On Principle

On a mid-May afternoon in 2020, Lauren Kriegler sat in her home office and scribbled a warning to her young kids—who were in the thick of remote learning—on a Post-It Note and stuck it to her office door: “Important call. Do not come in!” For five years at Alaska Airlines, Kriegler had led a massive project to overhaul the uniforms provided to its 20,000+ frontline employees—five years building a...

In the heating-and-cooling industry, they’re calling it “The Great Consolidation” as the pace of company acquisitions has risen from about 20 in 2011 to 120 a year by 2019. Meanwhile, The Great Consolidation is slamming head-first into the pandemic-born Great Resignation, as firms battle for a share of the scarce pool of talent on the market. That’s the environment Chris Hoffmann has faced since 2...

Since 1999, the digital agency that Brian Williams and his brother cofounded has weathered—often just barely—some tough blows to the economy. There was the bursting of the dot-com bubble. Then there was 9/11. Then, the global financial crisis of 2008. In fact, that last shock compelled Williams to create a formal business development function at Viget—a team that would market the firm, demonstrate...

This story is not really about the first pivotal moment Camryn Okere navigated. That’s the moment when the pandemic upended plans for a college internship and shuttered a business she had grown to love. In that moment, she decided to gather some mentors and some fellow students across a few universities to create a boutique consulting firm serving small community businesses—and providing experienc...

In the wake of the global pandemic, some of the loudest voices in corporate America proclaimed the end of work as we know it. Lockdown, it seemed, had proven workers could be productive from home. Work-from-home came into vogue. We’d never have to commute to the office again, some suggested. But as pandemic-era restrictions eased in mid-2021, Steve Degnan, then chief human resources officer for Ne...

In early March 2022, the skies over Irpin, Ukraine, sizzled with Russian missiles and thundered with mortar shells. Under those skies in the first days of Russia’s aggression, the lead software developer for a Chicago-based startup huddled in his parent’s basement when the air raid sirens sounded. For a substantial investment of thousands of dollars, the leadership at that startup—Phenix Real Time...

Christine Chang recalls the moment in the back seat of a cab, heading across Manhattan to her next appointment. She and her cofounder, Sarah Lee, finally had to have a tough conversation about the future of their beauty business Glow Recipe. The pair had originally built a successful business focused on curating Korean beauty products produced by other manufacturers. A business that had generated...

Akeem Shannon was stressed. In three weeks, his Shark Tank episode would air, the episode where he’d pitch Flipstik—a novel cellphone attachment that doubles as a kickstand and a sticky wall mount. He knew one thing with absolute certainty: Whether or not the “sharks” on the popular ABC-TV show offered him a deal, he was going to sell some Flipstiks. Probably a lot of them. And he didn’t have any....

At the start of the day, Lisa Baron and her board of trustees gathered for the fifth strategic planning cycle in the 20-year history of Memory Care Home Solutions, the nonprofit Baron founded to serve families with Alzheimer’s patients. How would they expand? How would they diversify their revenue sources? How would they create sustainable long-term earnings? But after dinner, at the end of the da...

The voices in today's bonus episode may be familiar to On Principle listeners. They're voices from previous guests, sharing stories about some major “Oh, shoot!” moments they confronted in their businesses. They came together for a special "On Principle Live!" event at WashU Olin Business School on September 1, 2022, called "Now What?" The event was the first of our Leadership Perspectives events...

When this month's guest and I originally talked, she remembered the toilet paper woes in the early days of the pandemic as a turning point for consumers, a time when supply chains entered the common lexicon. We decided to take a deeper dive into the topic by going further into that original interview from May 2022. Credits This podcast is a production of Washington University in St. Louis’ Olin Bu...

Our first season three bonus episode looks back at my conversation with Erik Dane, an associate professor of organizational behavior at WashU Olin Business School. We originally spoke for our episode called “Warrior Heart, No Stigma" featuring Gen. Mike Minihan. Today, we're revisiting Erik's comments about how mindfulness and its perceived opposite, mind-wandering, are valuable tools in the workp...

Arguably, the four consultants in our story have already weathered their share of pivotal moments. They’ve navigated a full-time MBA program, coursework across three continents in six weeks and a global pandemic halfway through their studies. Indeed, all that may have prepared them for the professional path they’ve taken. All four work full-time as consultants. They’re also co-founders of  Oystar...

Kendra Kelly wryly refers to it as “her old friend.” She’s an accomplished junior executive with years of marketing experience. She served as a field organizer for the Obama presidential campaign. She led WashU Olin’s graduate student body as its president and was elected its graduation speaker. Yet a year after joining L'Oréal, where she serves as chief of staff for the president of the luxury di...

Eighteen whiskey producers comprise the famed  Kentucky Bourbon Trail , something of a mecca for bourbon aficionados. They come to wander the trail and sample each distillery’s golden recipe—a guarded combination of grain types and grinds, cooking times and temperatures, yeast blends and finishing processes borne from generations of tradition and training. Among the trail’s newest stops:  Bardstow...

If you read the website for Jimmy Sansone’s company, he doesn’t beat around the bush: He hated working in finance—a career he pursued for five years after earning his business degree from WashU. But then, there was that shirt … Yes, Sansone made a shirt. A shirt he loved. A shirt he thought everyone would love. He called it the Normal Shirt. And in 2015 he quit his finance job, moved into his pare...

Gen. Mike Minihan will be the first to tell you: The United States loses a staggering number of veterans or servicemembers to suicide every month. Indeed,  a 2021 report pegged the number at 30,177 suicides among military personnel and veterans since 9/11. That’s about 127 a month. And it’s more than have died in military operations in that time—by a lot. As Minihan put it, traditional approaches...

Fake it till you make it. Talk the talk before you can walk the walk. We hear it all the time, and that’s where Russ Flicker was in 2009. Russ left the Blackstone Group to join Ian Schrager Company as its chief investment officer but “irreconcilable differences” compelled him to leave only months after joining to strike out on his own—in the midst of the worst global economic crisis in decades—wit...

In March 2013, the Normandy School District’s board hired Ty McNichols as its superintendent. By January 2015, McNichols was gone, resigned from the post after gaining what had been a career ambition—to lead a school district. In the course of those 22 months, McNichol ran into a buzzsaw of state and local politics, financial crisis, plummeting morale, personal attacks and lightly veiled racism as...

Turns out, it’s hard to differentiate one cow from another—harder than you might have thought, in any case. And that idea was at the core of the company Mark Pydynowski formed, and the technology his firm was developing. Investors seemed excited about his cow-identifying technology. Government regulators seemed excited. Then, some of the reality started to set in. The tech was reliable in a lab, b...

When her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer 11 years ago, Lauren Herring jumped in to help with projects and lead the global expansion for IMPACT Group—the firm her mother had launched in 1988. In 2007, Herring led the work of incorporating an acquisition target of the company, an outplacement firm that doubled the company’s size. Two years later, she took over as the company’s CEO — right af...

Something you never saw coming … a fire, a financial crisis, a pandemic. Some business challenges you can anticipate, while others come out of the blue. How do you grapple with the unexpected? What’s your next move after the floor caves in? This panel discussion features four business leaders who have shared their stories on WashU Olin’s On Principle podcast. Join us to hear them talk about their...

Our second season two bonus episode looks back at my conversation with Trish Gorman, a professor of practice in strategy at Olin Business School. We originally spoke for our first season two episode called “The $5 Million Mistake,” and at the time, Trish was deeply involved in planning Olin’s new online MBA program. Today, we’re revisiting her remarks about what business strategy means to her, how...

When we first talked to WashU Olin finance professor Tim Solberg in October 2021, we sought his input for our season 2 On Principle episode “The Inspiration.” Our focus was on real estate developer Steve Smith and the winding path behind City Foundry, his retail and commercial development in midtown St. Louis. In the course of our conversation, we learned how Solberg was bitten by inspiration for...

In 2014, one of his coffee shops failed—the one on St. Louis’ underserved north side. Some of the workers he held over after acquiring his coffee brand were sabotaging customer relationships. He couldn’t get bank loans. Checks were bouncing. Advisors pushed him to quit. Don’t throw good money after bad, they said. But Jason Wilson, owner of Northwest Coffee Roasting Company, decided he had to exis...