Bigger ideas, better lives, and not just bigger bucks

“Just follow the money.” As a scientist in a business school, I’ve heard countless variations of that famous quote from “All the President’s Men.” They pop up in both teaching and research venues.

I’ve seared into my gray matter the first time I taught leadership principles to MBAs (at an unnamed university). Three young men sat together in the back row of my classroom — arms folded, eyes rolling, mouths grimacing. They were the nucleus of the PE bros that year. They couldn’t fathom why they, the visible hands of Adam Smith, had to take a “soft skills” course (ahem, “durable skills”). Losing his last iota of patience, one of them blurted, “Why should I care about any of this **** if it doesn’t make me more money?”

More money indeed. They would have mainlined money if they could. Lawdy, greed … is good.

Academic discussions are rife with more subtle parallels. At McCombs, we have internationally renowned research teams that forensically and literally follow the money. Sometimes though, the money connection manifests as nodding approval of the bottom-line effects of some investigation or inquiry; the research squarely addresses boosting a revenue numerator or busting an expense denominator. Other times, it’s a headshaking form of disapproval and a verbal undermining of the worthiness of a study topic; the research doesn’t clearly attend to either part of the holy ratio above. It’s a way of pointing out that the scholarship at hand doesn’t satisfactorily answer the interrogator’s evergreen “so what?” question. Because — as the implication soundlessly shouts — there aren’t discernible dollar signs attached to the $dependent variable$.

In many ways, this is supremely logical. “Money be (ever)green” (strong adult language warning and Oscar-winning actor alert if you click). Business is consensually defined at the collective level as an organized activity wherein goods or services are provided to make a profit, or at the individual level as the practice of making one’s living by engaging in such commerce.

But business school research goes leagues beyond the economic thread in those definitions. The Big Ideas^tm we study don’t have to squeeze or spread margins. They might deal with expanding educational attainment, reducing political conflict, boosting recycling programs, executing better medical treatment, or heightening happiness – all in organizational or market contexts. We’re delighted to have faculty members in McCombs who publish their scholarship in Science, Nature, and PNAS. Of course, we study the activities, provisions, practices, livelihoods, and yes, the profits in that definition of business. What binds everything together for our school is that they take place in and around the contexts where parties are working together to achieve mutual goals.

Now, when I’m asked how something I study will help make more money, I turn the question around. Why do you want to make more money? Inevitably, the answer resolves toward “to make my life … my family’s life … my friends’ lives … or other people’s lives better.” We’re very good at that, and it’s something to be celebrated. In business school research, we enhance the experienced value in lives — even when it’s not all about the Benjamins.

Possible tensions between how AI might (a) benefit the Benjamins ratio versus (b) deteriorate the interpersonal relationships that are the foundational fabric of learning in organizations, are the focus of our latest “I in AI” column, from Ed Anderson. In an interesting way, Metin Sengul (“What’s the Big Idea”) writes about a related notion in his research at the firm level. Pursuing multiple goals at once doesn’t need to create tensions or trade-offs. Smart choices about organizational design can boost the Benjamins while improving other aspects of performance at the same time.