On Principle

In 2009, nobody wanted Jill Castilla in Edmond, Oklahoma, much less inside the halls of its century-old community institution, Citizens Bank—nobody except her stepfather. The third-generation Citizens Bank-er had coaxed her to come in the midst of a Federal Reserve examination underway at the bank.  Though she’d arrived at the bank without a title, she got to work, living in her stepfather’s house...

How do you honor the past while planning for the future? In a business that relies on goodwill from customers—indeed, members —whose voices count most when a massive shock threatens to bury the business? How do you balance the pull of tradition, the weight of history, and the need to look forward and innovate? These questions and hundreds of others confronted Angel Likens in February 2017, when sh...

Berto and Ivan Garcia are the co-founders of what has become a St. Louis real estate powerhouse. Garcia Properties is a vertically integrated firm with divisions in construction, property management, buying and selling property, financing and insurance. But just two years into its existence, the company nearly died. How much risk is acceptable when you’re trying to start something new? And while w...

A civic crisis rooted in racial inequity. A chance visit to an Atlanta retail attraction. A commercial developer persuaded to step outside his own comfort zone. Three events converged in 2015 that put in motion a $230 million redevelopment in St. Louis’s urban core—an effort that launched like a cannonball from Steve Smith’s imagination but came within a hair’s breadth of dying. In this episode of...

On Memorial Day 2020, police in Minneapolis murdered a Black man during a routine traffic stop. In the context of that event, which sparked a deeper national reckoning on issues of racial equity and justice, business leaders across the nation grappled with their own response. How should they support workers who were shaken by the tragedy and moved to act? How would they confront their own company’...

As the curtain rises for this episode, we meet Mike Isaacson, tapped in 2011 to become the new executive producer and artistic director for The Muny. Yes, The Muny, the 103-year-old outdoor amphitheater in St. Louis’ Forest Park, a massive venue renowned worldwide for drawing audiences to professionally produced musical theater. Cherished as one of the city’s crown jewels, The Muny has drawn stars...

In 2003, Alaina Maciá arrived at  MTM , the St. Louis-based broker of non-emergency medical transportation services, to find a company on the verge of explosive growth. By 2005, she was MTM’s CEO, and since that time the company has rocketed from $30 million to nearly $700 million in revenue, with clients and customers nationwide. A nagging concern she noticed as she began, however, was the stable...

How do you recover from a multimillion-dollar mistake while your company is expanding and your technology is ailing? How do you capitalize on unusual sources of inspiration? When is a handshake deal ever good enough? How do you plan strategy during a crisis? These are some of the questions we explore, thanks to the business leaders who share their stories in season two of On Principle.  We’ll have...

In our first-season On Principle episode with Dave Ciesinksi, CEO of Lancaster Colony food brands, we also spoke to Anjan Thakor, Olin’s John E. Simon Professor of Finance. He had consulted with Lancaster Colony as its leaders sought to drive deeper employee engagement—and better results. Thakor, along with collaborating researcher Robert Quinn from the University of Michigan, has done pioneering...

In our first-season On Principle episode with Nina Leigh Krueger , CEO of Nestle Purina PetCare for the Americas, we also spoke to Anne Marie Knott, Olin’s Robert and Barbara Frick Professor of Business. Her research focuses on questions around innovation, R&D and entrepreneurship. We talked to her about corporate innovation and how companies know they’re seeing a return on their innovation dollar...

In a white paper published in June 2021, WashU Olin’s Professor Stuart Bunderson and Jesse Wolfersberger, CEO and cofounder of Vrity, outlined a cross-section of consumer attitudes about how they relate to brands that outwardly articulate their values. Among their findings: Consumers said they will vote with their wallets when people value-align with a brand. They’ll drive farther, dig deeper, spe...

David Karandish is, by any standard, a massively successful entrepreneur. His most noteworthy transaction is the sale of Answers.com for $960 million—a “rounded unicorn,” he says, using startup shorthand for a billion-dollar deal. But that success was hard-fought and made possible by a litany of failures and one unexpected disaster. Meanwhile, those failures—and that one big success—paved the way...

For most of her career with Nestlé Purina PetCare, Nina Leigh Krueger had worked on the pet nutrition side of the business. When the WashU Olin alumna joined the company’s cat litter group to lead its marketing, she found she was a fish out of water—and facing a challenge with a high sales goal in a stagnating business. Leadership, questioning whether or not to exit the business, challenged her to...

As the factory manager gave David A. Ciesinski, CEO of Lancaster Colony food brands, a tour of the facility, he led the company’s top executive into a locker room with collapsing ceiling tiles and rusted fixtures. “Is this befitting of a ‘better food company’?” the manager politely asked, reflecting the company’s slogan. That was one of many moments that drove home for Ciesinski that his company c...

Olin alumnus Jason Wang, BSBA ’09, owns a popular chain of restaurants in New York City, Xi’an Famous Foods. In the summer of 2020, one of his employees was punched in the face while she headed home on the subway, cutting her lip and bloodying her nose. Later, another was punched in the face on the way to work in the morning. The assailant had followed him off the train, looking for an opportunity...

In the summer of 2017, a data breach occurred at Atlanta-based credit bureau Equifax affecting the records of more than 140 million consumers in the United States. The company announced the incursion in September, arguably one of the largest such breaches in history at the time, giving hackers access to private information—names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, credit card numbers, even d...

Lisa Hu, PMBA ’16, failed at least 40 times before succeeding. It’s as simple as that. The founder of Lux and Nyx, maker of handbags designed for “jet-setter luxury and boardroom quality,” had the idea in mind, and worked on it while ascending the corporate ladder. Yet she failed over and over to find the right manufacturer to execute the vision she had in her mind. She tried doing it herself. She...

On October 28, 2011, the St. Louis Cardinals completed a comeback from a 2-3 deficit to win their 11th World Series championship. It was a thrilling series that twice saw Cardinal hitters score clutch runs with the team a single strike away from elimination. Three days later, the reality of the team’s future resumed for John Mozeliak, the Cardinals’ president of baseball operations. Manager Tony L...

On March 18, 2020, or thereabouts, the world turned upside down. With dire news around the spread of the deadly coronavirus came staggering uncertainty for business leaders. How should they respond? Among restaurateurs, owners were forced to make incredibly consequential decisions in the snap of a finger. They had to look into the fog and consider how long this new world would last. Pivoting opera...

How do you put a price tag on a hall-of-fame ballplayer? How do you decide to throw away one career dream for another one? How do you survive an existential crisis in your business? The debut season of On Principle puts you behind the scenes for these decisions and more. We interview leaders of startups and C-suite executives of major corporations. We talk to the president of baseball operations f...