Contributed by: Mark Miester
Tulane Freeman School of Business

Not long after he started the MBA program last year, Joel Yarmon realized the Freeman School — and New Orleans — had an image problem.

“My friends would say, ‘What’s it like down there? Is it still under water?’” Yarmon recalls. “Most people had a very different image in their mind’s eye of what it was like here, so I wanted to show them the real picture.”

Combining his love of technology with a desire to promote Tulane, Yarmon created TulaneMBA.org, a blog dedicated to MBA life at the Freeman School. About three times a week, Yarmon updates the site with pictures, videos, news stories, links and his running commentary on pursuing an MBA in general and pursuing an MBA at the Freeman School in particular.

“I try to keep an open mind when I’m going through school and life,” Yarmon says. “If something strikes me that I think would be important for people outside of New Orleans to know about, I make it a blog posting.”

In a typical week Yarmon might post the text of President Cowen’s Tulane Talk e-mail message, a podcast interview with finance professor Bill Reese, a video showing off the Freeman School’s Trading Room, a list of frequent questions MBAs get during job interviews and his thoughts on Fox’s new New Orleans police drama K-Ville. When a rare tornado touched down in Uptown New Orleans last February, Yarmon posted photos of Tulane’s campus the next morning to show viewers it was untouched.

“Everything moves so quickly today,” Yarmon says. “That’s why blogs are so important. I can put up information that nobody else vets. It doesn’t have to be politically correct. It doesn’t have to portray anybody in their best light. The important thing is that it’s real.”

Since launching the site in October 2006, Yarmon has posted more than 170 entries, and the site is averaging about 4,000 unique visitors per month, many of them prospective MBA students seeking the uncensored, unbiased viewpoint that blogs provide.

“Prospective students are very skeptical of the mainstream media and promotion in general,” says Bill Sandefer, director of graduate admissions at the Freeman School. “The blog has been a great resource. Prospective students get a lot of information from the admissions office, but I hope they use our current students to validate what we are telling them.”

While the blog has thus far been a labor of love on Yarmon’s part, he hopes to involve other students so that after he graduates the site can continue to provide readers with an insider’s perspective on Freeman and New Orleans.

“No matter what, it will remain student driven because I think that’s really what people appreciate about it,” Yarmon says. “Business school is a big commitment. I’m just trying to give prospective students another way to do due diligence on the decision to go to business school and, more importantly, the decision to attend the Freeman School.”

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Many thanks to the Tulane Freeman School of Business for allowing Stein Communications to reprint this article. We encourage you to visit their web site: www.freeman.tulane.edu.

Contributed by: Knowledge@Wharton

You know the type: coworkers who never have anything positive to say, whether at the weekly staff meeting or in the cafeteria line. They can suck the energy from a brainstorming session with a few choice comments. Their bad mood frequently puts others in one, too. Their negativity can contaminate even good news. “We engage in emotional contagion,” says Sigal Barsade, a Wharton management professor who studies the influence of emotions on the workplace. “Emotions travel from person to person like a virus.”

Barsade is the co-author of a new paper titled, “Why Does Affect Matter in Organizations?” (”Affect” is another word for “emotion” in organizational behavior studies.) The answer: Employees’ moods, emotions, and overall dispositions have an impact on job performance, decision making, creativity, turnover, teamwork, negotiations and leadership.

“The state of the literature shows that affect matters because people are not isolated ‘emotional islands.’ Rather, they bring all of themselves to work, including their traits, moods and emotions, and their affective experiences and expressions influence others,” according to the paper, co-authored by Donald Gibson of Fairfield University’s Dolan School of Business.

An “affective revolution” has occurred over the last 30 years as academics and managers alike have come to realize that employees’ emotions are integral to what happens in an organization, says Barsade, who has been doing research in the area of emotions and work dynamics for 15 years. “Everybody brings their emotions to work. You bring your brain to work. You bring your emotions to work. Feelings drive performance. They drive behavior and other feelings. Think of people as emotion conductors.”

In the paper, Barsade and Gibson consider three different types of feelings:

• Discrete, short-lived emotions, such as joy, anger, fear and disgust.
• Moods, which are longer-lasting feelings and not necessarily tied to a particular cause. A person is in a cheerful mood, for instance, or feeling down.
• Dispositional, or personality, traits, which define a person’s overall approach to life. “She’s always so cheerful,” or “He’s always looking at the negative.”

All three types of feelings can be contagious, and emotions don’t have to be grand and obvious to have an impact. Subtle displays of emotion, such as a quick frown, can have an effect as well, Barsade says. She offers this example: “Say your boss is generally in very good humor, but you see him one day at a meeting and his eyes flash at you. Even if they don’t glare at you for the rest of the meeting, his eyes have enunciated some valuable information that is going to have you concerned and worried and off center for the rest of the meeting.”

Barsade suggests that while some people are better than others at controlling their emotions, that doesn’t mean their coworkers aren’t picking up on their moods. “You may not think you are showing emotion, but there’s a good chance you are in your facial expression or body language. Emotions we don’t even realize we are feeling can influence our thoughts and behaviors.”

The researchers’ paper discusses a concept known as “emotional labor,” in which employees regulate their public displays of emotion to comply with certain expectations. Part of this is “surface acting,” in which, for instance, the tired and stressed airline customer service agent forces himself to smile and be friendly with angry customers who have lost their luggage. That compares to “deep acting,” in which employees exhibit emotions they have worked on feeling. In that scenario, the stressed-out airline worker sympathizes with the customer and shows emotions that suggest empathy. The second approach may be healthier, Barsade says, because it causes less stress and burnout, particularly emotional exhaustion from having to regulate one’s emotions and “play a role.”

But is there a downside to being too authentic? If the company is losing money and experiencing the effects of downsizing, should the manager, feeling stressed and overwhelmed, convey his despair to his workers? Or should the manager try to appear cheerful and act as if nothing is wrong? Barsade says it’s possible for the manager to convey emotions that are both authentic and positive, saying something like, “I know you’re worried. Things aren’t looking good, but you know, we have a way out of this and we can work [on it] together.” The employees will appreciate the honesty and take comfort in the optimism, she says.

Emotions as Valuable Data

Emotional intelligence — buzz words already familiar in psychology and education — is now talked about in business circles as well, Barsade says. Business schools are teaching executives how to be emotionally intelligent, and how to manage the emotions of their employees.

“The idea behind emotional intelligence in the workplace is that it is a skill through which employees treat emotions as valuable data in navigating a situation,” according to the authors. “Let’s say a sales manager has come up with an amazing idea that will increase corporate revenues by up to 200%, but knows his boss tends to be irritable and short-tempered in the morning. Having emotional intelligence means that the manager will first recognize and consider this emotional fact about his boss. Despite the stunning nature of his idea — and his own excitement – he will regulate his own emotions, curb his enthusiasm and wait until the afternoon to approach his boss.”

Barsade says research suggests that positive people tend to do better in the workplace, and it isn’t just because people like them more than naysayers. “Positive people cognitively process more efficiently and more appropriately. If you’re in a negative mood, a fair amount of processing is going to that mood. When you’re in a positive mood, you’re more open to taking in information and handling it effectively.”

While you can’t necessarily change your coworkers, people can take steps to avoid catching a negative mood, according to Barsade. They can tell themselves before attending a staff meeting that they are not going to be bothered by the person who shoots down everyone’s ideas, or that they are not going to let that person become the focus of their attention at the meeting (reducing the possibility for contagion). Or they can change their office routine. Barsade gave the example of a manager who was dragged down at the start of every day when passing by the desk of an employee who either grunted or gave no acknowledgement. The manager took control and simply started following a different route through the office.

Barsade’s research has taken her into a variety of workplaces, most recently long-term care facilities. Her research found that in facilities where the employees report having a positive workplace culture — she calls it a “culture of love” — the residents end up faring better than residents in facilities with a less compassionate and caring work culture. The residents reported experiencing less pain, made fewer trips to the emergency room, and were more likely to report being satisfied and in a positive mood.

Overconfidence Online

E-mail, instant messaging and video conferencing have introduced new challenges to the workplace, Barsade adds. E-mails and instant messages can be misunderstood because they are devoid of facial expressions, intonation and body language — cues that help convey emotions. Some people, she says, work hard at making their emails neutral, with the downside of sometimes sounding curt. On the other hand, while some writers may add a smattering of exclamation points, question marks and capital letters in an attempt to convey more emotion, this can also be a dangerous route, particularly when attempting humor or sarcasm to drive home a point.

“How can emotions be best conveyed via these media?” the paper asks. “What is the effect of conveying emotionally charged messages via text, when these messages are more likely to be misconstrued? How must we re-think emotional contagion and other social processes in an organizational world in which many meetings take place online?”

The paper cites a study showing that people tend to be overconfident about their ability to convey the emotion they wish in an e-mail, particularly when they are trying to be funny or sarcastic. “Video conferencing, also increasing in its use, has more cues, but it is also not yet the same as interacting face to face, particularly in group situations. Given that these technologies continue to grow as a primary means of communication within the business world, it is crucial that we understand how the interpretation and communication of affect occurs in these contexts,” the paper says.

Workplaces need to get smart about the best use of e-mail, Barsade states. Her advice is that “if something is important, and you know that the emotional context is going to be an issue, then pick up the phone; don’t just rely on e-mails.” And even the phone may not be good enough. “Sometimes, if it is really important, you just have to fly to where they are and meet them face-to-face to get the message across.”

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Reprinted with permission from Knowledge@Wharton — the online research and business analysis journal of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Belmont University assists in a nation’s decision

The Commission on Presidential Debates has chosen our friends at Belmont University, along with the University of Mississippi, Washington University, and Hofstra University, as presidential debate sites for 2008. Congratulations to you all on this amazing honor and opportunity.

Davidson College and a higher calling: a project filled with trust

In March 2007, Davidson College became the first liberal arts college in the country to replace loans with grants in all of its financial aid packages. This fall, we at Stein were retained by the college to partner in the mission of finding a suitable name for this historic action, somewhat like the branding terms used by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with its Carolina Covenant or the State of Georgia with its Hope Scholarship.

Collectively, we may have been searching merely for a marketing term, a branding device, but in the end, the college’s challenge to us transcended into much more. Our focus groups and web research on their behalf gave us tremendous insight into the values of the high school student and the American family in their selection criteria as they approach college choice. It also confirmed the great respect that Davidson’s alumni feel for their alma mater not only for their superb education but also for the values they received during their college years. The response to our on-site questions, off-site focus groups, and online surveys from high school students, Davidson students, parents, alumni, and high school counselors was enthusiastic and filled with imaginative suggestions.

Through both qualitative and quantitative research, we plotted and tested nearly a dozen branding terms, and The Davidson Trust rose to the top. How appropriate, as the term trust builds on a core value of the college, the college’s Honor Code, and that a Davidson education should be available and affordable to all qualified students regardless of means. This was indeed a project of a higher calling — a project filled with trust.

We welcome our new projects

We are pleased to announce new projects at the following institutions:

Cornell University (NY)
Davidson College (NC)
Hampton Roads Academy (VA)
LaGrange College (GA)
Sewanee: University of the South (TN)
Ursuline College (OH)

Stein’s latest addition

We’re excited to welcome our latest account executive, Kathryn Spruill. Before joining the Stein consulting team, Kathryn began her career in college admissions in 2002 when she rose through the ranks of student tour guides to a coveted internship in Tulane’s admission office. After graduating with a double major in Spanish and international development, she joined the admission staff full time. Hurricane Katrina brought her biggest challenge as she helped prospective students and parents overcome their fears and misconceptions about the post-Katrina city and university.

Kathryn also received her MBA at Tulane’s Freeman School of Business. The crowning achievement of her studies is the pending development of a splash park in New Orleans. She, along with three peers, completed a comprehensive study regarding the feasibility of building the park as well as its potential in generating additional revenues for City Park.

Aside from her post at Stein, Kathryn stays busy solving sudoku puzzles, working to improve her tennis skills on the Nintendo Wii, and training for the ING half marathon to benefit the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

Seeking qualified candidates for sales position

Stein is seeking qualified candidates for a sales/consulting position. If you are interested in learning more about the position, please contact Jenny Brower at 404.494.4393 or jbrower@steincommunications.com.