IT TOOLS AND RESOURCES

Following Rob Kelly's enlightening Mendoza Exchange post that introduced the "One Mendoza" concept and encouraged us to think collectively as a College, it's only fitting to consider the tools that shape our daily experiences.

In our continuous endeavor to support your work and uphold the mission of our esteemed institution, we are excited to reiterate and share with you the transformative potential of three exceptional tools: Google Suite, Slack and Monday.com. Some of these tools, such as Slack and Monday.com, are currently being utilized by our staff to increase efficiency and communication within and across teams. Although our faculty members may not be the primary users of these tools, their indirect contribution through enhanced efficiency and communication benefits the entire Mendoza community.

Google Suite: Collaboration and Innovation
Google Suite, now known as Google Workspace, is more than just a suite of applications; it's a dynamic force that drives collaboration, innovation and productivity. With Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, Sheets, Slides and more, you are empowered to work seamlessly and unleash your creative potential from any location — be it real-time co-editing of documents, streamlined email communication or effortless data storage and sharing. Google Workspace streamlines your daily tasks and fosters collaboration within our community.

Slack: Communication and Collaboration
Slack is the hub for communication, where ideas flourish and teamwork thrives. This robust tool offers real-time messaging, file sharing and seamless integrations with many apps and services. With the ability to have dedicated channels for different projects, teams and interests, Slack enables efficient and organized discussions that transcend departmental boundaries. You'll streamline your communication, reduce email clutter and enrich collaboration, which makes the app an invaluable addition to your professional toolkit.

Monday.com: Simplifying Work Management
The complexity of work management becomes simplified with Monday.com. This user-friendly platform lets you plan, track and manage projects and daily tasks. Whether you're coordinating program development, organizing research initiatives or overseeing administrative duties, Monday.com equips you with customizable workflows, task assignments and visual tracking of your work. It's your key to managing projects more efficiently and ensuring that nothing falls through the cracks.

In the ever-evolving landscape of higher education, we must take advantage of these tools' immense power to drive innovation, foster collaboration and elevate productivity. These platforms will empower us to better serve our students, support our colleagues and further the continued success of our institution.

Mendoza IT (MIT) applauds your dedication to our Mendoza community and is eager to embark on this enhanced collaboration and productivity journey together. We are fortunate to have an exceptional IT team (Yes, I am biased) ready and willing to assist you with any of these tools. MIT will continue to serve faculty and staff throughout the College through improved processes and resources.

Please feel free to call us at 631-7896 or email us at mendozit@nd.edu for your consultation or additional resources to support your work.

Best regards,

Chris

Chris Fruehwirth
Director of Mendoza IT

One of the key priorities in our College’s strategic plan is to elevate our research culture. An important part of our research culture is getting together as a College to learn from and celebrate one another’s scholarship. Our faculty do so regularly with their colleagues in their respective departments, and in seminars where particular papers are being presented by external visitors and by our own faculty. 

I’m glad to announce a new initiative where we hope to gather faculty from across all departments at Mendoza – together with staff as well as graduate and undergraduate students – to hear from the most accomplished scholars in the College who will share an overview of their research targeted to a broad audience. 

In particular, we are launching the University Chair Public Lecture Series featuring Mendoza faculty who are designated as “University chairs” – Notre Dame’s highest recognition of the impact of a faculty member’s research. We plan to host one University Chair Public Lecture event each semester. 

Mike Crant, the Notre Dame Professor of Management & Organization and the College’s newest University chair, will present the inaugural lecture on November 28 in the Jordan Auditorium. The lecture and Q&A will take about an hour, followed by a social in our atrium. Details as to the time will be sent to you as a calendar invitation. 

For his lecture, Mike will present “My Mendoza Journey: A Memoir,” where he will reflect on his personal and professional experiences since joining Notre Dame in 1990 – his first academic job after receiving his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill earlier that year. He will present an overview of his body of research, the changes he’s observed in his field of organizational behavior and his contributions to the growth of the College and his field, all targeted to a broad audience. 

Mike researches workplace dynamics, focusing primarily on proactive personality and behavior at work. He is one of the creators of the proactive personality scale, the most frequently used measure of proactivity in the organizational literature. With nearly 23,000 citations to his research, he is one of the most highly cited scholars at Mendoza (top 5) and in the upper echelon of researchers at Notre Dame (top 30 among current faculty). His more recent work examines the frequency and impact of proactivity in Asian cultures, including exploring how proactivity helped Chinese hospitals deal with the early days of the COVID-19 crisis.

I think you will find Mike’s talk and the ones to follow to be meaningful, enjoyable and even inspiring.  I’m most grateful to Mike for his many contributions to Notre Dame, and his willingness to share his scholarship with all of us in the inaugural University Chair Public Lecture at Mendoza.

I hope that you will join us!

In Notre Dame,

Martijn

I’ve been using the term “ONE Mendoza” with increasing frequency. It reflects our desire to be a single college team with a unified purpose, aligned objectives and a common culture. There are two images that come to my mind when I think of ONE Mendoza.

The first is simpler and focuses on how our faculty, staff and students make up departments, functions and programs that are the Mendoza College of Business. Imagine looking down over a triangular pyramid with its three vertical sides rising up from the ground to meet at the apex. Metaphorically, each face is the primary “home” for each of our core internal constituencies, but there are three edges where the faces meet and a central apex where all three faces converge. 

To extend that metaphor, I envision these edges and apex are where much of our work actually happens and, when done well, we reach the peak (pun intended) of our mission as a college:

The second is a slightly more detailed and functionally centric organization graphic. It aims to show the relationship between an expanded list of internal and external core constituencies (the circles):

• Faculty
• Staff
• Students
• Student Prospects
• Alumni
• The Global Public

… and our functional groupings (the rectangles):

• Marketing & Brand Strategy
• Graduate Enrollment
• Graduate Career & Alumni Engagement
• Student Experience (Graduate & Undergraduate)
• Research
• Strategy & Planning
• College Operations

… in relation to the student journey and each other. It’s not a perfect representation but it’s helpful in what it communicates simply about who we are as an organization and how our work is associated with our constituents.

Since Dean Cremers announced organizational changes this summer we’ve been hard at work bringing that ONE Mendoza vision to life. We’ve drawn special inspiration from the new Strategic Framework for the University, where this opportunity can also be seen through a College lens:

“Becoming the Notre Dame the world needs will require the University to become better at thinking as an institution.”

We can practice thinking as an institution by first thinking as a College (beyond our immediate program, team or work function). Thinking as a College means moving toward a more unified, collaborative and organized way to achieve our goals. That has implications for almost every aspect of our daily work experience, including the tools that we use, the questions we ask ourselves and the way we help each other realize success.

I’ll devote time to these topics (and enlist the help of others) in future Mendoza Exchange entries. In the meantime, I would like to leave you with a reflection:

Have you ever been a part of a championship team? Or a team that did something very hard?

What did it look like? (From inside the team and from the outside?)

What did it feel like? (How would you describe the energy and emotion?)

What did it sound like? (What did you say to each other?)

Discuss this with your immediate team and your fellow Mendoza teammates. Share your experiences and reflect on how we can become a ONE Mendoza championship team.

Gratefully,

Rob

Rob Kelly
Chief Operating Executive

We have a lot going on in the College even as we head into fall break at the end of the week. Undergraduate and graduate student teams involved in Business on the Frontlines, Grow Irish, and Innovation and Design Thinking will travel across the globe — from Uganda and Appalachia to Honduras and Nevada — to work on a wide range of projects.

We also have a high level of ongoing research activity, as described in Ken Kelley’s excellent guest column last week. I’m pleased to highlight five recent research papers published in top academic journals:

Chris Bechler, Assistant Professor of Marketing
“Working Hard for Money Decreases Risk Tolerance” (Journal of Consumer Psychology)
The research finds that working harder to earn money increases valuation of earnings and aversion to losing them, resulting in lower tolerance for investment risk. This can help explain why consumers don’t invest enough, especially when times are hard, and provides support for new interventions that facilitate consumers’ accumulation of overall wealth (e.g., those that automatically invest consumers’ income).

Casher Belinda, Assistant Professor of Management & Organization
“A Spillover Model of Dreams and Work Behavior: How Dream Meaning Ascription Promotes Awe and Employee Resilience” (Academy of Management Journal)
Most explanations for the link between sleep and employee behavior are grounded in physiology. However, people also navigate psychological experiences during sleep, and these experiences are often recalled shortly before the start of the workday. This research shows that dreams often spill over to affect employee resilience and goal progress at work, in part due to their capacity to elicit attributions of meaning and waking awe.

John Donovan, Gerspach Family Associate Professor of Accountancy
“Does Recognition versus Disclosure Affect Debt Contracting? Evidence from SFAS 158” (The Accounting Review)
Donovan and co-authors study how recognition of previously disclosed pension liabilities under SFAS 158 affects debt contracting. They find that pension underfunding is associated with a higher cost of debt and a lower use of covenants when underfunding is disclosed. Following recognition, these effects reverse. This evidence contributes to the accounting literature by examining the contracting effects of recognition versus disclosure.

John Shim, Assistant Professor of Finance
“A Theory of Stock Exchange Competition and Innovation: Will the Market Fix the Market?” (Journal of Political Economy)
This paper studies how U.S. stock exchanges compete in the modern electronic era. Exchanges earn profits by selling speed to high-frequency traders, which ultimately come at the expense of investors through higher trading costs. Because of these profits, exchanges are not willing to adopt new, more efficient designs that reduce the value of speed. While implementing such a design would benefit investors, high-frequency traders would not purchase speed: exchange speed profits stand in the way of market design innovation.

Sriram Somanchi, Assistant Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations
“Exploiting Discovered Regression Discontinuities to Debias Conditioned-on-observable Estimators” (Journal of Machine Learning Research)
Regression discontinuity (RD) designs are widely used to estimate causal effects in the absence of a randomized experiment. Rather than relying on known discontinuities, the researchers developed a method (DEE – discover, estimate and extrapolate) to automatically discover regression discontinuities in observational data. Their method integrates information from multiple discovered discontinuities with an observational estimator and extrapolates away from discovered, local RDs using Gaussian Process regressions. The research demonstrates the performance of their method on two synthetic datasets and shows real-world applicability by estimating spatially heterogeneous treatment effects in the context of a recent economic development problem.

Thank you to Chris, Casher, John D., John S. and Sriram for their work.

I also want to recognize our colleagues who provided tremendous support in managing the aftermath of Monday’s fire in the lower level. They helped to put out the fire, evacuate the building, retrieve and return students’ belongings, relocate classes and communicate with students. Thanks to Kyle Way, Chad Harms, Hank Gettinger, Morgan McCoy, Ron Grisoli, Chad Deweese, Tabitha Kingsbury, Jennifer Brewer, Andy Wendelborn, Lisa Heming, Teresa True and Kari Friestad. (Here’s The Observer story, in case you missed it.)

In Notre Dame,

Martijn