Robert Carraway

Speaker A: Welcome to another episode of the Stakeholder Podcast. I'm Ed Freeman. Your host. Ben Freeman is the producer. Today we have a guest, uh, who's, uh, a friend for the 40 years I've been at Darden and, uh, sat until last year in the office next door. Professor, uh, Robert Carraway. Robert is the, um, Elianis Distinguished Associate Professor Emeritus of Business Administration, uh, here, uh, at Darden. Robert, welcome to the Pond Podcast. Good to have a chance to, uh, talk. To talk with you.

Speaker B: Thank you. Look, it's fun to have another Zoom meeting after being retired for a year. I've sort of gotten away from Zoom

Speaker A: meetings, so I look forward to that. Um, uh, look, you're, uh. I mean, we have a lot in common. We're both from small towns, uh, me and Georgia, you from. In North Carolina. And yet we both end up as a professor at a kind of top business school. How did you get here? What was the road like? Did you always want to be a professor since you were a wee lad, or, uh, what happened?

Speaker B: Uh, and, uh, I was clueless. All of this talk, all of this talk about planning. Uh, I can certainly, in hindsight, look back and say, oh, yeah, see how I planned this? But the reality is that was nothing for me. I graduated from college with a degree in math and no idea what I wanted to do, and so became an assistant basketball coach with a friend of mine at a nearby high school, um, and in eastern North Carolina. Um, and I often tell the story about, uh, that we actually inherited a team that had lost 36 consecutive games.

Speaker A: Oh, my gosh.

Speaker B: So it's a great situation, though, right? You can only get better.

Speaker A: You're not going to.

Speaker B: Yeah. The very. The very first game of the season is a home game, and it's late in the game and the score is tied. The excitement in the building is palpable. So we call timeout, and the head coach and I, we huddle up to decide what are we going to tell the players. And I immediately began to argue for a risky strategy. I think some kind of press or something. And, uh, I concluded my argument with, hey, Coach, no guts, no glory. And without missing a beat, he looked at me and said, coach, no brains, no job. So we did what he wanted and we won the game. But I often reflect back on that. About that is sort of my fascination, um, from a research standpoint, is this balancing act. Yeah, between, you know, your. And, you know, many people have looked at this between your. Your rational self and your intuitive self. And, uh, how do you manage those Two things. So I did that for three years, taught high school, went back to get an mba, and in the first year my MBA took a course in quantitative methods applied to businesses, and absolutely fell in love with it. I had known for a long time I wasn't a mathematician, but I just love the application of it where you're working with people. Um, and it was right then and there I decided to go ahead and get my PhD. Not even planning to go into academia. I told you there was no planning here. I was going to go into the private sector because I really wanted to try this stuff out. Um, ah, and in fact, my final decision came down between Darden and Bell Labs, which Bell Labs at the time was the place to go if you wanted to practice operations research and management science. Um, and I only visited Darden because a former professor of mine who was visiting there at the time said, they have an opening in this area, you should come talk to them. And so I really did it out of favor, uh, to him. But by the end of spending a day here, I knew. I called my wife that evening and said, this is where I want to be. This seems like a perfect fit for me. Um, and 40 years later, I can honestly say, whatever else has happened in my life, my choice of profession and my choice of where I would, uh, do that profession, I've never regretted that. Yeah, and there was no planning. There was no planning.

Speaker A: Yeah, I had a kind of similar thing. I mean, you know, I think I was the only person in my town by the time I left who was going to get a PA. Gonna get a PhD. Well, my sisters did, but that was pretty much it. You know, I didn't really know what it was, but I knew I wanted to teach, uh, that, that I was pretty sure if I couldn't place be the shortstop for the Yankees, I wanted to teach. And, uh, I learned around the age of 18 that I was not going to be the shortstop for the 80s

Speaker B: because, well, it fairly said, though, Derek Jeter knew he was not going to be a professor either.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's true. That's true. That's exactly, that's exactly right. And when, when I figured that out, I also figured out I wasn't going to play baseball in college because I couldn't really afford to. Um, and, um, ah, and so, you know, from there, same thing, degree in math, uh, and I, I was smart enough to switch to math and philosophy. And so, you know, I think my father said, I've said this before, uh, oh, you want to have trouble finding A job. They're kind of opening new philosophy factories all the time. You know, there's no, there's no, there's no problem with. Look, How does this technical, mathematical M. Area of operations, uh, research or decision analysis or management science or whatever it is, how is it really useful to real executives out making decisions in a world that doesn't have much precision, doesn't have much certainty?

Speaker B: Yeah, um, you know, you mentioned all the names for, for this stuff, and I'm sure you remember back in the 80s we had another name for it. We called it artificial intelligence.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right.

Speaker B: And so it's been amusing to me to see that whole thing kind of come back in style. And, uh, I'll admit there are a lot more powerful tools, primarily because there's so much more computing power available today than there was back then. But a lot of concepts are still the same. So, um, you know, I get asked this question a lot by students. Do companies actually do this?

Speaker A: Ah.

Speaker B: And certainly I have, I have many examples of companies that have done this. I also have many examples of companies that could have done it, maybe even developed the tools or the software, and it just collapsed because there was no one there. People didn't really appreciate what it could do and they didn't understand it well enough to trust it. And so, you know, I think there have been recent studies that just show the failure rate of projects in this whole AI space is very high.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: And it's not for technical reasons. It's high. It's for the, it's for the philosophical reasons. The human reasons.

Speaker A: Yeah, well. Well, that's a, that's a part of it because it's always seemed to me, which is this was, this was the area I was a, I was attracted to when, uh, I went to business school and I did this, you know, really formal dissertation in philosophy. Gave up, gave a talk for ORSA tims, or Operations Research Society Institute of Management Science. And uh, yeah, I was proven theorems and stuff had absolutely nothing to do with business really. Uh, it's around that time, because I didn't really know much about business. You know, the critique of this is that the assumptions about rationality, uh, you know, et cetera are so. They're very stylized and that's not who we are as human beings. And so this whole area leads business astray because it leads them away from a very complex humanity. What do you think about those? I mean, and so they see this as, you know, this critique sees it more as fantasy than reality.

Speaker B: Um, my experience working with actual companies is if you take the level of sophistication of these tools, and let's say A is the simplest and G is the most complex.

Speaker A: Yeah,

Speaker B: A is so much better a solution than not doing anything. You know, it's sort of like walking versus sitting on the couch. Yeah, it's better if you run than walk. But my gosh, you get so much benefit from just walking. Same thing with this. Taking some of the simplest tools or applying them simply. I, uh, I think that that works better, and I think it does because it's easier for people to understand them. Um, and, you know, from the philosophical or psychological standpoint, I think people don't realize just how powerful their experience base is and how no matter what you show them analytically, if it doesn't match up with their intuition and judgment, they find it very hard, uh, uh, to accept. Uh, I think in terms of getting better at applying these things, my experience is don't start with the technical. Start with what your experience is and, and try to recognize when you're encountering things that are different from what your experience is and really try to dig into that. Almost like therapy. Try to dig into why you believe that, and only then do you kind of bring up, well, here's an analysis that could actually possibly. You well know, my catchphrase has been what could change your mind? For years now. And that's it. Before you ever come up with something, think about what might actually impact you and what you decide to do. Um, and I found some success with that, uh, with folks, frankly.

Speaker A: Well, I think we've adopted that in our ethics course here. What could change your mind? Unfortunately, answering ethics is not very much, but people at least claim they're open minded, whether they are or not. Okay, now this is the technical part of the podcast, which I know you've been looking forward to.

Speaker B: Oh, uh, yeah.

Speaker A: What in the hell is dynamic programming? How did you get interested in it? I'm asking this question because when you were up for tenure, I was here and I think I was one of the few people in the school who could actually read your papers on dynamic programming, though I couldn't today for sure. So how did. Tell me about dynamic programming, if you can, and remember, you got a really lay audience here. Uh, and how did you get interested in that?

Speaker B: Well, let me start by saying a story about, um, when I was defending my dissertation, which was on this thing that I called generalized dynamic programming.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's right.

Speaker B: It happened to be my main professor, um, was out of the country at the time, so he was not able, uh, this was pre. Where you could zoom in on stuff. He wasn't able to be it by oral defense.

Speaker A: Oh my God.

Speaker B: And at some point during the oral defense, one of the other professors said, I sure wish such and such was here because I, I don't really understand what's going on here. And so I'm having to take his word that it's good stuff. So you're certainly not alone. To me, it's a really interesting story because dynamic, um, programming is simply a technique when you're faced with making a sequence of decisions and where the sequence of the decisions actually matters.

Speaker A: Uh-huh.

Speaker B: Um, uh, in what I would call conventional dynamic programming, you can frame the problem in such a way that the best way to accomplish a partial solution is actually the best way to eventually get to, to a total solution. So if you're thinking about driving from Greenville to Macon and, and you're, you know, you're going to go through Greenville, South Carolina.

Speaker A: Huh.

Speaker B: The best way to get to Greenville, South Carolina is going to be part of the best way to get from Greenville, North Carolina to Macon, Georgia.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And so that's traditional dynamic programming. The problem is if you now instead of just having a single criteria, such time, if you have multiple criteria. And uh, the example I can best think of is it is the only application I know people ever tried was the U.S. uh, Air Force back in the, um. Oh, uh, let's see, it was the. Oh, it was the original Persian, um, Gulf War. And uh, they had to track routes for pilots to fly in order to reach their target. So part of it was minimizing the number of miles, but another part of it was minimizing the chance they would get shot down, which is a multiplicative thing, not an additive thing, as you're going along paths. And so the main premise of dynamic programming is that. So it's possible that a partial solution might not be the best overall solution to the problem. And actually you'll appreciate this. I actually ended up reading a proof that a guy did where instead of having a total ordering at stages, and I'm sorry, I know I'm getting too tangled here. I do appreciate it. Uh, he said, well, he actually said, let's assume it's a total ordering of the different ways to get to Greenville, South Carolina. I was saying, well, what if it's not total? What if it's only a partial ordering? Yeah, what if, even though you can't say the best way to get Greenville to Greenville, South Carolina is necessarily the best way to get to Macon. Maybe there's only two or three ways to get to Greenville, South Carolina. That would be the best way to get to Macon. So if you can carve out and come up with those handful of ways to do it, then you could significantly reduce the size of the problem that you have to solve. I call that the generalized, um, dynamic programming. Uh, uh. I will always remember the first paper I submitted to Management Science. I got back two reviewers. Yeah, the first reviewer said, this is nothing but dynamic programming. I don't know why there's anything new here. The other guy says, this has nothing to do with dynamic programming. There's nothing here. And then I actually appealed to the associate editor and I said, I think this is just why you need to publish this paper. And they ended up doing it.

Speaker A: So, yeah, typically the editor says, uh, would you please fit, uh, your paper to apply to both reviewers? You know, contradict each other. I, I got one of those, I got one of those on a book, you know, that was, that was just exactly the opposite. And the editor said, okay, well, how are you gonna fix. Oh, I can't. I mean, there's a contradiction. So,

Speaker B: so I ran, I ran, I ran in. Shortly thereafter, I ran into a, I wrote an article based on some work a previous guy had done. Uh, um, where he made a mistake. Yeah, and Generalized Dynamic Program would have worked, but dynamic programming didn't. And someone else wrote in and just excoriated him because it didn't work. And I wrote a paper saying, well, here's how you could have made it work. At some point I actually reached out to talk to the professor who wrote the first paper. Yeah, he didn't think there was anything wrong with his first paper. Teachers said, no, what do you mean there's something wrong? There's nothing wrong with that. So I thought, okay, well, it's the same old. How do you get people, how do you get people to accept data and analysis when it doesn't sync up with.

Speaker A: Well, yeah, you know, we know the psychological studies that if I find disconfirming data of a, uh, particular belief of mine, it strengthens my belief. Now that doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense to me. But yeah, we certainly see that in the political world today.

Speaker B: Absolutely.

Speaker A: Kinds of disconfirming data for, for, for people's hypothesis. And yet they, they, they make up, you know, well, you can always tell a story, so you can always make up in a sum some assumption to Keep yourself whole until it just becomes, you know, Plato, Plato said, follow the argument wherever it leads. I think rather follow the argument till it becomes completely ridiculous. And that's unfortunately what we have today. Completely ridiculous. Our, our arguments, you know.

Speaker B: Well, and what I love happening in politics today is if you really can't, there's one story you can always fall back on which is. It's fake.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's right.

Speaker B: The data, the. Everything's fake. It's not real.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And you know what, Ed? If there's something that scares me about AI Way more than taking over the world.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: It's just going to be so easy to make fake stuff. And it is today so easy to make fake stuff. I think it really presents a challenge that, uh, it's going to be easier for people to stick to their beliefs.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Because you can come up, you can actually invent stuff that supports your, your belief.

Speaker A: So being open minded and thinking critically is going to be incredibly short supply. Uh, supply. Yeah. Just, just to put a exclamation point on that, we had a paper developing some scale for measuring stakeholder mindset. And uh, I think it was the second or third round. We, the, the paper gotten reviewed by the journals, I guess their methodology editor. And they said you must read paper X and you must do these steps that are in paper X. Right. And the only problem was paper X doesn't exist. Uh, Clear. Clearly whoever this was did it as a, you know, used an AI to, to, to, to review, uh, the, to referee the paper. And you know, they make stuff.

Speaker B: Well, yeah. And you know, even though I don't think it's widespread, our profession has unfortunately contributed to undermining our argument. Yeah, no, because they are actually what was a great example with, uh, my wife and I were talking the other night about some strain. Oh. It's how much sleep do you need at night? And someone's come along and said, you really only need six and a half or seven hours.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And I was telling her, you know, what's possible is that a hundred people did that test.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: At a 1% guaranteed rate. And so one of them found that. Yeah. Yeah. See, you don't need that much sleep.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And of course, what's the, what's the publication going to publish? Which of those. Not the 99 that say the same thing?

Speaker A: No, exactly. You know, yeah, that's, that's exactly right. Um, plus some of the stuff on that, it's always seemed to me, again, I don't, I don't know the math of it. But um, when someone says, you know, there's no statistical difference, uh, in this drug and, and ah, and ah, placebo, but maybe they didn't take into account the, the, the DNA of the folks there. So you have a class that says it's got to work for everybody, regardless of their DNA, regardless of their circumstance. Um, and that seems to me to be as much a fallacy as, as, as the 1 in 100 things here.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, I agree.

Speaker A: You know, it's one of those things that I try to tell the students. Look, you can, you can talk about getting the numbers and you can think about that as the numbers objective, but the truth is what's important is the story behind the number. You know, and I know you always did this when you were teaching here. Getting the students to appreciate not the number, I mean, yeah, you got to know how to do that, but getting to appreciate that they need to understand, to be critical of the story behind the number. The idea of profit isn't objective in any sense. It's about some kind of intersubjective agreement about what we can agree on. You want to invest in a company like Amazon for a while that was never profitable, uh, or you want to invest in a company that has one product and they don't have a replacement. And so they're making money but they're having to buy back shares because they don't have any ideas, you know, and it's, it's, it's you, you, you could look at that, the, at, at the profit table of each, or you could say, wait a minute, what's the underlying story here? And I'm afraid sometimes we've gone too far on making people facile with the numbers and getting the number and not far enough with getting them in terms of understanding, um, the underlying story. One of the things I liked about what we do here when we teach athletes with our DA colleagues, and I know you did this with us for years, is that we can really get at what the underlying story is here.

Speaker B: Right, Right. And uh, you know, in my, I mean there, I think there are two ways for me that I think about what you just said. One way is going forward, we're going to get better and better at not having to group people together in such a coarse way. We're going to be able to more and more narrow down the differences that might cause someone to react one way to a drug and someone else to react a different way. I do think we're, uh, we're on a path that, that's Going to get better and better.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: You know the other, yeah. The other thing that we used to say all the time is, you know what it is really important, um, to uh, to, to come up with an effective story. That's really, really important. The problem is there are many people who can come up, can communicate an effective story. I say for me the numbers about trying to do a better job of finding what's the right story to tell.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So it's important to tell the story. Yeah, it's important to tell it. But numbers can help you figure out is this real or is it not?

Speaker A: No, well, yeah, exactly. And that, that's the thing to look, the, the numbers are absolutely important. But. Right, but, but um. Imputing to them some kind of. Well, I just know the number that, that's all I need to know is, is.

Speaker B: Yeah. Well, and the other thing is, I love a quote I heard a while back, which is the plural of, of. Anecdote is not data. It's anecdotes.

Speaker A: It's anecdotes. So. Yeah, that's right. That's right. And, and the other thing which I found interesting, uh, is a distinction I would make between uh, data and evidence. In other words, there's a lot of stuff which you would say is not data, uh, but is evidence. Uh, if I have some experience with somebody, uh, that's evidence. It's not, it's not data in the sense of, you know, uh, all people's experience or something. But it is evident that it should count as well. You see this sort of thing in arguments. Uh, I know you've seen them since we've been in the same room where people are talking about a tenure candidates teaching. There's evidence and there's data. We get the data from the student evaluations, but we also. One of the things I love about Darden is we actually sit in, have, have, have, have people sit in on the class and give evidence for uh. Both of those things I think are, are important. So I think the world is stewing towards data.

Speaker B: Yes. Yep.

Speaker A: That's the, that's a problem with uh, so called big data.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Big data and little explanation.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Well, and it's, it's. I mean it's what AI does really well is it ignores the story. It just puts as many numbers well

Speaker A: and you get the end big enough. Everything's correlated.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: You know, uh, the issue is not that it's what's the kind of underlying causal mechanism here.

Speaker B: Yeah, you probably. I'm not going to say his name. But you would know. I remember a junior professor we had who really did not get good classroom numbers in his first couple of years. And then he turned around and got great ones until he got tenure.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And then they kind of went back down. He was a much better teacher once he got tenure and his numbers were lower.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, no, I've seen that many. I've seen that many times.

Speaker B: Yep. Uh, he was no longer catering. He was no longer spoon feeding people. He was actually challenging them.

Speaker A: That's right. And I think sometimes we err on the. Are you spoon feeding them or not to. To get good n numbers, you know? Right.

Speaker B: M. Right.

Speaker A: Look, you. You got the teaching bug the same way that, that. You know, how. How did being a high school math teacher help you teaching MBAs?

Speaker B: Well, I taught high school, and then I actually taught undergraduate college. And then I came to Darden to teach MBA students the case methodology. And what I often said was, when I got to Darden, it was back like the high school classroom again, where I had to try to tell people to shut up constantly.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Undergraduate college. No one said a word.

Speaker A: Nobody says anything. Right.

Speaker B: Exactly. Um, and so, at least from that standpoint, I think it, uh, helped, uh, me a lot.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: You know, I was not aware of really wanting to be a teacher. My mother was a teacher. I really wasn't aware of that. I knew it was something I did pretty well, but it was not something that was a, uh, obvious passion to me. But as I've gone along. Well, I can remember two stories. I remember when I came to Darden Vista, I sat in on a classroom of our colleague Sherwood Fry. And despite all the education I had had, I walked out of there thinking for the first time I've seen what education can really be like in a classroom. It was like the old Greek academy where the students would tell the. The faculty when they were finished.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Because the students were really engaged in owning the process. Um, so. Uh, yeah, so. So there. There is that. And, um. Oh, gosh, I'm blanking on the other. The other thing that I had. That's. That's one of the. That's one of the disadvantages of retiring Ed. If you're not careful, you got to do a lot of crossword puzzles.

Speaker A: It happens to me all. Ah, uh, uh, ah. Already I'm working puzzles every day, you know. Well, yeah, look, what were. What were some of the most memorable, uh, experiences in a classroom? Uh, you taught. Uh, you were here when I came here. I'm now the. You were the last person when you left last year. Now there's nobody here who was here when I, When I came.

Speaker B: So I joined. Yeah. Ah, Yeah.

Speaker A: I, I took over your position as official OG here. But think about all, all these years and there's thousands of students. Are there two or three, um, incidents that sort of stand out to you?

Speaker B: Yeah, I, I would say two. One humorous and one more serious. And, and the, the humorous one is, um, When I was coming up for tenure, the dean sat in my classroom.

Speaker A: Yeah. Ah.

Speaker B: And he was in the John Rosenblum at the time. And we were doing a case and I called on a student. I still remember his name and where he sat. I called on him and he started saying something completely wrong. Completely and totally wrong. Uh, halfway through, though, he suddenly realized that what he was saying was wrong.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And he said, but of course that's not possible, Professor Caraway, because of this and this, which is what makes you such a great instructor. So I.

Speaker A: That's great.

Speaker B: Good recovery. Good recovery, guy.

Speaker A: Very good. Um, we call those gate saves.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: That's a hockey game.

Speaker B: The other, the other one that just pops immediately to my. Well, no, I'm sorry. There are two more that are more serious. One is when we, uh, when spreadsheets first became popular and we began to teach some, um, simulations that you could add into spreadsheets. And I can remember one of our students who was working for a consumer, um, packaged goods firm. And they, they had, uh, interns from all over the country, the best quant schools. And at some point their partner called him in and said, you know, here's like, what I'd like to do. I think this simulation package is something that, you know, might be useful. The other folks said, oh, yeah, yeah, in class. They mentioned that in class. At some point the darn guy said, let's open the computer and get started. I can do this. So I, I love the fact that someone at one point called Darden Stealth. Quant school.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Because you don't think of it as a quant school.

Speaker A: No, you don't.

Speaker B: But it actually, the, the lessons people learn are really ingrained. And the other one is I was actually running an exec Ed program. I think I was in Singapore for that matter. And I suddenly got a text and, you know, one of the, one of the cases we teach in the first year is a case called George's T Shirts.

Speaker A: George's T Shirts.

Speaker B: Which is a very simple little thing, but I had someone sort of, I, ah, think emailed me out of the clear blue Sky. He'd been out for 10 years, and he said, hey, um, uh, Caraway. I think I've got a client now. He was a consultant. I've got a client now who's having a George's T shirts make. He's making a George's T shirts mistake. Now, you know, you and I know that it's. Mathematically, you could say it as, you know, the value of the sum of two is not necessarily equal to the sum of the values. I mean, there's a mathematical way to say it. He could have never said that, but, by God, he knew George's T shirts.

Speaker A: He knew the case.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: Well, I think that's. That both of these stories are a testament to the way that you guys that, you know, taught, um, uh, what, uh, we call DA now. Decision and analysis. I'll never forget sitting in on, uh, a class of Sherwood fries and having Sherwood march up the aisle, call on somebody and go, so, John, how many bears? I don't remember what the case was.

Speaker B: I do.

Speaker A: Yeah, I know you do. And, uh, But. But. But this guy, you know, uh, he. He was kind of guessing he'd done some stuff. But. And, and he'd go down the wrong road. And. And. And. And Sherwood would ask him enough questions or the other students would ask him enough questions. You were coming back, and I thought, man, how do you deal with stuff where, you know, the stuff they did was wrong? Now, teaching, a lot of people say stupid stuff, but I can't. I can't do it that way. I have to, you know, I. I have to have kid gloves on here so they don't want me to call their moms or stuff, you know.

Speaker B: Well, you're a little bit like a, uh, former marketing professor we had who was complaining once. They said, you know, caraway. That the. When I walk into. So when you go in the classroom, everyone knows they don't know the quant stuff.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And so they're open to learning. They all know the marketing. They all know how to.

Speaker A: We all know the other stuff.

Speaker B: Uh, exactly. So we have to, first of all, convince them they don't know how to market before we can help them understand what they do need to know. Uh, and, um, I. I would also think, you know, I. I would have people come up and complain sometimes at the end of class and say, you know, I had the right answer when we walked into class, but then we went down this rat. I got completely confused. And then at the end of class, it turned out I had the right answer all along. And I thought, you know what, what a great learning experience for you because if you could let these people in this classroom dissuade you from believing what you believed, then did you really know it? Did you really understand it? And I think the answer was no. But again, that's where sometimes learning can be an uncomfortable process if you do it right.

Speaker A: How do you think, uh, what's going on with AI, uh, affects our ability to teach via the case method? I mean, I was reading something today that one of our colleagues wrote. They talked about. The tough part is, um, students show up, they've got these nice, uh, you know, uh, answers that the AIs help, help them with. They all are kind of vanilla. Uh, and uh, people don't make the mistakes. Where, you know, making mistakes is how you learn. Uh, how do you, how do you deal with that? And I say that being happy I'm going to retire next year and don't have to,

Speaker B: um, well, you know, as soon as the AI, when the first CHAT GPT came out, we immediately began to just incorporate it. And soon people are going to be using CHAT GPT. And so how do we, how do we build knowing that? How do we build it into what we expect them to do? And you know, it turns out that there's way more value in recognizing the right question to ask.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Than there is in figuring out the answer to a given question. And AI is really good maybe at figuring out the answer to a given question. It's not always that good to figure out what's the right question to ask. Now. It may get better and better over time with that. I don't know, Ed, because I know there's some high level people in the field who say there is revolutionary stuff here. Uh, the people I know that I think understand it well, they're a little bit like me. They say, I'm not sure it's all that different. And I'm not sure the way we train with AI. I'm not sure it's going to be that much different until we have a much better understanding of how our brains actually work.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Because I still don't think we do. It's, I often say it's one of the reasons I, I regret my mortality is I think 50, 100 years from now, we're going to understand the brain so much better than we do today. And that may open the door for a different type of AI.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's, you know, I think that's actually, I think that's actually right. Uh, I changed my Life last Friday because I downloaded Claude.

Speaker B: Well, I, I don't, I don't. Yeah, no, I, I have to say every, every search engine now has AI built into it, right.

Speaker A: Yeah, they do.

Speaker B: So it's, uh. And you know, I. The 99% of stuff I don't know anything about AI is extremely useful.

Speaker A: It really is.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: The 1% of stuff I do know about it is so simplistic.

Speaker A: It's not very good.

Speaker B: No, it's just not very helpful.

Speaker A: So I did ask, I did ask, Ask Claude to, uh, please summarize the work of our Edward Freeman. Uh, and I wanted to see what Claude. And Claude turns out to know me maybe a little better than I know myself. So that was.

Speaker B: Oh, I'm so not going to do that.

Speaker A: Yeah, I may do that for you. In fact, I never thought about. That's a good way to prepare for these, uh, Pod Podcast is, uh, to use a lot.

Speaker B: Yeah. Just Google all your guests and see what, uh.

Speaker A: Well, that's what I usually do is I, as I doodle guests and you know, read, read through, through, through stuff. But you were, you were a coach, a high school basketball coach. And, and I remember, uh, before old age got got us, we used to play a pretty decent game of basketball. In fact, I once supplanted you as coach. You were coaching the faculty team. I supplanted you and we went on a winning streak, and that was only because I made you play the whole game. So, um, you're the best player. What did coaching in high school, uh, do for you?

Speaker B: You know, I think the two biggest lessons, I think one was already there in coaching was, um, there's a lot of value in reducing, reducing 90% to 70%.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And so rather than say, this guy's probably going to make this shot, if I can make it a little bit harder.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Then in the long run we'll be much better off.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And, uh, part of that was the reason why we loved it when someone who wasn't a very good shooter would make a couple of threes early in the game. We just say, keep shooting, please just, uh, keep shooting because we know it's not going to last. So, uh, there was this longer term perspective that actually informed at the, at the small level. Work your butt off, work your butt off. Ignore the results. But the small things can make a big difference in the end. Um, and, and the, the other big message, the other big lesson that I learned both as a player but really as a coach is whatever just happened, it's Irrelevant. It's what's going to happen next, next play. So whatever you do, whether it was good, bad, or indifferent, it's gone. Do not let it affect what you do next on the court. And, uh, that's probably. You learn. There's time to learn from it, but don't let it influence what you do. And maybe that's not. Maybe. Maybe I sort of think about life with both of those examples in the same way.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Uh, um, play the odds.

Speaker A: And you know what? One of the. One. One of the things, I mean, you know, I'm. I'm a big Duke fan because that's. That's where I went. And one of the things I've gotten so much from Coach K is his idea of niche play. You know, the last play is the last play, but you got to focus on the next one.

Speaker B: Uh, yep.

Speaker A: And if you. You buck up enough, enough last plays, you get taken out. But still, you know, that's. But, But. But if you just dwell on that. And I wish I wish I had known this when I played sports competitively because, um, you end up playing afraid. You end up.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: To make a mistake.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So translatable into business and the real, real world to have people think about, okay, you did that. Learn from it, clearly. But let's focus on the next play and learn from the past for that. And I think that's, uh. I mean, I didn't have many. I didn't have a coach who understood, stood that. But that's incredibly important.

Speaker B: Um, I think something you hit on, I think, to me is really important, is its idea of you got to play to win, not to avoid losing.

Speaker A: That's right.

Speaker B: And I think it's so easy to be so afraid of failure.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: I watch.

Speaker A: I watched a lot of hockey now, as you know, and you'll see, um, people say three to one or two to zero is the hardest score to be ahead in hockey. Because what happens is you. You know, you'll score many goals. So. So. So you. You focus on not losing. And that's usually. That's usually when things just go wrong, you know.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: But that.

Speaker B: That's also.

Speaker A: That's also. I. I think there's a lesson for us as academics in that when you get, um. When you get referee reports and, and what you want to. And what you do is you say anything to respond to the referees, you're basically trying not to lose rather than to major contribution to developing ideas. I think you can develop ideas or you can chase journals. And I see so many Academics chasing journals. I once said if I wrote, uh, an uh, editorial letter when I edited a journal, if I wrote an editorial letter that said your paper would be much better if in, uh, page 16 you added three paragraphs on unicorns, uh, and rainbows, I would get a response letter from the academy, said, thank you so much for your helpful suggestion. Now on page 17, we've added two pages on unicorns, uh, and a page and a half on rainbows. I know I would got that. But I never had the guts to actually try that because it's the same kind of, you know.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Now, ah, now, now you also were administrator. Uh, I mean you, you ran the MBA pro program. You, you ran something called a partnership in leadership and education. Uh, what, what, what's the, what was the administrative stuff like in your career? Did it, did it get in the way of anything else? Was it something you really enjoyed doing?

Speaker B: Um, I'm going to be honest with you that, uh, I enjoyed it at the time, at least early on in the time. Uh, in hindsight, you know, it's like I was playing center when I was really a power forward.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And so I think I played center pretty well as a power forward, but that wasn't my best way to contribute to the organization. Um, I didn't realize how much in an administrative role you were constantly in the spotlight. And I am a pretty introverted person. I'm pretty quiet. I don't like to be exposed. Ah, and you just had to learn to live with that in an administrative position.

Speaker A: Same here. You know, you went through some, some difficult stuff when I, when I was an associate with me to help. And I, I didn't like that. Being in the spotlight. I, I'm, you know, I'm an introvert. And uh, right. You, you gotta, you gotta grow out of that if you can when you're an administrator. Uh, but I didn't like that. So thank God I, I, I could find an excuse and quit and yeah, I'd be happy. Uh, but that, that I, my hat's off to people that can do that.

Speaker B: Oh yeah, yeah. Uh, mine is too. And uh, I think the turning point, what made me decide to finally, um, quit was when, um, I got a 360 review and I read all the comments, the critical ones, and I sat there and said, you know what? They're absolutely right. All of those are true. Am I really going to change? I don't know that I am.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Because I, I accept that that's maybe some parts of myself that I'm not that good at.

Speaker A: Yeah. Right.

Speaker B: And so, um, I'm gonna go back to playing power forward, I think. Yeah.

Speaker A: Uh, exactly. That. That was. That's. That was. I'm glad. I learned early on that that was not something I wanted to do.

Speaker B: And I, you know, I. Yeah. In my executive programs, when it would spill over into leadership, I. I would often close programs by telling folks, if you really want. If you really want to spend all of your time thinking about how people work, about how they think. If you really enjoy doing that.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Then by all means, pursue it. But most of you don't.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And I would strongly encourage you if you don't turn down that promotion.

Speaker A: Yeah, Exactly.

Speaker B: I know it's appealing to you, but if it's not what you really want to do.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Don't do it. We have enough bad leaders in the world.

Speaker A: We certainly do. And they seem multiplying.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Look, 40 plus years, uh, you were here, um, uh, you know, one of the most beloved teachers in our history. Um. You got any regrets?

Speaker B: Um, this is going to be trivial, but you'll appreciate it. I wish I had taken a sabbatical very early in my career.

Speaker A: We don't have sabbatic. Well, we do now.

Speaker B: We do now. Yeah. And in fact, not only do we need now, we're being told we always did. We just didn't know.

Speaker A: Oh, oh, oh, really? I didn't.

Speaker B: The university has said no, you couldn't. Could have always done sabbaticals. It must have been a darn thing that you didn't.

Speaker A: Yeah, it was. It's not just we.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: But the other hand. I mean, I, I've. I've had a lot of falls off. But that's different. That's different than taking a sabbatical, going somewhere else, uh, meeting some new people, some new ideas. Uh, I think what, what that's. What that's led to is we're a little too in. In insular for our own good. You know, we. We, uh, tend to drink our own bath water. I think a little too much here.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: So.

Speaker B: Well, for me, it was just a, uh, change doing something.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's right.

Speaker B: Break up the monotony of it. But, you know, the other thing is. And you know this well, so the other. I. It's not really a grit because I, I did it with eyes wide open. And I won't second guess that decision. I sort of fell off the academic research train shortly after getting tenure. Uh, and it wasn't because I consciously said I'm not going to do that anymore.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: It was. The next time I do academic research, it's going to be something that I care about.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And not something I'm doing just to get published.

Speaker A: Well, that's the, that's, that's the idea behind developing ideas or chasing the journals. And it's a real.

Speaker B: I appreciate. Yeah, folks. Yeah. Folks like you could do that. And I so appreciated what you were able to do. I just discovered that, uh, maybe it's because I enjoyed teaching so much that I just got too caught up in that. But.

Speaker A: Well, I, I, I, I, I think, you know, there, there, there, there, there comes a point where, I mean, I didn't chase the journals, but I didn't chase the journals because I was a philosopher and I didn't know any, I didn't know any better.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: So I was, I mean, I didn't know you're supposed to write a book that you weren't supposed to write a book, you know? So I, I wrote a. Has something like 80,000 citations, but I didn't, I didn't know you weren't supposed to write it. Uh, just, just Serendipity. Yeah, that, that, that, that, that, that, that word. But I've seen so many people burn out on chasing the journals, you know?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Uh, yep. And now, Now. So I've got tenure, I think. Okay. So what do I really want to do? Oh, I don't know, because all I've been doing is chasing journals.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's a, that's a, that's a real problem for us. Yeah, no, I, Yeah, we have already been talking, uh, for almost an hour, so.

Speaker B: Good Lord.

Speaker A: Uh, yeah, it's, uh, it's really been great. And we could usually hear each other through our, through our office wall, so.

Speaker B: That's true. True.

Speaker A: Better. But we have, we, we have one more thing, which I'd love to do, um, which is we have this tradition, which I stole, actually, from a hockey show, uh, called Three Burning Questions. I asked you three questions so our listeners get to know you a little bit better. Okay.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: Okay. Question number one. You've won a contest. And the prize in the contest is a concert for Robert. A concert just for you can be played by any musical group or ensemble or person that's alive. Got to be alive to play. Who would you have play the concert for Robert?

Speaker B: Uh, I don't know. I know there's one way to go, but I'm going to go a different way because it's not just a who would play what I would want to hear is to sit a concert of Dvorak's New World Symphony.

Speaker A: Oh, wow.

Speaker B: Particularly the second movement, I think is about, uh, the most beautiful piece of music I've ever heard in my life. And so that would be my choice.

Speaker A: That's one of my. That's one of my favorites. If. If you're listening to this and you haven't heard that, it doesn't matter who plays it, really. Uh, it's just a wonderful piece of music. I would add to that. Uh, there is a record done by the cellist Yo Yo Ma of box cello concertos.

Speaker B: Oh, yes. The Brandenburg concertos. That's my second choice.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's right up there. Okay. Uh, burning question number two. You can have dinner with anybody alive. Who would it be?

Speaker B: You're gonna laugh. Sean Hannity. Yeah.

Speaker A: Okay. Why?

Speaker B: I think he's a smart guy, and I can't believe what he says, and I really can't believe he believes what he says.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's right.

Speaker B: I would love to have dinner with him where he was being honest.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And I could get to know what he actually thinks about the world.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: I mean, he's a. He's a supreme entertainer.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Which is great.

Speaker A: But he's a smart guy. Does he really? Yeah, he says.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Yes. Okay. That's a great answer. So I'm going to give you burning question to be. You, uh, can have dinner with anybody from history.

Speaker B: Oh, from history.

Speaker A: Who would it be? Um, history of the human race.

Speaker B: Jesus.

Speaker A: Yeah. Why?

Speaker B: Because I want to know what he actually thought about the world.

Speaker A: Yeah. Okay.

Speaker B: Before the myth of him was.

Speaker A: Before the myth and the church and

Speaker B: all that was created around him.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: I would have liked to have known who was he really?

Speaker A: Yeah. So. Yeah. That's good. That's true.

Speaker B: As you know, you and I've talked. Because religion was such a part of my early life.

Speaker A: Same here.

Speaker B: And so, um, it. It, uh. There are times I've had to work hard to. To get away from some of that.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, exactly.

Speaker B: And. Yeah. And you know, my. My. My, um, ex wife, she once said, you know, Robert's really not a Christian, but he's more of a Christian than most Christians that I know.

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker B: That's because I believed in a lot of the. Yeah. The messages I believed in. But.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Not the. Not what I think of as the myth.

Speaker A: Yeah. Not. Not. Not the. Not the metaphysics. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Um, burning question number three. You. You come back. Meet. Meet some. Or let me put it this way. What do you want your former students to say about you.

Speaker B: You know, I think, I think the answer I would like to give is I would like them to say that I cared.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: But I'm not sure if that's really true. I think what's. What may be more true is I want them to say I was really good at what I did.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And I mean, I, I don't like that. That, I think is a. Is a bigger thing.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: But I think part of it is a bigger thing because, uh, you know, I could care. I mean, I know plenty of folks who care who create terrible educational experiences. Right.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker B: So, you know, you know, it's like. I know, I know doctors. I just had my knee replaced.

Speaker A: Oh.

Speaker B: Yeah. I had. I, you know, a lot of doctors, I love their bedside manner, but when I get my knee replaced, I want the best person at replacing knees.

Speaker A: Yeah. I, I, look, I had my hips replaced, and, and I loved it that, that my sir surgeon said, I can do this. There's no problem. We got the best team around. You want your surgeon to be. To be doing their best and knowing they're doing their best.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yep. Yep. So, I don't know. I just, I really value competence, and, um, I really value people who pursue not just competence, but perfection, who really want to be the best version of themselves. Something I think you have done really well in your career.

Speaker A: I don't know about that.

Speaker B: And, um, I like to think in my little part, the little part of my career, that I actually was able to achieve that.

Speaker A: Well, I think you certainly were, uh, with your students. I think, uh, we continue, uh, to miss you, uh, and I continue to miss, uh, seeing you every day, even if sometimes it was at the coffee shop and not in, not in our office. Robert, thank you so much for being on the POD podcast. I, I really appreciate that. And I'll be calling you more for some more personal retirement. Um, uh, tips.

Speaker B: I'm, I, I'm, I'm an email away. Make sure your name's on it, though, because if it just is from Darden, I just hit delete.

Speaker A: Yeah, right. This has been another.

Speaker B: Thank you, Ed. I've really enjoyed it.

Speaker A: Good, good. So, so, so have I. This has been another episode of the Stakeholder Podcast. I'm Ed. Ah, Freeman. Your host, Ben Freeman is the producer. Don't forget to rate review. Tell all your friends to subscribe to the Stakeholder Podcast and be on the lookout for the Stakeholder channel, which is coming soon to you to YouTube. See you next time.