From the Dean's Desk

Guest Column: Wendy Angst

Wendy Angst

Wendy Angst

Tuesday, 2 April 2024
Image

“This college cannot fail to succeed. Before long, it will develop on a large scale. It will be one of the most powerful means for good in this country.” 

This well-known quote from Father Edward Sorin, C.S.C, founder of Notre Dame, is a part of the fabric of our beloved University. It defines the spirit of our faculty, students, alumni and extended family of all those who love and embrace the mission of Our Lady’s University. This quote also served as the inspiration for the aptly named Powerful Means Initiative that I have the honor to lead.

The genesis for the Powerful Means Initiative (PMI) began as most exciting ideas do – on the back of a napkin. In 2015, I was meeting with friend and colleague Matt Alverson ’01, ideating on what the future of high impact design thinking projects could be for our ND students. How could we support the interest of the students in applying what they are learning in the classroom to make a real impact – and to serve as a powerful means for good?

PMI began to take shape during spring semester 2020. My project for the Innovation & Design Thinking class involved St. Bakhita Vocational Training Center (SBVTC) in Northern Uganda. Soon after I traveled to St. Bakhita with 10 students during that spring break, the University moved to online courses to navigate the COVID pandemic. Many of the I&D students were seniors and many had their start dates for their new jobs delayed. 

As I’ve come to learn from my past 14 years with the incredible young women and men that make up our Notre Dame student body, the students did not view a delayed start date as an opportunity to lean out and binge-watch shows. Rather, they saw this as an opportunity to lean in and amplify their impact on projects they cared about. Many of the students from my class stayed engaged with the St. Bakhita project and began strategizing on how to implement ideas that originated from the course. 

Another truth that I've continued to have reinforced from my time at Notre Dame is that we have an incredible community of alumni, family and friends! The parents of one of my former students made a gift endowing experiential learning for my classes, and after seeing the passion and potential impact from projects with Saint Bakhitas, offered to provide additional support to get the implementation phase of the project off the ground! 

We got to work putting the needed infrastructure in place to help implement the ideas, including establishing agreements between the University and the Archdiocese of Gulu, completing needed infrastructure updates so the school could reopen post-COVID, providing tuition support for the young women in the region to be able to attend school and securing a trusted team to lead the school. (A big thank you to our amazing head of school, Victoria Nyanjura (MGA ‘20).)

Nearly four years later, the initial project partner has become the proof of concept for what is possible when the Notre Dame family comes together to make a meaningful impact by using business as a force for good, as highlighted in the 2022 “What Would You Fight For?” series. The Saint Bakhita project and all that is possible has become the cornerstone of PMI.

Today, PMI has grown to encompass an academic track (Impact Consulting minor, research and internships), an investment vehicle (Powerful Means Fund) and a campus-wide student services club (Innovation 4 Impact). 

The Impact Consulting minor incorporates a series of classes that provide students with a path to engaging with project partners throughout classes over multiple semesters:

  • Innovation & Design Thinking: Building empathy with stakeholders and engaging in collaborative innovation.
  • Design Thinking Immersion: Spending time on the ground with the project partner, conducting research and testing prototypes.
  • Applied Impact Consulting: Managing the project and the budget to implement ideas in a sustainable way.
  • Designing Your Life: Reflecting on purpose and intentionally using time and talents in service to others.

Students have the opportunity to continue working on projects with the partner over summer or winter breaks with paid research fellowships and internships.

To enable collaborative innovations to have a meaningful impact, PMI supports the student-led investment vehicle, the Powerful Means Fund (PMF). PMF currently is focused on providing micro-grants and student mentorship for early stage initiatives and seeding micro-loans for partner-centric Village Savings and Loan Accounts for partner recipients to borrow from for needed capital for their entrepreneurial endeavors. Students provide mentorship and training, track the investments and measure the social impact, which is reported out annually in the IM-ND (Impact Metrics-Notre Dame) report. 

The Innovation 4 Impact Club offers an opportunity for students who are not enrolled in the minor or the management of the fund to work on social impact projects. Examples of what club verticals are working on this semester include: 

  • Biogas: Installing one unit at the school over spring break with the hopes of expanding to the broader community as a safer and more sustainable way to cook.
  • Early Childhood Development Center: Helping with the development of a curriculum and providing themed learning units for the center for the new ECDC that was developed with a collaboration with ND Architecture. 
  • Storytelling: Capturing images of locals to create a book similar to the Humans of New York to tell the story of the resilient members of the Kalongo community.

Each club vertical has an industry advisor composed of an awe-inspiring group of alumni and friends.

The top priorities for next stage of PMI are to expand the number of students involved in the work, to identify the second project partner and to continue to collaborate with other colleges across campus to contribute to the ecosystem of high-impact experiential learning that makes a meaningful impact, working together across the Notre Dame family to serve as a Powerful Means. 

PMI would not be where it is today without the more than 500 students who have contributed to this work through the Innovation & Design Thinking courses over the past four years; the nearly 100 students who have participated in the immersions through spending time on the ground conducting research and building, testing and implementing ideas in Uganda with our first project partner; and the foundational team of alumni who worked on these projects as students and still make time to contribute to the work today, including Alex Potts ‘23, Grace Kamholz ‘23, Carlos Flores ‘23, Abbie Hagerty ‘23, Joanna Helm ‘23, Olivia Coyle ‘22, Megan Baumbach ‘22, Bruce Morris ‘20, Kendyl Pettit ‘20, Alice Breummer ‘20, and Joe Bialous ‘20. A special note of gratitude to Quin Gallagher ‘21, who we are lucky enough to have working on the initiative full-time as the program coordinator! And of course to our dean, Martijn Cremers, for enabling the entrepreneurial culture in Mendoza to make this work a reality.

And a huge note of gratitude for the Powerful Means Circle whose mentorship and support every step of the way to not only me, but to countless ND students, to serve as a powerful means to help build a lasting legacy of transformative impact. Thank you, Mark Pulido and Donna Walker, Cindy Stark ‘81 and Paul Stark ‘80, Matt Alverson ‘01, Dr. Carrie Quinn ‘96, and our newest members, Mike Neumann ‘98 and Melanie Neumann (SMC ‘98). 

In Notre Dame,

Wendy

Wendy Pfromm Angst
Teaching Professor, Management & Organization 
Director, Powerful Means Initiative
Director, Impact Consulting Minor

 

Group shot of Powerful Means holding a Notre Dame Flag in front of a cross on a mountain

Research Roundup

Dean Martijn Cremers

Dean Martijn Cremers

Monday, 25 March 2024

I am glad to share some recent research papers that our faculty published in top academic journals:

Ahmed Abbasi, Joe and Jane Giovanini Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations
John Lalor, Assistant Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations
Kezia Oketch, Ph.D. in Analytics Student
Should Fairness be a Metric or a Model? A Model-based Framework for Assessing Bias in Machine Learning Pipelines (ACM Transactions on Information Systems)
Fairness is a crucial challenge in AI. However, fairness measurement currently involves metrics that consider disparities for a single protected attribute or group. Existing metrics don’t work well in many real-world applications of machine learning (ML), where imperfect models are applied to data with multiple protected attributes in a broader process pipeline. This leads to inconsistencies in fairness metrics between upstream representational harms and allocational harms in downstream policy/decision contexts. The authors propose FAIR-Frame, a model-based framework for parsimoniously modeling fairness across multiple protected attributes in a holistic ML environment. FAIR-Frame’s representational fairness measures have the highest percentage alignment and lowest error with allocational harm observed in downstream applications. The researchers’ findings have important implications for various ML contexts, including information retrieval, user modeling, digital platforms and text classification, where responsible and trustworthy AI are becoming an imperative.

 

Nicholas Berente, Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations
Sriram Somanchi, Assistant Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations
Do Crowds Validate False Data? Systematic Distortion & Affective Polarization (MIS Quarterly)
The paper examines how socio-cognitive influences can systematically distort crowdsourced ground truth in event-centric data through subgroups. The researchers conducted an immersive experiment to investigate whether crowd consensus can be systematically distorted by subgroup-based socio-cognitive influences, such as affective polarization. In the experiment, raters from various subgroups with varying levels of affective polarization were asked to view and validate crisis data from a violent public riot in 2020. Relying partly on double/debiased machine learning techniques, the research analyzes heterogeneous treatment effects across subgroups. The results show that affective polarization and more extreme raters, via the constructs of loyalty and betrayal, distort consensus-based ground truth in different ways.

 

Yixing Chen, Assistant Professor of Marketing
The Value of Safety Training for Business-to-Business Firms (Journal of Marketing Research)
Business-to-business suppliers invest in safety training programs believing that such programs mitigate safety hazards, prevent workplace injuries, and create value for their customers. However, causal evidence of these effects is sparse.  Leveraging proprietary data from a global oil field services company, a safety training regulation in New York City, and a conjoint experiment of procurement professionals, we underscore safety training as an important risk-mitigation vehicle that also has positive implications for business-to-business buying decisions.

 

Stephannie Larocque, Notre Dame Associate Professor of Accountancy
On the Informativeness of Unexpected Exclusions from Street Earnings (Contemporary Accounting Research)
The paper investigates the unexpected exclusions from street earnings that are revealed after earnings are reported. The researchers find that unexpected exclusions represent a mix of transitory and recurring items and are informative about future profitability, particularly when firms meet or beat analysts’ street forecasts but not their GAAP forecasts. The findings are consistent with recurring earnings amounts being opportunistically shifted to excluded items to meet or beat benchmarks.

 

Adam Wowak, Viola D. Hank Associate Professor of Management & Organization
John Busenbark, Mary Jo and Richard M. Kovacevich Associate Professor of Management & Organization
Why Do Some Conservative CEOs Publicly Support Liberal Causes? Organizational Ideology, Managerial Discretion, and CEO Sociopolitical Activism (Organization Science)
CEOs are increasingly choosing sides in societal debates, despite the obvious risk of alienating stakeholders. Even more puzzlingly, conservative CEOs sometimes espouse liberal stances in such debates, which runs counter to the otherwise consistent evidence that CEOs are guided by their ideologies in their actions. The study addresses this paradox by examining the antecedents of CEO liberal activism with an emphasis on the interplay between the CEO’s ideology and the prevailing ideological tilt of the employee population. In short, the research finds that a pronounced organizational ideology constrains a CEO’s ability to act in accordance with their own values.

Rafael Zambrana, Assistant Professor of Finance
Ben Golez, Associate Professor of Finance
Friendly Investing and Information Sharing in the Asset Management Industry (Journal of Accounting and Economics)
The researchers study whether asset managers act as friendly shareholders of brokerage firms to gain privileged investment information. They find that mutual funds are more likely to hold and overweight stocks of their broker parent companies and side with management in contested votes. They also find that fund performance improves with the extent of such friendly investing. The performance improvement stems from trading the stocks of the broker's clients.

Thank you to Ahmed, John L., Kezia, Nick, Sriram, Yixing, Stephannie, Adam, John B., Rafael and Ben for your work.

I also wish you a blessed Holy Week and a joyful Easter. Pope Francis’ Easter message described the season of Lent as “a season of conversion, a time of freedom” and as an occasion to rediscover God’s promise: 

“It is time to act, and in Lent, to act also means to pause. To pause in prayer, in order to receive the word of God, to pause like the Samaritan in the presence of a wounded brother or sister.” 

May this be a blessed time for you and your families.

In Notre Dame,

Martijn

Visit to Manila

Dean Martijn Cremers

Dean Martijn Cremers

Monday, 18 March 2024

Welcome back from spring break, and to the home stretch of the academic year. Commencement is just a little more than two months away. 

I was fortunate to travel just before spring break to Manila, the Philippines, for the Notre Dame Alumni Association Asia Pacific regional meeting and to explore a partnership with De La Salle University. The Philippines has one of the fastest-growing economies worldwide. Manila, with a city-center population of nearly 15 million, is one of the world’s most densely populated.

Club leaders and representatives from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, Singapore, India and the Philippines attended, along with Experiential Learning Director Megan Piersma and several other Alumni Association leaders including Executive Director Dolly Duffy. I gave a presentation to the alumni club leaders about the College’s strategic plan and had several meetings with regional leaders of Notre Dame International to explore collaboration. I also met with a few parents of Notre Dame students and met other alumni at social events.

As I mentioned, an important reason for Megan’s and my trip was to explore a partnership with De La Salle University (DLSU), a Catholic university founded in 1911 by the Christian Brothers whose main campus is in Manila. We discussed future collaborations with DLSU, including a potential immersion for the Global EMBA in Manila and an exchange program for our undergraduate students (with DLSU students coming to Notre Dame in the fall and spring semesters, and our students traveling to Manila perhaps as part of a summer program).

We also met five of our own MBA students in Manila! They were in the Philippines as part of the Meyer Business on the Frontlines program. Megan and I had dinner with leaders from World Vision, our Frontlines partner in the Philippines, along with the Frontlines student team and two alumni advisors. We had fantastic Chinese food, and I challenged myself to eat some new dishes including chicken feet, which are one of the most popular appetizers in Asia.​​ They tasted pretty good (as long as I didn’t think about what I was eating). 

One of our memorable outings was to Mount Pinatubo, an active volcano about 60 miles north of Manila. Pinatubo last erupted in 1991, killing 847 people. Megan and I got up at 1:45 a.m. to drive to the volcano so we could get our hike done before the heat of the day. (Daytime temperatures in Manila typically range in the 90s and it’s very humid.) It was a truly fantastic experience, and one that we could offer the more adventurous of the EMBA students.  

Manila is a fascinating, diverse, busy city with a rich heritage. As a booming metropolis, the energy, the noise, the craziness are off the charts. At the same time, people are easygoing, very friendly and welcoming. Somehow, it all works, even the completely crazy traffic. It's also a city of extremes. There's great wealth and extreme poverty right next to each other. As a vital part of the Asia Pacific region and with a large Catholic population, the Philippines is important for the University and College. I felt a strong American flavor to their culture, e.g., in how many people are wearing NBA jerseys and caps, and the songs on the radio in the cabs.

Hearing from alumni, many of whom are from Mendoza, about their gratitude for Notre Dame, was inspiring. They have learned that the Notre Dame ethos of leadership is about service, and service is about others and giving back. And that’s what they are doing. They attended the regional meeting to learn how they could be more effective in giving back, which is just wonderful to hear. Our strongest supporters are our alumni, and they expressed deep gratitude again for everything they have received from the University because of our staff and faculty.

I’m grateful to the Notre Dame Alumni Association and especially to Lea Barthuly, NDAA international program director, and to the Philippines Alumni Club leaders Guenevierre Panopio (BBA ‘11) and Jaime Urquijo for arranging the meeting. Thank you to Megan Piersma, Ryan Retartha and Reilly Fangman for their support in coordinating the trip, and especially to Megan for being such a fantastic fellow traveler. 

In Notre Dame,

Martijn

 

 

 

Guest Column: Jen Wade

Jen Wade

Jen Wade

Monday, 4 March 2024
Image

Charting New Horizons in Branding

Greetings, fellow Mendoza teammates! It is with great excitement that I reintroduce myself to you. I say “reintroduce” because I began my role as Senior Director of Marketing and Brand Strategy in November 2023, just before the birth of my son, William, who joined us in the middle of the winter storm on January 12, 2024. As I am now back from maternity leave – and as a nod to “the Great Wave” – I feel like a sailor returning to familiar shores after a voyage at sea. Let’s hoist the sails and explore uncharted waters together!

Let me first recognize our talented marketing and brand strategy team who are the unsung heroes behind our brand’s voyage. Composed of teammates who specialize in marketing (led by Brian Connelly) and communications (led by Carol Elliott), as well as content development and digital and social media, together our team harnesses creativity, strategic acumen, and tireless dedication to propel Mendoza to new heights. We are committed to shaping narratives, sculpting advertising campaigns, and weaving stories that resonate with key audiences. 

Here’s our course for the year ahead:

  1. Imagination Unleashed - Brace yourselves for marketing and communications campaigns that defy gravity. We’re ready to ignite minds through new messaging, storytelling, and advertising that promote our brand and attract new students. Creativity, my friends, is our compass.
  2. Brick by Brand Brick - Notre Dame’s iconic Golden Dome was not built in a day. Similarly, we’ll strengthen our Mendoza brand by conducting market research to lay the foundation for new strategies and tactics. We aim to enhance our brand by optimizing creative solutions and targeted messages while exploring new trends.
  3. Flowing Communications - Our Mendoza communication channels span across the seven seas! From social media, print, email campaigns, stories, videos, and more - reach out to us with your story recommendations and departmental updates!

Already in 2024…

  • The marketing and brand strategy team is launching new assets and telling new stories, thanks to the support and collaboration of our amazing faculty and staff and our inspiring students and alumni.
  • Advertising for our master’s programs is meeting audiences where they are through paid media as we roll targeted, scroll-stopping messages on Google, LinkedIn, Meta, and more. 
  • A new edition of our renowned Mendoza Business magazine, reaching more than 25,000 alumni and friends of the College, is in the works and will be published this spring. The cover story presents an in-depth exploration of how our mission-focused research is having a real impact on some of the human community’s most pressing needs, such as recovering from the devastation caused by natural disasters.   
  • Our team is traveling near and far to capture new content that showcases experiential learning in global settings, including a trip with the Global EMBA crew to Barcelona, Spain, in early March. 
  • Our Mendoza website has been audited and updated to reflect program value propositions and fresh messaging and graphics, which has led to positive outcomes, including:
    • Newly optimized pages.
    • Increased organic traffic.
    • Reduced bounce and exit rates.
    • Improved mobile-friendliness of pages.
    • Piloted a new content management system for the soon-to-launch Meyer Business on the Frontlines website.
    • Comprehensively revised the site to meet Web Content Accessibility Standards. This included updates to design, including adding contrast ratio for visual impairment and stop/play buttons on video for motion sensitivity and providing users with assistive tools such as screen readers to better navigate the site.

As I settle back into Mendoza Suite 123 (come visit!) and begin planning the work ahead, I am grateful for the opportunity to embark on this grand adventure with all of you. So, fellow sailors, may our hashtags trend, our brand compass remain true, and our Mendoza community legacy ripple through time!

Jen 

Jennifer Wade
Sr. Director of Marketing & Brand Strategy

University Chair Public Lecture featuring Ahmed Abbasi

Dean Martijn Cremers

Dean Martijn Cremers

Monday, 26 February 2024

I’m pleased to announce that Ahmed Abbasi, the Joe and Jane Giovanini Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations, will be the speaker for the next University Chair Public Lecture on May 1. His talk in the Jordan Auditorium will start at 3 p.m. and will be followed by a reception. You should have received a calendar invite for his talk. I hope you can attend.

The University Chair Public Lecture Series was launched in fall 2023 to recognize the importance of the research contributions of our faculty. The series features Mendoza faculty who have been designated as University chairs – Notre Dame’s highest recognition of the impact of a faculty member’s research. The event is an opportunity to hear about their work and career, and to celebrate together how we are growing the good in business to contribute to human flourishing. (You can view the inaugural University Chair Public Lecture by Mike Crant here.)

Ahmed is the co-director of the Human-centered Analytics Lab (HAL), which seeks to better understand the human condition in the context of digital lives. He also serves as the academic director of the Ph.D. Program in Analytics. His research interests are related to text and predictive analytics, and include subjects such as the ethical use of generative AI. A prolific researcher with more than 9,300 citations, he has published more than 100 articles in journals and conferences, including over 40 articles in top-tier outlets such as MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Journal of Marketing, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, and ACM Transactions on Information Systems.

Ahmed’s research has received over a dozen individual and best paper awards. Recent research themes include analytics for social good, the role of AI in supporting public health, and the use of fair machine learning to better understand the human condition for enhanced decision making and policy outcomes. Ahmed also has generously served the profession in his roles as senior or associate editor for top journals such as INFORMS, ACM, IEEE, and AIS, having authored over 350 editorial reports and guest-edited special issues on various AI-related topics such as the role of the institutional press in the digital age, disaster response management, healthcare analytics, and trustworthy AI.   

His work has been funded by more than 15 grants from the National Science Foundation and industry partners such as Microsoft, eBay, Deloitte, and Oracle. Ahmed is a recipient of the IEEE Technical Achievement Award, INFORMS Design Science Award, and IBM Faculty Award. He also served as chair of the INFORMS College on AI. 

The inaugural University Chair Public Lecture by Mike Crant was a wonderful event, and I look forward to hearing from Ahmed. Please join us.

In Notre Dame,

Martijn

Latest from the Dean