*This episode was originally released with the incorrect audio. We’ve now updated it with the correct audio.* COVID 19, the rise of AI, and climate change have made the world more unpredictable. So how should we respond to a VUCA world – one characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity? In this episode of the Chicago Booth Review, Hal Weitzman talks to Chicago Booth’s Greg Bunch about how to take advantage of the opportunities VUCA offers.

Are you good at identifying the core essence of things? Clearing your head, rising above the day-to-day, and abstracting things to their critical elements could make you a better leader. In this episode of the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, Chicago Booth’s Linda E. Ginzel, a leadership expert and the author of the book Choosing Leadership, reads her essay “To Lead Effectively, Find Your Core Essence.”

What makes successful entrepreneurs different from the rest of us? Are they more risk-seeking? Do they have better ideas? Or are they just lucky? How do you know if it’s the right time to take the leap into starting a business? What does it really take to launch your own venture? In this episode, we bring you a conversation between three experts on entrepreneurship: Chicago Booth’s Lindsey Lyman, Sean Bisceglia, former CEO of Curion and operating partner at Sterling Partners, and Liz Tilatti,...

Women are often appointed as leaders when an organization is in crisis, and in many cases, they’re not given the support needed to turn things around—a phenomenon known as the glass cliff. So are women leaders being set up to fail?

One of the byproducts of growing inequality is that many wealthier people grow up, live, and work without ever knowing someone who is poor or struggling financially. Do the wealthy have an obligation to know what life is like for those on the lower end of the income spectrum? In this episode, we hear from John Paul Rollert, an adjunct associate professor at Chicago Booth and our in-house ethicist.

In the perfect world of economic models, investors make perfectly rational decisions using perfect information and earn the best possible returns. They never get distracted or confused. Of course, in real life it doesn’t always work that way. Investors can get bamboozled by management drivel, or besotted with charismatic founders. What if we could use AI to make better investment decisions? In this episode of the Chicago Booth Review podcast, we explore how researchers are using...

Many of us have observed how social media shapes or warps our behavior. Some people are more willing to get into disagreements or show off more. The rest of us see these behaviors and can assume that that’s just how other people behave, even though in reality algorithms may be directing us to the most controversial or explosive content. In this episode, Jeff Cockrell, editor of the Chicago Booth Review website, meets Chicago Booth’s Joshua Jackson to discuss his research on the effects of...

For decades, income inequality has been on the rise around the world. Is that mainly because those at the very top are getting paid more, or are they increasingly passively collecting the income produced by their accumulated wealth? In this episode of the Chicago Booth Review podcast, we ask what makes the rich so rich, with Chicago Booth’s Luigi Zingales and Eric Zwick, and the University of California at Berkeley’s Gabriel Zucman.

Ben Baldanza ran Spirit Airlines from 2006 to 2016, and transformed it into a ultra low-cost carrier, abandoning all frills and charging for any extras. In this episode of the Chicago Booth Review podcast, he debates Chicago Booth’s John Paul Rollert, one of our adjunct professors, who had just written an article entitled, “A business school professor studies the world’s worst airline.”

Thanks to the growth of index funds, more and more of us own passive investments. To what extent are we responsible for what goes into those index funds? In this episode of the Chicago Booth Review podcast, Chicago Booth’s John Paul Rollert asks if there really is such a thing as a truly “passive” investment.

Regulators have trained their sights on Big Tech companies. Many Americans think Big Tech should be more tightly regulated, and politicians across the aisle agree. But what exactly should be done? In this episode of the Chicago Booth Review podcast, we explore three possible options: break up the biggest companies, regulate them more forcefully, or wait and see.

The Showtime series Super Pumped told the story of the rise of Uber in a swirl of excess and intrigue. But many startups seem to be run by charismatic CEOs with a big vision, which sometimes turns out to be nothing but an illusion fueled by investor cash. In this episode of the Chicago Booth Review podcast, we present a conversation about startup culture with New York Times reporter Mike Isaac, whose book inspired the TV series, and two experts on entrepreneurship, Chicago Booth’s Steve...

How does the experience of poverty shape decision-making? Research suggests that, rather than bad decisions leading to poverty, being poor can lead to some poorer decisions. At the same time, research also indicates that the stark financial choices faced by poor people can actually make them better at assessing the trade-offs involved in some decisions. 

Stakeholder capitalism is the idea that business should be about more than just making money. That seems a world away from the brash financial types of Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel ‘American Psycho,’ or the 1987 movie ‘Wall Street.’ But in this episode of the Chicago Booth Review podcast, Chicago Booth’s John Paul Rollert asks how much we have really moved on, and reflects on the continuing relevance of Easton Ellis’s novel.

Airport bookstores are full of volumes claiming to reveal the secrets of effective leadership, and yet business leaders often don’t seem to be getting any better at actually leading. Some people seem to be born leaders, but many executives really struggle with exercising authority, connecting with, and motivating their workforces, and many ultimately fail to do so. In this episode of the Chicago Booth Review podcast we present a discussion from 2017 how leaders can work on their leadership...

It’s no revelation that the language we use often says more about us than whatever it’s describing. But what about the number of words? The more we’re surprised by something, the more we’re likely to say about it, and that can reveal all sorts of prejudices that we might not be aware of. In this episode, we chat to Ayelet Fishbach, a professor of behavioral science at Chicago Booth, about her recent paper on “surprised elaboration.”

Rajat Gupta was one of America’s most successful Indian-born businessmen. In 1994, he became McKinsey’s youngest chief executive and the first who had been born outside of the US. Duing his nine-year leadership, McKinsey’s revenues grew from $1.5 billion to $3.4 billion, its number of consultants went from 3,300 to 7,700, and from having 58 offices in 24 countries, it expanded to 81 offices in 44 countries. But in 2010, Gupta was charged with insider trading, a crime for which he was...

Most of us find it hard to achieve our goals. So how can we set better goals and follow through on them? We put that question to two experts on motivation, Chicago Booth’s Ayelet Fishbach and the University of Pennsylvania’s Katy Milkman.

How carefully do you tend your professional network? How does your network shape your ideas and your behavior? Understanding network theory can both help you become more successful professionally, and to explain political and sociological trends such as polarization, nationalism, and anti-globalization.

As hybrid work becomes increasingly common, organizations and managers are trying to come to grips with the challenges of a partly remote workforce. We consider how hybrid work will shape the labor market with three experts in the theory and practice of hybrid work: Chicago Booth’s Steve Davis and Mike Gibbs, and the University of Chicago’s Melina Hale.

What should the uber wealthy do with their money? How can they leave a lasting legacy? And what responsibilities do they have to society at large? On this episode of the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, Booth’s John Paul Rollert reflects on the role of those at the very top of the 1 percent.

Many economists agree that inequality has risen in recent decades, but that’s where the agreement ends. Measuring the trend is contentious, and it’s more than just a methodological squabble. How severe one sees the problem informs the policies proposed, from no change to a host of new taxes aimed at correcting the imbalance. In this special episode of the Chicago Booth Review podcast, we present a conversation between two economists who take very different views on inequality: Chicago Booth’s...

Academic models often built on the assumption of how rational utility-maximising individuals would behave. But as behavioral scientists have long pointed out, real people don’t actually behave that way. Does that mean that we behave irrationally, and if so why? Or is our behavior actually more rational than it may appear? In this special episode, we present Chicago Booth’s Richard Thaler, an economics Nobel laureate, in conversation with Harvard’s Steven Pinker.

Do stock prices reflect all publicly available information? Are they entirely a reflection of the fundamental values of their respective companies? Or is there something else that helps to explain episodes of surprisingly high volatility, from market-wide plunges to the sudden surges of meme stocks? On this episode of the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, we explore the inelastic markets hypothesis, which suggests that fund flows and investor demand play an important role in market behavior.

The buzz around artificial intelligence has led to a surfeit of funding for A.I. startups—and, consequently, less funding to go around for other young companies. Is the hype around this technology creating a bubble? On this episode of the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, Hal Weitzman speaks with a panel of experts to explore what underlies the valuations of A.I. startups, and what those valuations mean for entrepreneurs and investors more broadly.