On Principle
45 episodes - English - Latest episode: 18 days ago - ★★★★★ - 14 ratingsOn Principle, a production of Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis, tells the stories of pivotal business decisions. What led to them? What were the choices? And what lessons can executives, entrepreneurs and other leaders draw from them?
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Episodes
Nothing but Volatility: Lauren Kriegler
April 09, 2024 09:00 - 36 minutes - 33.2 MBOn 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 20,000+ frontline employees—five years building a program from raw materials to design and development, inventory planning and distribution, and ...
Clash of the Megatrends: Chris Hoffmann
March 12, 2024 09:00 - 39 minutes - 36.7 MBIn 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’s the environment Chris Hoffmann has faced since 2016, after taking over the St. Louis-based, family-owned business his father began 28 years ear...
An Unforced Error: Brian Williams
February 13, 2024 10:00 - 36 minutes - 33.2 MBSince 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 Viget—a team that would market the firm, demonstrate its expertise, drive in-bound business leads and keep the phones ringing. Viget hummed into it...
Building for the Future: Camryn Okere
January 09, 2024 10:00 - 30 minutes - 27.8 MBThis 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 small community businesses—and providing experience to budding business leaders. No, this story is about another big “oh, shoot!” moment, after t...
Better Together: Steve Degnan
December 12, 2023 10:00 - 34 minutes - 31.5 MBIn 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 Degnan, then chief human resources officer for Nestlé Purina PetCare, joined other senior leaders and prepared to bring its workforce back. All ...
War Zone: Rescuing a Colleague: Kyle Bank
November 14, 2023 10:00 - 30 minutes - 28.5 MBIn 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 dollars, the leadership at that startup—Phenix Real Time Solutions—could hire an extraction team to relocate their Ukrainian-based developer and his pa...
The Fateful Cab Ride: Christine Chang
October 11, 2023 09:00 - 34 minutes - 31.8 MBChristine 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 other manufacturers. A business that had generated a significant customer following and an engaged fan base through savvy use of social media. A b...
Opportunity on the Line: Akeem Shannon
September 12, 2023 09:00 - 32 minutes - 29.5 MBAkeem 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 Flipstiks. Probably a lot of them. And he didn’t have any. Or any money. At the time, in mid-October 2020, Shannon’s startup was so young he sometimes s...
Time to Dream Bigger: Lisa Baron
August 08, 2023 09:00 - 31 minutes - 28.7 MBAt 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-term earnings? But after dinner, at the end of the day, the planning facilitator put a question to Baron and her board, a question she wasn’t expect...
"Now What?": On Principle Live event
July 11, 2023 09:00 - 34 minutes - 31.8 MBThe 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 was the first of our Leadership Perspectives events for the academic year. Featured Guests Alaina Macía. An Olin MBA alum and president and CEO of...
Never Break the Chain: Lingxiu Dong
June 13, 2023 09:00 - 19 minutes - 18.3 MBWhen 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 production of Washington University in St. Louis’ Olin Business School. Contributors include: Katie Wools, Cathy Myrick, Lesley Liesman and Judy Milan...
Daydream Believer: Erik Dane
May 09, 2023 09:00 - 18 minutes - 17.5 MBOur 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 opposite, mind-wandering, are valuable tools in the workplace by driving efficiency, creativity and well-being. Credits This podcast is a production of...
Learning to Balance: The Founders of Oystar
April 04, 2023 09:00 - 41 minutes - 38 MBArguably, 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 consultants. They’re also co-founders of Oystar, a student-driven platform to improve and expand university recruiting. “We're better at being c...
My Old Friend: Kendra Kelly
March 07, 2023 10:00 - 32 minutes - 30.3 MBKendra 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 chief of staff for the president of the luxury division, she’s only just beginning to understand how to deal with her old friend—an unwelcome v...
A Shot of Customer Service: David Mandell
February 07, 2023 10:00 - 30 minutes - 28.1 MBEighteen 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 training. Among the trail’s newest stops: Bardstown Bourbon. Founded in 2014, the distillery has decidedly less than a generation of tradition under...
Supply Chain Crash Course: Jimmy Sansone
January 10, 2023 10:00 - 31 minutes - 29.4 MBIf 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 2015 he quit his finance job, moved into his parents’ basement and started making shirts. Full time. And people loved them. His brothers joined ...
Warrior Heart, No Stigma: Gen. Mike Minihan
December 06, 2022 10:00 - 27 minutes - 24.9 MBGen. 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 a lot. As Minihan put it, traditional approaches tend not to “crack the code” on the problem. One day at a leadership workshop, a retired chief m...
A Career on the Line: Russ Flicker
November 08, 2022 10:00 - 31 minutes - 28.8 MBFake 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 of the worst global economic crisis in decades—with two children under 5 years old and his wife. In fact, he wasn’t really even trying to start a...
When the Kids Come First: Ty McNichols
October 11, 2022 09:00 - 29 minutes - 26.8 MBIn 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 morale, personal attacks and lightly veiled racism as he navigated the sudden loss of accreditation for the district. Oh, and by the way, McNichols ...
The Road to Reinvention: Mark Pydynowski
September 13, 2022 09:00 - 31 minutes - 29 MBTurns 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 started to set in. The tech was reliable in a lab, but not in the field. The cattle industry was decidedly not excited about it. Narrow margins in ...
Taking Ownership: Lauren Herring
August 16, 2022 09:00 - 29 minutes - 27.1 MBWhen 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 later, she took over as the company’s CEO — right after the economic downturn. But in her company’s line of work at that time, economic downturns ...
On Principle Live! A Leadership Perspectives event
August 03, 2022 09:00 - 2 minutes - 2.43 MBSomething 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 Principle podcast. Join us to hear them talk about their uh-oh moments, how they dealt with them and the lasting impact of their solutions. Gerard Craft...
Examining Strategy: Trish Gorman
July 05, 2022 09:00 - 13 minutes - 12.4 MBOur 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 remarks about what business strategy means to her, how she thinks about it and how it informed her work on launching a new online MBA program. CREDIT...
Bitten by Inspiration: Tim Solberg
June 07, 2022 09:00 - 13 minutes - 12.3 MBWhen 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 learned how Solberg was bitten by inspiration for another project. And we’re not speaking metaphorically. In today’s bonus episode, we revisit th...
In the Gray Area: Jason Wilson
May 03, 2022 09:00 - 29 minutes - 26.9 MBIn 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 Northwest Coffee Roasting Company, decided he had to exist in what he calls “the gray area.” He had to push through, stay the course and survive on self...
The Troubled Condition: Jill Castilla
April 19, 2022 09:00 - 31 minutes - 29.5 MBIn 2009, nobody wanted Jill Castilla in Edmond, Oklahoma, much less inside the halls of its century-old community institution, Citizens Bank—nobody except her stepfather. The third-generation Citizens Bank-er had coaxed her to come in the midst of a Federal Reserve examination underway at the bank. Though she’d arrived at the bank without a title, she got to work, living in her stepfather’s house. The bank examination was terrible. Heads rolled. Within 30 days of arriving, she found fraud,...
Rising from the Ashes: Angel Likens
April 05, 2022 09:00 - 33 minutes - 30.5 MBHow do you honor the past while planning for the future? In a business that relies on goodwill from customers—indeed, members—whose voices count most when a massive shock threatens to bury the business? How do you balance the pull of tradition, the weight of history, and the need to look forward and innovate? These questions and hundreds of others confronted Angel Likens in February 2017, when she was the general manager of Bogey Hills Country Club. The St. Charles County, Missouri, institu...
The Handshake Deal: The Garcia Brothers
March 22, 2022 09:00 - 30 minutes - 28.4 MBBerto and Ivan Garcia are the co-founders of what has become a St. Louis real estate powerhouse. Garcia Properties is a vertically integrated firm with divisions in construction, property management, buying and selling property, financing and insurance. But just two years into its existence, the company nearly died. How much risk is acceptable when you’re trying to start something new? And while we love to hear about the risks that paid off, what do we know about the risks that didn’t? Thes...
The Inspiration: Steve Smith
March 08, 2022 10:00 - 32 minutes - 29.6 MBA civic crisis rooted in racial inequity. A chance visit to an Atlanta retail attraction. A commercial developer persuaded to step outside his own comfort zone. Three events converged in 2015 that put in motion a $230 million redevelopment in St. Louis’s urban core—an effort that launched like a cannonball from Steve Smith’s imagination but came within a hair’s breadth of dying. In this episode of On Principle, we look at the moment when inspiration launches a transformative project. What p...
Finding Strategy in Crisis: Joyce Trimuel
February 22, 2022 10:00 - 41 minutes - 38 MBOn Memorial Day 2020, police in Minneapolis murdered a Black man during a routine traffic stop. In the context of that event, which sparked a deeper national reckoning on issues of racial equity and justice, business leaders across the nation grappled with their own response. How should they support workers who were shaken by the tragedy and moved to act? How would they confront their own company’s record of inclusive leadership? Were they positioned to make a constructive contribution to t...
The Second Act: Mike Isaacson
February 08, 2022 10:00 - 36 minutes - 33.8 MBAs the curtain rises for this episode, we meet Mike Isaacson, tapped in 2011 to become the new executive producer and artistic director for The Muny. Yes, The Muny, the 103-year-old outdoor amphitheater in St. Louis’ Forest Park, a massive venue renowned worldwide for drawing audiences to professionally produced musical theater. Cherished as one of the city’s crown jewels, The Muny has drawn stars of stage and screen to perform before its 11,000 seats and, in many ways, is a bellwether of th...
The $5 Million Mistake: Alaina Maciá
January 25, 2022 10:00 - 38 minutes - 35.6 MBIn 2003, Alaina Maciá arrived at MTM, the St. Louis-based broker of non-emergency medical transportation services, to find a company on the verge of explosive growth. By 2005, she was MTM’s CEO, and since that time the company has rocketed from $30 million to nearly $700 million in revenue, with clients and customers nationwide. A nagging concern she noticed as she began, however, was the stable but not particularly cutting-edge technology platform the company was built on. Yet she faced a ...
On Principle Season 2 trailer
January 11, 2022 10:00 - 5 minutes - 5.3 MBHow do you recover from a multimillion-dollar mistake while your company is expanding and your technology is ailing? How do you capitalize on unusual sources of inspiration? When is a handshake deal ever good enough? How do you plan strategy during a crisis? These are some of the questions we explore, thanks to the business leaders who share their stories in season two of On Principle. We’ll have eight more episodes that put you inside the C-suite or out on the street as our guests confront ...
Bonus Episode: Discovering Higher Purpose
December 14, 2021 10:00 - 21 minutes - 19.9 MBIn our first-season On Principle episode with Dave Ciesinksi, CEO of Lancaster Colony food brands, we also spoke to Anjan Thakor, Olin’s John E. Simon Professor of Finance. He had consulted with Lancaster Colony as its leaders sought to drive deeper employee engagement—and better results. Thakor, along with collaborating researcher Robert Quinn from the University of Michigan, has done pioneering research into the economic benefits of higher purpose. Why does the firm exist? As the pair fou...
Bonus Episode: The IQ of Innovation
November 16, 2021 10:00 - 18 minutes - 16.6 MBIn our first-season On Principle episode with Nina Leigh Krueger, CEO of Nestle Purina PetCare for the Americas, we also spoke to Anne Marie Knott, Olin’s Robert and Barbara Frick Professor of Business. Her research focuses on questions around innovation, R&D and entrepreneurship. We talked to her about corporate innovation and how companies know they’re seeing a return on their innovation dollar. In today’s second bonus episode of On Principle, we dive a little deeper into our conversation...
Bonus Episode: The Value of Values
October 19, 2021 09:00 - 13 minutes - 12.5 MBIn a white paper published in June 2021, WashU Olin’s Professor Stuart Bunderson and Jesse Wolfersberger, CEO and cofounder of Vrity, outlined a cross-section of consumer attitudes about how they relate to brands that outwardly articulate their values. Among their findings: Consumers said they will vote with their wallets when people value-align with a brand. They’ll drive farther, dig deeper, spend more to support those brands. Consumers who had job disruptions because of the pandemic we...
Taking a Punch: David Karandish
September 21, 2021 09:00 - 35 minutes - 32.7 MBDavid Karandish is, by any standard, a massively successful entrepreneur. His most noteworthy transaction is the sale of Answers.com for $960 million—a “rounded unicorn,” he says, using startup shorthand for a billion-dollar deal. But that success was hard-fought and made possible by a litany of failures and one unexpected disaster. Meanwhile, those failures—and that one big success—paved the way for what already promises to be another massive hit for Karandish, BSCS ’05. Capacity, his AI-d...
Out of the Box: Nina Leigh Krueger
September 07, 2021 09:00 - 32 minutes - 30 MBFor most of her career with Nestlé Purina PetCare, Nina Leigh Krueger had worked on the pet nutrition side of the business. When the WashU Olin alumna joined the company’s cat litter group to lead its marketing, she found she was a fish out of water—and facing a challenge with a high sales goal in a stagnating business. Leadership, questioning whether or not to exit the business, challenged her to make or break the line. Our story sets the stage for that pivotal moment and goes on to share ...
The Higher Purpose: Dave Ciesinski
August 24, 2021 09:00 - 41 minutes - 38.3 MBAs the factory manager gave David A. Ciesinski, CEO of Lancaster Colony food brands, a tour of the facility, he led the company’s top executive into a locker room with collapsing ceiling tiles and rusted fixtures. “Is this befitting of a ‘better food company’?” the manager politely asked, reflecting the company’s slogan. That was one of many moments that drove home for Ciesinski that his company could do more to walk the walk of a better food company. He strove to lead an organization that ...
The Tarnished Dream: Jason Wang
August 10, 2021 09:00 - 36 minutes - 33.7 MBOlin alumnus Jason Wang, BSBA ’09, owns a popular chain of restaurants in New York City, Xi’an Famous Foods. In the summer of 2020, one of his employees was punched in the face while she headed home on the subway, cutting her lip and bloodying her nose. Later, another was punched in the face on the way to work in the morning. The assailant had followed him off the train, looking for an opportunity. Those are the attacks he knows about. And they’re among the nearly 6,600 incidents of anti-As...
Out of the Breach: Paulino do Rego Barros Jr.
July 27, 2021 09:00 - 30 minutes - 28 MBIn the summer of 2017, a data breach occurred at Atlanta-based credit bureau Equifax affecting the records of more than 140 million consumers in the United States. The company announced the incursion in September, arguably one of the largest such breaches in history at the time, giving hackers access to private information—names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, credit card numbers, even driver’s license numbers. Into that scene, WashU Olin alumnus Paulino do Rego Barros Jr. stepped...
The Big Leap: Lisa Hu
July 13, 2021 09:00 - 32 minutes - 29.3 MBLisa Hu, PMBA ’16, failed at least 40 times before succeeding. It’s as simple as that. The founder of Lux and Nyx, maker of handbags designed for “jet-setter luxury and boardroom quality,” had the idea in mind, and worked on it while ascending the corporate ladder. Yet she failed over and over to find the right manufacturer to execute the vision she had in her mind. She tried doing it herself. She hired a seamstress. She looked at professional bagmakers—all the while, collecting prototypes ...
The Negotiation: John Mozeliak
June 29, 2021 09:00 - 34 minutes - 31.1 MBOn October 28, 2011, the St. Louis Cardinals completed a comeback from a 2-3 deficit to win their 11th World Series championship. It was a thrilling series that twice saw Cardinal hitters score clutch runs with the team a single strike away from elimination. Three days later, the reality of the team’s future resumed for John Mozeliak, the Cardinals’ president of baseball operations. Manager Tony La Russa, destined for baseball’s hall of fame, announced his retirement. And an off-the-field d...
The Longest Winter: Gerard Craft
June 15, 2021 09:00 - 36 minutes - 33.6 MBOn March 18, 2020, or thereabouts, the world turned upside down. With dire news around the spread of the deadly coronavirus came staggering uncertainty for business leaders. How should they respond? Among restaurateurs, owners were forced to make incredibly consequential decisions in the snap of a finger. They had to look into the fog and consider how long this new world would last. Pivoting operations is expensive—and hard to justify for only a few months. Fail to pivot quickly enough, howe...
On Principle Trailer
June 02, 2021 21:17 - 4 minutes - 4.11 MBHow do you put a price tag on a hall-of-fame ballplayer? How do you decide to throw away one career dream for another one? How do you survive an existential crisis in your business? The debut season of On Principle puts you behind the scenes for these decisions and more. We interview leaders of startups and C-suite executives of major corporations. We talk to the president of baseball operations for the St. Louis Cardinals and an award-winning chef. Then, for each episode, we talk to academi...