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 …

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’…

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 Vi…

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 …

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…

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 dollar…

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 o…

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 Flipstik…

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-ter…

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 wa…

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 product…

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 opposit…

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…

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…

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 tra…

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…

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 …

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 …

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 mor…

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 st…

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 la…

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 Princip…

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 rema…

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 …

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 Northwe…

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, …

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 …

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…

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 wi…

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 …

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…

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 s…

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 …

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 fro…

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 t…

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 wi…

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, thos…

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 whet…

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 moment…

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 foll…

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 nu…

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 sh…

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…

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 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.…