufacturing systems and was receptive to her insights and methodologies. As a part of this work, her thesis aimed to help bring about “the next generation of manufacturing.”

She didn’t stop there: While at MIT, Heslop co-directed the MIT Water Innovation Prize in 2019, and was VP of marketing for the MIT Water Club and a member of the Executive Team for the 2017 MIT Water Summit. As a student and young alumna, she co-founded LGO’s Underrepresented Minority (URM) Alumni Group; the participants hope to create a pipeline of diverse talent.

“We are just starting on this journey, but have an amazing group of LGO URM alumni executives who are acting as advisors to us and helping us build pipelines into organizations,” she said in a 2022 MIT News article.

I don’t dream about jobs. I dream about impact.

I want to manage, run, and lead projects that are having a meaningful impact in the world, preparing it for future challenges like climate change, and leveraging emerging ideas and innovation to create a healthier, more equitable society.

Janelle Heslop, LGO ‘19

After graduating, Heslop continued her work at Amgen as a senior manager of strategic planning and operations. The company put her at the head of a team determining where their next $1 billion manufacturing facilities would be located.

While completing the project, she found her education to be so helpful. “I often visited my notes on location strategy frameworks from the Operations Strategy class that I took with the executive director of LGO!” she said.

“I don’t dream about jobs. I dream about impact,” Heslop explained. “I want to manage, run, and lead projects that are having a meaningful impact in the world, preparing it for future challenges like climate change, and leveraging emerging ideas and innovation to create a healthier, more equitable society.”

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What’s the Problem with Problem-Solving?

“What problem are you trying to solve?”

It sounds like such a simple question. Yet, when a business or group wants to change something, it’s probably the most critical starting point—and one of the toughest things to get right. Leaders don’t engage an active problem-solving mindset often enough. They often jump straight to potential solutions or set a nebulous goal like “We need to increase sales.” Or, they forego collaboration in favor of executive decision-making.

But it doesn’t have to be this way, explains Nelson P. Repenning, PhD ’96 (Associate Dean of Leadership and Special Projects; School of Management Distinguished Professor of System Dynamics and Organization Studies; Faculty Director, MIT Leadership Center).

At the MIT Leadership Center, Repenning and his team aim to enable future leaders to solve the world’s toughest problems. “Leaders who want to be more successful need to create clear problem statements that are both concrete and quantifiable, focusing on the issues that really matter and tackling them effectively,” he says.

To do this, it’s important to understand two methods the brain uses to solve problems— automatic processing and conscious processing—and how they apply. Conscious processing is, as the name implies, the slow, conscious process of working out a problem.

Automatic processing occurs in the background, pattern matching to previous problems and experiences. Both are essential for problem-solving, but formulating a problem statement and working to execute it make critical use of one’s conscious processing.

As outlined in a 2017 MIT Sloan Management Review article with research collaborators Don Kieffer (Senior Lecturer, Operations Management) and Dr. Todd Astor, EMBA ’15, a problem statement connects something important in the organization to a concrete goal, articulates the difference between the current situation and the goal, makes the problem and solution quantifiable, has a realistic scope, and remains neutral in terms of solutions.

Then, through structured problem-solving that takes hypotheses and tests them with experimentation, leaders can solve the world’s toughest problems.

What does a good problem statement look like? “We look for three key elements,” explains Repenning. “There needs to be a clear target—a desired state; a clear view of the current state; and a clear gap between them. Research in psychology suggests that it’s the gap that is the key to change. For example, we want to deliver new products in three months; we’re doing it in six months, so we’ve got to cut it by three months.”

At MIT Sloan, students tend to lead with problem-solving first. While they may not conceive of themselves as leaders foremost, their passion for finding solutions makes them excellent problem solvers. “It’s this type of thinking that unlocks the innovation in organizations and makes this type of problem-solving so effective,” says Repenning.

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Leaders who want to be more successful need to create clear problem statements that are both concrete and quantifiable, focusing on the issues that really matter and tackling them effectively.

Nelson P. Repenning, PhD ’96, Associate Dean of Leadership and Special Projects

NELSON P. REPENNING

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Hands-on with Leading Thai Companies The Summer Thai Lab is now in its seventh year. Originally funded for five years in 2015 and renewed for another five in 2020, it’s an opportunity for MIT students with strong academics and global backgrounds to work with leading Thai companies in an MIT Action Learning Lab format. In addition to being an unprecedented opportunity to work with experts in the field, Summer Thai Lab serves as an opportunity to deepen and broaden students’ international business experience, and is made possible by Bangkok Bank and its president, Khun Chartsiri Sophonpanich, SM ’83, SM ’84.

In 2021, the program saw four projects with leading Thai companies staffed with students from MIT Sloan and the Sasin School of Management in Bangkok. The projects took place over six weeks in June and July. By necessity, the program was hybrid due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, the experience was as immersive and hands-on as possible, even with limitations, and the results continue to be impressive.

One MIT affiliate, who was also the founder and CEO of a global tech business, tasked one of the teams with conducting market, competitor, customer, and regulator research on a digital fintech product expanding in Southeast Asia. The team laid out a full roadmap for implementation next steps and identified markets, distribution channels, and target industries critical for expansion.

Another home-delivery company launched an aggregator platform to make delivery easier in Southeast Asia. They asked the team to develop a strategy for the app’s future.

The team provided a full implementation roadmap, including a branding strategy, user experience, loyalty program, and quality recommendations.

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A regional network working with corporations and agencies across Asia had a goal of driving significant GDP for Thailand and Southeast Asia. As they were developing a B2B management education platform, the Summer Thai Lab team was brought in to develop a product strategy, working closely with the head of strategy and investment. The team came up with a new business model and a roadmap schedule for implementation.

One of the companies, which is based in Singapore and focused on Southeast Asia, operates a leading e-commerce platform. To accommodate a drastic rise in usage, the student team was tasked with developing a nationwide service point network for first-mile logistics. Using extensive research, they developed a full go-to-market strategy for nine provinces.

Building on the success of the 2021 program and as a preliminary plan for 2022, coordinators hope to expand capacity, subject to student demand. Additionally— depending on the global conditions—this may also mean a return to in-person activities. The onsite work and interpersonal collaboration that come with it are at the heart of the Summer Thai Lab’s efficacy.

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This campaign gave us opportunities to prepare for what’s next for MIT Sloan. It helped us to further refine our mission as a school and set aspirational goals. It helped us make a better world our business. And I hope that through the stories in this publication, you are able to see some of the many ways in which that has come to fruition. In the years to come, it is my belief that we will continue to take up this call to make a better world our business, because if MIT Sloan does not do it, then who will?

MIT Sloan is unique in that there is no other place as intent on recruiting the students, faculty, staff, and researchers who are not just going to change the world—they are already doing it. The important research happening at MIT Sloan has implications in every arena, from financial engineering to food safety to climate and energy. The school is helping students develop into the principled, innovative, inclusive leaders the future needs; the leaders who will change the world for the better through the companies they start, the organizations where they work, the people they hire, and the ideas they generate.

As we look to the future of management education at MIT Sloan, I know we have you to thank for where we are today, and for where we are headed. And as we continue to pursue a better world, to ask what we can do, and do it, I know there is no limit to what MIT Sloan can achieve with the support of this community. Thank you for being a part of it—today, and tomorrow.

David Schmittlein John C Head III Dean MIT Sloan School of Management

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A BETTER WORLD IN THE MAKING

A Better World in the Making MIT Sloan Office of External Relations 77 Massachusetts Avenue, E60-200 Cambridge, MA 02139