“These challenges are what drive the Fox Executive DBA program, where leaders expand their decision making and approach problems by learning how to research, collect, analyze and understand data.”
Tiffany Sumner, director of communications at the Fox School, host of Catalyst
In the spirit of Women’s History Month, this episode focuses on women who transitioned from leaders to thought leaders by way of their research and are now changing perspectives on business, inclusion and culture.
Each of our guests is a graduate of the Executive Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA) program at the Fox School of Business. The part-time, three-year program reaches a milestone this May when its 100th student graduates.
The DBA program is designed to equip senior managers and executives with the power to transform today’s business environment. Each of our guests has chosen a particular area of the business world to explore.
First, Jodi Detjen, DBA ’21, associate professor of practice and academic director of the MBA program at Suffolk University, shares her research which focuses on the barriers to women’s leadership acquisition (1:25). Her work earned the Award for Excellence in Research by a DBA Student in November 2020.
“Personally, it felt very gratifying that my research was considered quality, and professionally it gave me credibility—it’s like a stamp of approval,” she said.
Next, banking executive Sherry Williams, DBA ’19 and chief risk officer at Amalgamated Bank, discusses her research into determining what factors and/or combinations of banking features determine how someone chooses a financial service provider (14:38).
Williams believes that having a better understanding of the consumer journey might help policymakers and the financial industry consider options that will break down, rather than create, barriers to financial inclusion.
Finally, Maggie Jordan, DBA ’18, vice president of marketing operations at MNG Health and founder and CEO of LAIR Entertainment, shares her insights into what people’s approaches to video game character design mean for the metaverse (22:34).
Her research journey also helped her make a career change – an outcome she didn’t expect.
Resources:
Full Episode Transcript
Host: Welcome to Catalyst, the podcast of Temple University’s Fox School of Business, I’m your host, Tiffany Sumner.
It’s Women’s History Month, so in today’s episode, we’re excited to feature three Fox alumni who are making waves in their fields. Jodi Detjen, Sherry Williams and Maggie Jordan all graduated from the Fox School’s Executive Doctorate in Business Administration program (DBA). The DBA gives senior executives the skills they need to be inclusive, data-driven thought leaders. We’ll talk about Jodi’s research on the barriers to women obtaining corporate leadership positions. Sherry will give us insights into how to close the financial inclusion gap and make banking more accessible. And we’ll get some clues from Maggie about the way people choose to represent themselves in video games and how it might impact our experience in the Metaverse. Stay tuned.
[2:10]
Host: First I’d like to welcome Jodi Detjen. Jodi graduated from the Fox DBA in 2021 and is currently an associate professor of practice and the academic director of the MBA program at Suffolk University. Jodi, I’m excited to talk to you today about the barriers that prevent women from gaining leadership positions. Can you tell me a little bit about your research and the inspiration behind it?
Jodi: So what I love about my research is I’ve been thinking about inequities in the workplace…literally…don’t know, since I was in since I was born, practically. I grew up as a woman who believes in equal rights and equal opportunity and I saw, even as a young girl, how I would be not allowed to do certain things because I was a girl. So I’ve always had this fight for justice and so I went and I got—I was a programmer and did all that kind of stuff and then I realized I wasn’t really doing this work that I think I’m supposed to do, which is around how do we bring more justice into the world. So I pivoted about in, I don’t know, early 2010’s. Basically, I decided I’m going to really double down on this and so started out doing some research on why is it that women weren’t getting into senior leadership. I found in that initial research that women were having were swallowing all these gender norms that our society tells them and they were enforcing them on themselves. So, for example, everything has to be perfect. We can’t do anything unless it’s perfect so that for example is: I can’t apply to a job. This is a very well-known piece of research. I can’t apply to a job unless I have all the criteria, whereas men will do apply at 60%.
So when I started the DBA I was kind of like, alright, what is it that I want to figure out? What I wanted to do was figure out the organizational side. There’s been a ton of research on pay inequities and all sorts of different, you know, gender norms and all this kind of stuff and I was like, what I think part of the problem is the processes themselves. So the way we make decisions—not just the fact that there’s bias in the decision-making—but the decision-making process that we use. So how we hire, how we promote and I was very interested in the promotion side because there had been a ton of work on the hiring side, so I focused on the promotion side, and was really like, ‘what is going on?’
So, I found this article and the journal actually was a special issue in The Journal Social Issues on the masculine contest culture. Basically what they did was they codified what masculinity looked like in the workplace from a toxic perspective. I’m very careful when I speak about this more publicly. I say it’s toxic masculinity in a research case. So this is a research construct. This is not, you know, society’s view on what toxic masculinity is. It’s actually a real research construct and they tested it and so I decided to use it in my research and the components are really clear, so the components are a combination of work is primary. So, family, life is secondary, everything that you do must sacrifice for work. Being seen as overly confident, so “coming across as almost like I got this” there’s no vulnerability at all—that kind of thing. Then this idea of hyper-competitiveness: we’re gonna win, we’re gonna like beat everybody.
So what I did was I looked at this construct. The first thing I did was I talked to ten senior male leaders in a qualitative research study and really tried to explore how these were manifested in the way they lead. And, of course, I didn’t ask them do they exhibit this. I asked questions so they could discover what was happening. What was interesting about it was I heard a lot about the lack of vulnerability for some of them but then for other ones I heard this opening. A lot of the senior leaders were really saying that they wanted to be more vulnerable and they were talking about how they were sharing more of themselves. Work as primary came out loud and clear—like it didn’t seem to really affect it and then the hyper-competitiveness also came out. So, for example, one leader was talking about collaboration and then he was saying ‘but we out collaborate everybody else!’
Host: Oh wow.
Jodi: It comes out really clearly in the qualitative interviews but not as clearly as I thought. So it’s clear that this is being tempered in the workplace. And then the second part of my study: what I did was, I took this construct and I evaluated it so I did a survey and had over 500 respondents and evaluated this construct and then compared that with what how fair people thought the processes of promotion and the developmental assignments that get you to promotion. So those processes, they evaluated how fair these processes were and overwhelmingly, the correlation was very strong. People thought it was the more toxic their culture was, according to this construct, the more unfair they thought promotion and developmental assignments processes were.
Host: What do you think are the potentially far-reaching impacts of your findings?
Jodi: So, I do a lot of consulting with organizations as well as my teaching. What I find is that organizations are really hesitant to change processes, because changing processes is hard, right? You implemented a technology system, it’s a big upheaval. You’ve got all this change. People are upset. There’s training, but the same thing happens. If you say everybody’s got to use the same questions at hiring or you can’t go around and what I call ‘horse trade’ around the table when you’re figuring out who should be promoted, you gotta come up with a process that’s a little more objective. So, there’s always resistance. I think organizations feel that resistance. But what I’m starting to see is there’s a willingness, at least right now in the hiring process, a willingness to be more reflective about the process itself and say how is it that we’re doing this so that we can be more objective and more inclusive? So, I think that there’s this opportunity for organizations to just look at their processes.
The other thing I found in my research is that the leaders were not–they did not seem to be manifesting their own ego needs in terms of reinforcing this culture. They seem to be reinforcing the culture of the organization. So, for example, one leader because he was the COO, said I talked to my CEO all the time and we try to really figure out what we’re trying to do and figure out how we run the company with that vision in mind so they’re always looking at what exists already and how to change that. So if we change the processes I think we’ll actually have a big impact on fairness and inclusion. And changing the processes is a heck of a lot easier–even though it’s hard–it’s a heck of a lot easier than changing a bunch of leaders and their individual viewpoint of themselves. I’ve done some of that work. That work is hard, that work is really hard. But changing the processes I know how to do that I’ve been doing that my whole career, so I’m actually bullish on it.
Host: I really like how you’re taking that approach of changing the process, not the people. Can you illustrate that with a single example? Like what does that look like? How does a company implement a more inclusive process?
Jodi: So, a lot of the companies that were working with—my companies right now—are really looking at the hiring process and what I’m finding very interesting is that they’re looking at just literally the entry point. How do we increase the entry point? So if you think of hiring as a pipeline, right, you have you start with something wide and then you narrow it down into the candidate that you’re hiring or candidates that you’re hiring. So clearly you have to have diversity in the pipeline at the top of the pipeline in order to get diversity at the bottom. But what I’m seeing organizations do is that they’re just focusing up here and they’re not looking at all the different steps. There are like ten different steps that we’ve identified that are through the hiring process. And so, what we’re working with organizations to do is to say alright here is the top of the pipeline, yes there are things that you have to do to increase the diversity there but then you have to look at your filter. What are you looking at in the resumes? What are you looking at, how are you interviewing people? Who are you interviewing? Who do you put in front of people all the way down to how do you onboard people so that people feel like they’re part of the process?
One of the ways that I like to talk about this with organizations is to think of it as a design thinking process. When I use that language, people get a little excited and they’re like it sounds fun and people have heard enough about it and so if I look at it like that or let’s break it down: what’s working, what’s not and then you look at it both from the perspective of the hiring manager who’s going through this process and also the person that is being hired and so you can actually not only redesign the process to become more inclusive but you can also redesign the process so it’s more effective for everybody. And so, you build some of that buying from the hiring managers because they’re part of that redesign process. So I think that’s where the potential comes, I will say though that I’m finding some resistance in doing that because again people are like, “Oh, it’s a lot of work” or “Oh, my hiring managers don’t you know they need to hire people now” and so there’s some resistance. But it’s not any different than any other resistance and the harder part we’re finding is that the process is not hard, it’s actually part of the change process. It takes time and I don’t think — I don’t know actually of very many — I can’t think of a single organization that’s actually thinking about this hiring exclusively process in a holistic way. I don’t have a single example right now of an organization either ones that we work with or ones that I’ve seen through research, not a single one yet. And so, we haven’t even gotten to the promotion part ’cause right now companies seem to be focusing on hiring, so you go where they’re not focused.
Host: That’s great and maybe you’re ahead of the curve, maybe your research is going to help lead companies there. I hope so. I mean it’s smart for you to focus on an area that is aspirational for a lot of businesses and I know you had been doing a lot of this work before. But how did the Fox DBA program make a difference in your professional career?
Jodi: I think one of the things I’d love—it was really important to me too, is I think we all kind of geeked out on the research. It was really fun to do the research whether it was qual or quant. We got excited because the conversations that we were having as part of the program were interesting, they were substantive, and they were grounded in research so we weren’t just saying here’s my opinion. We were basically saying, here’s what I think and here’s what I saw in the research and this is what I think it means and so the intellectualism that was evident across the program to me I found so rich and interesting.
So how did that help me in my career? Well, first off I have learned—because I’ve been consulting my whole life, is that this level of expertise you bring a level of expertise based on the credentials that people will trust you because of your credentials. So I personally wanted a credential that I could trust so a Temple doctorate means something. It’s an R1 school it’s like, it’s a signal to the market that it matters and so what that means is when people think about my doctorate—Oh you got it from Temple, it means something in the marketplace. So just the credential itself was meaningful, but then I trust what I learned so now I’m applying so much more of what I’ve learned. So for example, we do a lot of research, a lot of surveys, a lot of quality research bringing all of that rigor that I learned into my work so that the work is actually much more rigorous and so I feel I trust it more.
I think before I got my doctorate there was a little bit of—because I did a lot of this work before, but I had a little bit of impostor syndrome like who am I? It was based on my experience and now I don’t have the impostor syndrome I know and trust what I’m talking about. I think what I’m also seeing is that people, and maybe it’s because I trust myself more, but also I’m seeing that the marketplace seems to be responding as well since I got my doctorate. We’ve been using research-based for my company side a lot and I’ve been hearing and last week I heard a bunch of people tell me that back. So they’re hearing it too and they say it matters to them. So, I think that the whole research focus is a differentiator for me professionally but also a differentiator for the work that I do because there’s a lot of noise in the machine, especially around DEI and process change there is a lot of noise in the machine so how do you differentiate, and I think the research base is how I differentiate, and the market is responding.
[13:30]
Host: Next, let’s talk to Sherry Williams, a graduate of the DBA class of 2019 and currently chief risk officer at Amalgamated Bank. Sherry studies help people choose a financial service provider, and that choice can help close the financial inclusion gap. Hi Sherry, I’d love to talk to you about your research today. Can you share with us a little bit about your research and what led you to take a deeper look into the financial industry?
Sherry: Sure, thank you for asking and for your interest. So my research was really born out of a desire to blend the 20+ years of banking experience that I had with solving how to address the financial inclusion gap in this country and by financial inclusion, I mean enabling individuals and businesses to have access to both useful and affordable financial products and services that meet their needs and that could be anything from transactions and payments to savings and credit. You may have heard terms like financially underserved or underbanked and unbanked and those are the numbers that we’re trying to reduce because fact is that the unbanked and underbanked missed the opportunities to access lower-cost financial products and services. As a result, they’re unable to take advantage of opportunities to build credit and build wealth in order to actually have a foothold toward better financial status.
Host: And so, what can the industry learn from your work and how can the findings help widen the path to better financial inclusion?
Sherry: Sure, so my findings represent, really, a foundation on which additional research should be conducted to guide the industry toward exploration of those solutions that can be implemented to close that financial inclusion gap. Now, the research that I conducted clearly demonstrates–and some may find this surprising–but the importance of trust when it comes to selecting a financial service provider as well as the importance of convenience. We might expect that there’s that cost lens that consumers would view their selection through and now, the cost is without question is a significant factor but convenience and trust are also essential features for selecting a provider.
What do we mean? We need things like, in personal customer contact believe it or not. You know, data actually demonstrated very clearly that face-to-face interactions are important to consumers even as we see an increase in branchless banking and most institutions are expanding their online presence but not necessarily their brick and mortar presence. But what my research has taught is that, in order to include a selection of these financial services providers, then they need to strengthen those features that will contribute to building trust with existing and prospective customers because those are the factors that are really most significant. Offering that in-person customer service, demonstrating that they have a customer’s best interest in mind, offering fair resolutions if there’s a disagreement and most importantly being truthful in their customer interactions. These types of measures will go a long way in attracting the clientele that we’re seeking in closing this gap.
Host: So, I guess would your recommendation be more community-based branches or more local branches?
Sherry: Well, the research shows that there are, you know, that convenience, which would come in the form of branches or in the form of easy-to-use online apps, that though that’s an important factor and for certain demographics, they do want that high touch interaction little branches can bring.
Host: So, how did the Fox DBA program help you get where you are today?
Sherry: Well, I tell you the rigor that the Fox program has as well as the structure really strengthened my ability to sift through the bevy of data I encounter on a daily basis. It expanded my analytical skills so that I ensure I’m looking at things using varied perspectives and ultimately that enables me to optimize solutions that I may have when it comes to solving a business problem. The Fox DBA, I have to tell you, was a clear differentiator when I was a candidate for the chief auditor position that I previously held at Amalgamated Bank. Amalgamated is known as America’s socially responsible bank and clearly, there’s a tie in there to financial inclusion because, presumably, a socially responsible bank would be interested in promoting the concept of financial inclusion throughout its footprint. So, while the bank had many candidates for the job, no one could offer me—rather no one could offer the experience that I’ve gained from actually studying financial inclusion and interdisciplinary topics that are offered by the DBA program.
Host: That’s so great to hear. That’s such a good story to tell. Do you have advice for future DBA students or alum or just anyone wanting to work in the financial industry about what they can do to continue this work of making the finance industry more inclusive?
Sherry: I think the key is really to not take the eye off the prize right? Because it’s easy particularly. If you’re in the financial industry and in the financial services industry, it’s easy to lose sight of that market, frankly. I think there are a number of government initiatives out there now that are making sure that institutions focus where the needs are our greatest. I know that with ESG, this concept of ESG that’s out there now and in every industry including financial services wants to make sure that their environmentally social and governance programs are in line with the more progressive and future thinking. We’re really forced to consider what we should be doing with financial inclusion and with persons who have traditionally been excluded.
There’s some really good news out there regarding the data and that is that since I started my studies, we’ve seen great strides globally. 1.2 billion adults worldwide have gotten accounts—access to an account since 2011 and this is really—these are statistics from the World Bank which had a tremendous initiative going around financial inclusion. So today globally 69% of adults have an account now which means there’s still much work to be done but I think for those who are in the industry currently and looking to make a change the opportunity is there.
[22:30]
Host: Finally, I’d like to welcome Maggie Jordan. Maggie graduated from the DBA program in 2018 and is currently the vice president of marketing operations at MNG Health and the founder and CEO of Lehr Entertainment. Maggie’s research actually inspired her to take a whole new career path. Hi Maggie, thank you for joining me.
Maggie: Absolutely, I’m happy to be here.
Host: So, Maggie, tell me about your research. You started by looking into character representation and video games, why did that inspire you?
Maggie: My path to the doctorate was a very bumpy one I will say. I actually came into the program intending to study healthcare communications and then switched before I started my research to subscription marketing. I remember having a meeting with Ed Rosenthal who was my chair and my advisor and honestly, I would not have gotten through the program without him. I had a conversation with him, and he told me “Do something you really love and where you want to be.” At the same time, I was in Lynne Andersson’s qualitative marketing class and we were given the option to do a research study. A very small one. I decided to investigate Magic the Gathering, which is a game card game that you play and there are these things called Friday Night Magic. So I decided to go and observe them I had an absolute blast. I loved it. I’ve been a gamer for over 25 years, it was just something that I felt my heart just warm and I knew this between my conversation with Ed and the project with Lynne I knew this was where I had to go.
Unfortunately at the time, I had already started doing my research in writing so I did have to do a little bit of back-peddling and start over. But honestly, it was worth it because I got to spend years on a topic that I just thought was so fascinating. I also had an aha moment as I was going through the research where I was looking at people and how they’re representing themselves in this digital space. I remembered back to my undergrad and I actually did a thesis paper on how people represent themselves in screen names back in the day and so I guess I was sort of destined for it. This is always something that’s been very interesting to me. I find it fascinating that we make choices every day of how we represent ourselves and by applying this digital layer it gives us so many more options, so much more bandwidth. It’s really infinite and when you start thinking about where it’s going it gets even more interesting.
Host: That is really really fascinating. So, how are people choosing to represent themselves inside video games?
Maggie: There’s a bunch of different ways that I saw, at least, through the research that I did and some of the studies is that there is kind of four different approaches. Through my research, it was really one of two, but there are two other options. So the first one is you can be yourself you can show up and you can be yourself. Now when we say video games a lot of video games don’t have the options to create characters or you’re playing a pre-created character or something like that and offline games such as Dungeons and Dragons those types of games also give you the option to play characters and create them yourself. I’m a big Dungeons and Dragons player, so that’s why I always make sure I plug in Dungeons and Dragons, but you can show up as yourself and to be completely honest that’s often what I do because I just find it more natural for myself.
Some people will come in and they will do an idealized version of themselves. Admittedly, I’m probably somewhere between myself and idealized because I always, you know, make my hair a little darker, make my eyes a little bluer and make myself a little slimmer. And everybody has the option to do that if they want to and it’s a sliding scale for sure. Then there are two others that I did not see in my research but they have been studied which is your social self which is how your friends and colleagues see you. Then your idealized social self, how you want people to see you so it’s kind of interesting you have a lot of different options and in all honesty given psychology and how you know the human brain works it really probably is a sliding scale amongst all of them.
Host: And so, the Metaverse is coming. Will these same rules apply?
Maggie: Ah the rules are—I don’t even think there are any rules to be completely honest. The same behaviors I think that they definitely will apply I think it’s gonna be interesting to see how people start to react in these different spaces and this is—I’m so glad that you asked this question because this is actually one of the reasons why I selected my topic as well is because I remember back in the day you know things like Second Life, they were fascinating. They were a little early for their time but we’re starting to move back in that direction and I really thought this research is going to become even more relevant as we start to get into this. If you really start to think about and it’s hard to wrap your head around right? This whole other world could be anything and I remember another moment for me was when I read the book Ready Player One and then the movie came out. The book is better by the way. I remember thinking to myself I need to be a part of this. I need to be—this is going to be a thing one day. I don’t care if it’s in a movie, this is going to be a thing.
I remember that’s when I really wanted to go in this direction so when you think about you now have the freedom to exist in a world any way you want. Older, younger, bigger, smaller, taller, shorter, male, female, nonbinary whatever you want it gives you infinite possibilities on how you want to represent yourself. And presumably, you could also have an infinite number of personalities and character representations. There’s also an interesting Bruce Willis movie called Surrogates which is not a Metaverse per se but it also goes into some of these topics that are very very fascinating. You know how you represent yourself is it do you look like yourself but just a little bit different are you acting like you normally would in the quote-unquote real world or are you a little funnier are you a little more serious you can choose to represent yourself in any way you want to. And the implications to that are endless, there’s a whole other layer of psychology and sociology that has to be applied.
Host: So, just to clarify for those maybe not as familiar with the Metaverse, will you get to choose or design your own character?
Maggie: I’m not 100% sure to be completely honest. I would imagine because that’s one of the beautiful pieces of the Metaverse, right? Why would I go into a Metaverse, I mean, presumably people who want to go in as themselves can but to exist in a digital space. You likely will have to create something to be there so in theory you could probably have an option to scan yourself and be right into the game or you know I don’t even know what to call it aside from that right now the digital world but why would you not give people the flexibility to do that you already see it on Facebook where you can create your avatar. Snapchat you create your own avatar, pretty much every platform you can create your own emoji icon whatever it is so I don’t see why you would not be able to do that. It just adds to the immersion piece of the world.
Host: And speaking theoretically then everyone has a chance to have an avatar or character that’s represented of them you know inclusive, non-binary, animals from what I’ve seen from the videos if that’s what they said — how can this kind of representation impact society and culture?
Maggie: That is a very very deep question, one for the ages, one for the philosophers, one for the scientists I would love to have a tried-and-true answer to that, but I think you’re going to start to see a lot of research pop up in this area because the answers to that are infinite. There are so many different questions and topics and quandaries that are going to come up for that. Perfect example: what does crime look like in the metaverse? What does that even mean? Could there be a robbery, could you steal something from someone else? Can you harm someone else? On the flip side can you marry someone else in the metaverse versus having your real-life partner? There are all these questions that we don’t know because we haven’t been there yet and there are really no rules they’re not written yet.
Host: Oh my gosh, Maggie you just blew my mind.
Maggie: I know, it’s really amazing because when you really start to think about the implications of these things it’s virtually impossible for someone to get their entire brain around the whole concept of it. So that’s why I really believe there’s going to be a boom in research around this especially when it starts to become more popular because the implications are endless.
Host: Well, so I’m curious how the research that you did when you were in the fox DBA program helped you get to where you are today?
Maggie: Yes so, back to when Ed told me to do something that I loved and where I wanted to be I decided to quit my job and I decided to try teaching full time, I will admit it was not for me it was great ’cause I had talked before and I really loved students, I love teaching students I still consider myself a teacher to this day and I also decided to get involved with a gaming startup. So I started working with a gaming startup and we were going through the fundraising process right before COVID hit and strangely enough, we got funded the April before COVID hit, which was bizarre and the timing was crazy but the kicker was that it was an in-person tournament company. So all of the digital work that I had been doing became much more relevant for the company. So the company ended up going in that direction.
Over time I decided I was like you know what I kind of want to do my own thing. I got the confidence that I was like this is pretty cool. I really wanna try to do my own thing, so I decided to create a company on my own. The name of the company is Lair Entertainment, the website is lair.life and it’s actually a women-focused gaming company that we’re looking at how we can build tools or community for women gamers specifically. Because we do see that women have more challenging times in these digital spaces, especially because another thing that tends to emerge in digital worlds is that when people can put on a mask or be more anonymized you know the social niceties tend to go out the window so unfortunately women do suffer quite a bit in these gaming spaces and it’s very very unfortunate to see. And being a woman gamer, I was like I think we need something that can address this. So, if it wasn’t for the DBA if I hadn’t gone through that research if I hadn’t gotten that great advice from Ed honestly, I don’t think I would have had the confidence to do this and I probably wouldn’t have even gotten the idea to be completely like you know.
Host: That’s great. Do you have any advice for women gamers as the metaverse is coming?
Maggie: Ah, it’s interesting we’re already seeing a lot of really interesting things because often times it sometimes it does make me a little sad because I do see a lot of women will disguise themselves in digital worlds because they don’t want to be known that they’re women because they get harassed and that is an option obviously but the advice, I always give women gamers be unapologetically bold. Don’t get pushed down, don’t let them get away with this you know if you’re being harassed if you feel uncomfortable don’t let it slide you know so many times, I see things slide find your tribe and that’s what we’re trying to do we’re trying to create that tribe for them so that we can be stronger together. I always laugh and say that my goal is if one woman interacts with our tools one day when we’re ready to launch and comes out a stronger gamer to go and kick someone else’s butt out in you know digital space I’ve done my job. So, I say you know be out, be yourself and don’t let them hold you back.
Host: Thanks to our guests Jodi Detjen, Sherry Williams and Maggie Jordan for today’s inspiring and thought-provoking conversations. From leadership to financial inclusion, to video games these three women gave us plenty to think about. Like how can your organization change hiring and onboarding processes to think about inclusion in a holistic way? Can financial institutions continue to open pathways for those who have been overlooked in the past? And in the metaverse, who will we choose to be the real or idealized versions of ourselves or someone completely different? These challenges are what drive the Fox Executive DBA program, where leaders expand their decision-making and approach problems by learning how to research, collect, analyze and understand data. Learn more at fox.temple.edu/DBA. Join us for our next episode of Catalyst in honor of Earth Day. We’ll talk with Professor Crystal Reek about what happens when we make more sustainable choices and how we can make those choices easier and more frequent. I hope you’ll join us. Catalyst is a podcast from Temple University’s Fox School of Business subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and visit us on the web at fox.temple.edu/catalyst. We are produced by Milk Street Marketing, Megan Alt, Anna Batt and Karen Naylor. I’m Tiffany Sumner and this is Catalyst. I hope you’ll join us next time.
