Private Innovation in the Public Interest

Professor Mabel Abraham has built her career around understanding how inequality in employment practices getsproduced by people who want to do the right thing but end up with biased outcomes.   Mabel has studied how biasesemerge unintentionally through interactions between individuals, such as evaluators and job candidates; within triads, such as through referrals; and within networks and systems.    What tends to work depends a great deal on the historical experiences of the people involved, and on the micro-structure of decision processes.   If you want to learn more about what it takes to rout out bias, this episode gives you insight into this eminent scholar’s research findings.

Professor Chris Yenkey studies corruption, political violence, misconduct, and bribery.  In this impassioned conversation with Anita, he gives us deep insight into what constitutes corruption, and how it gets produced by people who want things that are important to them.   Chris describes how this problem is changing on a macro level, and what it’s going to take to address corruption at scale.   In the end, he finds optimism inthe ways in which we cooperate every day on the streets.  

Professor Deepak Somaya has studied the ways that technologies influence the competitive advantages of firms in one way or another ever since he was an undergraduate in engineering.   As a Professor at the University ofIllinois, his expertise now is in the ways that technology amplifies the strategic importance of employee retention and mobility.  In this conversation, Deepak describes forAnita why tech firms in pursuit of long-term scale-based advantages race in the short run to attract coders that can create superior customer-facing experiences.   It’s theinteraction between employee insight and customer experience that really matters, and it is the potential for exponential improvement in our quality of life that keeps Deepak going.

Professor Colleen Cunningham studies why and how companies accomplish innovations that benefit the public, such as in pharmaceuticals and alternative energy.  She sees a role for government in clarifying the guardrails on what’s allowed, but that’s not enough to get great outcomes.  It’s also important for government – and for civil society at a broad level – to make sure that the incentives reward innovators given the risks they must endure.  Yet even that’s not enough.  It’s also important to make sure that the right amount of competitive behavior arises.   You want some secrecy as innovators protect against imitation, but enough knowledge-sharing for insights to accumulated.   The formula:  Guardrails + incentives – excessive competition.

In this milestone episode, host Anita McGahan reflects on the key themes explored across the podcast's first 100 episodes,which bring together scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to discuss how private innovation can serve the public good.Complexity and entrenchment — Grand challenges like climate change and inequality are deeply baked into existing systems, making change difficult but not impossible.Achieving innovative solutions — Marshalling science, orchestrating public-private efforts (e.g., NASA as a model), and leveraging AI to break through innovation bottlenecks.Organizational adaptation — Whether large, established companies can actually overcome inertia to address global challenges, including stranded assets and competing incentives.Cross-sector collaboration — The role of NGOs, social movements, and public-private partnerships in driving change, along with the cultural and linguistic barriers between sectors.Corporate social responsibility (CSR) — A movement seen as declining due to greenwashing, anti-ESG sentiment, and poor measurement, with a shift toward genuine sustainability.Starting small and local — Despite the scale of global problems, many speakers advocated for prototypes and proof-of-concept approaches that grow organically.Government-side challenges — Governments are generally not designed for innovation, but can scale proven private-sector solutions effectively once trust is established.Stakeholder trust and dignity — Trust is slow to build, quick to lose, and foundational to any successful collaboration.Fairness, justice, and integrity — Acting ethically and collaboratively is essential to achieving meaningful breakthroughs.Personal transformation — Engaging in socially purposeful work can change the individuals doing it, not just the communities they serve.Risks of intervention — Imposing Western entrepreneurship frameworks on low-income communities can cause real harm, including backlash and violence.Strategic human capital and education — Innovation in K–12, university, and worker training, including the role of AI in reshaping skills development.Health innovation — Tensions between private IP and equitable access to medicine, especially for low-income populations globally.Energy security — The need for honest conversations about nuclear, geothermal, and natural gas as transitional energy sources.Microfinance and lending — Both the promise and the potential pitfalls of microfinance and entrepreneurship training in the Global South.Looking AheadAnita previews forthcoming episodes, flagging: AI and the future of work, wealth distribution, corruption, long-term "bigscience" projects, research integrity, authenticity and trust, and when small companies can outmaneuver large ones.

Professor Barry Finette is a global-health physician who decided as a college student to pursue his passions and to find a career in which he had control over what he did andwhen.    Fast forward to today, and he is a pediatrician, an exited entrepreneur, and a professor with two major appointments and a pioneering impact on the health of children in low-income countries.  In their conversation, Anita and Barry talk through the ways in which Barry was inspired to create ThinkMD, a company that supports field workers in low-income countries with AI-drive, smartphone-delivereddiagnostic capabilities.   Even in the most remote areas of the world where there are few physicians, scant electricity,and few therapies available, the digital technologies offered by ThinkMD allow for diagnoses that are saving lives.  Inthe end, Barry says, it’s always just about the patient.

Professor DK Kryscynski is an expert on how employees bring their unique skills and capabilities into their employment duties in ways that create value for their employers, their customers, their co-workers, and themselves.  In this conversation with Anita, he expresses an almost unbounded optimism about the potential for AI to make our jobs more meaningful and creative.   The way that this will work will depend on how are jobs are designed.  For those of us with a lot of drudgework, the potential is to offload those duties so that we can build stronger human relationships and spend more time on creative projects.   How this will play outdepends on many factors that are not currently known, but DK sees a bright future for anyone willing to embrace the possibilities.

Professor Bryan Stroube of the University of Kentucky has studied English, Engineering, and Management – all with a passion for understanding the human experience of interacting with products and services that are available through markets.   In his discussion with Anita, he describeshow he has identified the ways that misfit album tracks, movie themes, and fine-art representations have evoked strong responses that demonstrate buyer interest in new types of expressive products.   Bryan has also studied how technologies such as eCommerce have enabled entrepreneurs to build new kinds of capabilities at the same time as reducing requirements for difficult-to-develop skills.  The net result is the unlocking of untapped potential to create value through organized action.

Professor Bukky Oyedeji is a LEED-certified architect with extensive experience in designing physical workspaces in the UK, the US and Africa.   As a Professor of Strategy, she focuses on the implications of physical space for unlocking our human potential as individuals, in teams, and in our communities   that makes firms flourish in the unlocking of human creativity at all these levels – and that creativity depends on our experiences of physical space.  On top of that, the “behavioural residue” that each of us leaves behind has a profound impact on the people we seek to influence (so clean up your room!).   Listen to this great conversation if you want a whole new perspective on how you and your people interact to create new ideas.

Professor Christiane Bode studies how firms implement social-impact initiatives.   In this far-reaching conversation with Anita, she emphasizes how the field turned from extreme positions – first that companies will not do CSR and then that companies will all do CSR – to a middle ground where the current emphasis is on employee motivation.    In her own research, Christiane has found that there are often paradoxes and problems that arise when companies pursue social impact to satisfy employee interests in meaningful initiatives.   She feels that we haven’t quite cracked the code as a field on what it will take to have true social impact beyond meeting the needs of stakeholders.  What’s it going to take to direct firms toward solving tough problems even when employees and customers and investors are uncomfortable with the work?  Christiane says that answering this question is the next big leap required for true progress on corporate sustainability.

Professor Michael Leiblein has studied a wide range of subjects over the course of his long and storied career.   Mostrecently, he has examined how uncertainty about the future can lead companies to compete for effective climate technologies.  Broadly, what will it take to structure incentives so that companies invest at scale toward addressing the world’s most pressing problems?   Michael argues for a systemic, structural approach for overcoming the disruptive effects of sustainability initiatives that can lead companies to invest more aggressively than they would otherwise.   Listen and be inspired.

Professor Arzi Adbi hails from the poorest province of India, Bihar, where he studied assiduously for exams so that he could become an engineer.   After a storied career at Schlumberger, Goldman Sachs, and Loncar Industries, he decided to pursue his passion for long-term impact through a PhD at INSEAD, after which he became a professor at the National University of Singapore.   Arzi’s research is on themany ways that companies respond to incentives that originate outside the market, such as during pandemics and poverty crises.  He has focused in his scholarship on how local and foreign companies respond to foundational changes in the needs of the communities they serve.   Arzi argues that the corporate pursuit of pro-social solutions to long problems is not yet a reality, but it is an aspiration that he and all of us should focus on.

Professor Sharon Alvarez transformed the field of entrepreneurship through her early work on Jay Barney showing that entrepreneurship is about creating opportunities much more than about discovering them.  It’s not as though Taylor Swift and Oprah and Jack Ma and Steve Jobs and Elon Musk saw something pre-determined sitting on the side of the road awaiting them.   Rather, each had compelling insight grounded in a soulful understanding of what real people need that was so creative and important that it drove value creation at unprecedented levels.  Sharon talks with Anita about what this creative process involves, how it can be taught, and what AI means for our future.

Professor Caroline Fry studies how low-and middle-income countries build scientific capabilities, which occurs onescientist at a time.   The successful migration of scientists from low-income countries can create significant benefits for the country from which the migration occurs, but only when institutions in the home environment are designed to make that happen.   Without those institutions, migrant scientists often struggle both in the countries to which they move as well as in their collaborations with peers in their countries of origin.   Building institutions successfully in the home country requires integrity and deep engagement.   Poor implementation can create profound mistrust that lasts for decades.   Science and scientists also face unusually intense political challenges, especially during health emergencies such as COVID-19.  The bottom line:  It takes a lot ofcareful work by committed practitioners to support scientific creativity and insight.   Caroline finds inspiration intheir accomplishments.

Professor Isin Guler is a renowned expert on the limitations of venture-capital investing for stimulating entrepreneurship.  Among other problems, inventors from marginalized populations have trouble attracting attention, and yet even when they do, they are often misunderstood and passed by.   Yet entrepreneurship can be profoundly important especially to owner-managers.  Isin’s recent work with doctoral student Robert Hill on Texas prisons demonstrates the transformative potential of entrepreneurship training on reducing recidivism by providing newly released persons with unprecedented opportunity.

Professor Kris Irwin had a fifteen-year career as a management consultant prior to earning her PhD at theUniversity of Alabama.    In this inspired talk, she describes how the individual motivations, situations, and circumstances that shaped individual ambitions drive the outcomes of mergers, acquisitions, and new-firm formation. People cause projects to fail.    She analyzes how leaders develop the resilience to persist and even to innovate in the face of uncertainty and complex bureaucratic dynamics.   Despite all the challenges, Kris remains hopeful and optimistic that the higher purposes of leaders can carry firms to achievements that will address grand challenges in the world around us.

Professor Jeffrey York is the OG on environmental scholarship in the field of management.   The titles of some of his most recent work suggest optimism about adaptation to the climate crisis:  “How to Make Corporate Sustainability Work…” and “Climate Capitalism.”   That optimism reflects his belief that the barriers to technology adoption are nottechnological.  Rather, they are organizational, cultural, and political.  A big obstacle is that the most profitable and entrenched industry in the world – energy generation and distribution – will have to strand assets to move forward.  It is the disruption to profits that is blocking progress.  How can we make change happen?   In the end, we simply have to do it.   It is the existential crisis, he says, that will compel the change we know we have to make.

Professor Nur Ahmed studies how frontier technologies like AI, geothermal energy, and quantum computing can improve lives. In AI, for example, a remarkably low number of firms have committed publicly to principles of responsibility, and yet their ambitions are to hire engineers who support principled AI. In geothermal, jurisdictions such as the U.S. states may sustain regulatory ambiguity to attract investment by startups in new energy generation technologies, but with an intention to support access to electricity at scale to improve lives. These and other paradoxes lie right at the center of fulfilling the potential of technology to deliver value that elevates us all.

Professor Sharique Hasan is fascinated by the gap between ideas with high potential and their fruition in practice.   In this wide-ranging and clear-thinking conversation, he outlines the core ideas in several of his most recent research projects.  First, he talks about why some scientific ideas get buried, and what it might take for them to become commercialized.   And second, he describes how the market for talent is changing, and the implications of the aging of the workforce in some companies.  Want to know more about changing the world with breakthrough thinking? Sharique can help you look in the right direction. 

Professor Christina Lubinski takes the long view as a historian of entrepreneurship.  What she sees is shared achievement, and yet we tend to celebrate the roles of single individuals as iconic of success.  It’s worthwhile to consider whether this is working well.  Don’t we want less disruption, and some sense of stability? And shouldn’t we recognize the many individuals who contribute collectively to the creation of new organizations?    Christina will get you thinking much more deeply about what entrepreneurship involves in our culture. 

Professor Michael Bikard studies ideas:  where they come from, who gets credit, whether they get traction, and how we can measure them.  In this fascinating conversation, he takes a long view to describe how history credits innovators for their ideas despite their emergence among communities of scientists.   Michael talks about the high-stakes competition between Darwin and Wallace as iconic of the ways innovators become known for their Eureka moments. 

Professor Aseem Kaul began his career by studying what we call “corporate strategy:”  mergers and acquisitions, for example.  No more.  He is now convinced that companies are not equipped to solve truly important problems such as Grand Challenges because solutions require system change beyond their capacity.  What we need now is to reinvent strategy to support community organizations, non-profits, and governments to become more discerning, efficient, and effective. 

Professor Lori Rosenkopf, Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship at the Wharton School, has spent her career expanding how we understand innovation and entrepreneurial leadership. In her new book, Unstoppable Entrepreneurship, she explores pathways to innovation that go beyond the familiar story of disruption, highlighting intrapreneurs, tech commercializers, and alternative investors who are reshaping markets from within. Lori reflects on how entrepreneurship education is evolving in the age of AI, and how scholars can generalize responsibly from their research. What emerges is a vision of entrepreneurship that’s both more inclusive and more human, grounded in experience, experimentation, and optimism about the next generation of changemakers.

Professor Wes Sine is optimistic, deeply, convincingly, contagiously optimistic. After decades of studying the global energy transition, he believes the moment has arrived: we now have the technology, the public support, and the shift in values needed to transform how the world generates and uses energy. The missing piece is political will. In this energizing conversation with Anita, Wes explains what it will take to move from possibility to action, drawing lessons from decades of research on innovation, entrepreneurship, and social movements. 

Professor Nan Jia brings a rare combination of expertise in artificial intelligence, industrial policy, and creativity. A leading scholar of U.S.–China technology strategy, she studies how national choices about data, AI adoption, and innovation policy are already reshaping global industry and power. In this wide-ranging conversation, Nan and Anita explore how the pathways through which we unleash creativity through AI could redefine geopolitics—and influence how nations compete, cooperate, and create for generations to come.

Professor Damon Phillips studies how society's structures, beauty, and contradictions shape business and creative expression. In conversation with Anita, he discusses how entrepreneurship can offer pathways to economic independence for formerly incarcerated citizens and how the business of jazz reveals deep, profound truths about markets, creativity, and community. Through re-entry, rhythm, and reinvention, Damon reflects on how businesses can remake the societies they serve.

Professor Ranjay Gulati is a renowned scholar of organizational networks and strategic alliances who has recently turned his attention to courage, boldness, and purpose. His newest book, How to Be Bold, explores how individuals and organizations can act decisively in the face of fear and uncertainty. He argues that courage is a choice that can be cultivated by understanding how fear arises and how we respond to it. Whether in moments of crisis or opportunity, boldness allows us to emerge stronger and more purposeful.

Professor Rem Koning studies entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School, using experiments, data, and fieldwork to understand how AI can make innovation more inclusive. A pioneer in A/B testing and a global leader in AI for good, he believes AI can change who gets to innovate and who benefits. Instead of further enriching elite investors, AI can help on-the-ground pioneers do more with less, scaling ideas faster and smarter. In this high-energy conversation, Rem shares how AI can make entrepreneurship more accessible, equitable, and impactful.

Professor Phanish Puranam wants AI to make organizations better for humans. As an eminent scholar of organization design, Phanish sees all organizations as places where humans flourish. We are at our best in groups, supported by our communities. This means that we need to use AI to “re-humanize” organizations by deploying the technology to enable our actualization.

Professor Florenta Teodoridis studies what makes scientists more productive and more creative AI, quantum computing, and a range of other tools relieve experts from having to perform tedious tasks. They lower coordination costs and reduce barriers to communication. All this adds up to freeing experts to be more creative by broadening the directions of innovation that they pursue. Florenta envisions that this creativity can be deployed to solve intractable problems and improve lives in critically important ways.

Professor Aline Gatignon is passionate about both solving big problems–such as food insecurity and other Grand Challenges–by making organizations of all types more effective. She's particularly focused on how companies can work with non-governmental organizations like non-profits to innovate more and innovate better. In this fascinating conversation, Aline describes example after example of how this has occurred in the Brazilian Amazon, in Egypt’s densest urban areas, and in the wake of natural disasters around the globe.

Professor Christine Nolder’s breakthrough research on the mindsets of financial auditors focuses on the extraordinary conflicts of interest between the duty to client service and their duty to sustain independent judgement. What does it take for auditors to do their work effectively? Acting with integrity in this profession depends on a slate of understandings about the role of the auditor, the supplied information, and the culture of the audit firm. We need much more information to know what’s needed about whether compromises are occurring.

Professor Lars Frederiksen’s insights as a scholar of innovation have led him to leadership in the field of technology strategy. What he wants now is to understand how our humanity leads us to actin open-innovation communities, such as the CASP and LegoPage competitions, and on open source development platforms. The incredible diversity of these communities–and the differences in the interests of their members–can lead to governance challenges that are as difficult to address as they were in conventional heritage technologies. We need to get on top of this for AI now so that we can develop the norms and regulations that we need to deploy AI beyond LLMs in ways that make us more collaborative and broadly constructive. Once we do that, we can deploy AI to address our biggest challenges, such as environmental degradation and climate change.

Professor Sophie Bacq has studied social entrepreneurship for twenty years. For the first fifteen, she focused on the social entrepreneur as an individual: whether to take on an initiative; how to fund it; how to succeed. For the past five years, though, Sophie has increasingly focused on what it takes to improve lives on terms that are important to those you are seeking to serve. Often the beneficiaries of the largesse of social entrepreneurs don’t want competitive advantage, or to win, or to beat their local rivals. Often they want better and deeper communities. Maybe the best way to have social impact is to broaden the basis of community to include shared interests, practices, identities and fates.

Professor Julian Birkinshaw is a renowned authority on the ambidexterity of incumbent firms that face disruptive innovations. His newest book, co-authored with Pearson’s John Fallon and entitled Resurgence, provides a roadmap for companies in this position. The core message is that AI and other disruptions need not create Kodak moments for large incumbents. Great firms can find strength in their portfolios of capabilities and build strategies to respond.

Professor Beth Embry moved through her career deeper and deeper into finding solutions to the problems that give rise to disasters–even those disasters that at first appear to be natural, such as earthquakes and hurricanes. These events become disasters when communities are not prepared to respond to them effective in the immediate, short-term and long-term. There are many layers to what creates an effective response, but two jump out from Beth’s scholarly work. The first is the ability of a well-formed community to pivot by using the relationships and values that it has established in new and creative ways. And the second is in the building of communities to create that ability.

Professor Lamar Pierce studies the tension between employee performance and misconduct. High-powered incentives to sell more stuff, for example, can lead salespeople to lower prices or even misreport what they have sold. It is this kind of misconduct (and much worse) that Lamar studies. What does it take to rout this out? Lots and lots of time to get the right people and systems in place, and then the discipline to get out of the way.

Professor András Tilcsik studies the dark sides of organizations: discrimination, disasters, crises. His scholarly work demonstrates, for example, that companies must analyze comprehensively where discrimination is arising in their hiring practices if they want to root it out. Adopting a new approach to the recruiting of applications, a go-to improvement, is typically insufficient to address the problems behind the problems. Truly great organizations learn how to present disasters by doing a blameless post mortem before the unwanted outcome actually occurs. How can we change the structure of our company to avoid a disaster? The key is to learn how to hear dissenting voices and to respond to them effectively.

Professor Andrew Foley thinks of entrepreneurship as a social process rather than as a programmatic exercise. Motivated by his experiences as a Venture for America Fellow in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Andrew studies why exposure to the classic formulas for successful entrepreneurship often leave the entrepreneur high and dry. Success as he sees it depends on getting the community around an organization to help the entrepreneur develop an idea into fruition. That requires awareness of the downsides of accepting high-status capital and endorsements. You need the people behind you to have your back.

Professor Jillian Chown studies how physicians make choices that may shape patient outcomes for the rest of the patients’ lives. What she finds is that doctors make core decisions–like whether a baby will be born by C-Section–to a significant degree through the influence of the peers within whom they recently speak. This effect is greater for generalists than for specialists. At the same time, the performance of superstar physicians on the organizational practices of their clinics may persist for decades. Either way, the choices made by your doctor may be deeply dependent on the environment in which the doctor works.

Professor Chris Eaglin studies how small-and medium-sized companies respond to strategic opportunities in low-income countries, and particularly how drivers in the minibus industry of South Africa deal with the pressures they face. Minibuses take a quarter of all South Africans to work each day. While the system is far from perfect, it is critical to the economic health of communities. The commitment of drivers to get their fares to where they need to go requires overcoming all sorts of problems: equipment repairs, excessive competition, debt repayment requirements, and sometimes criminal interference. There’s a lot for us to learn from these drivers about resilience and adaptability.

Professor Keyvan Vakili studies what makes scientists creative. He has done work on governmental policy, team selection, research design, and the balance of specializations that come together to support profound scientific achievements. What Keyvan lands on as he reflects on the trajectory of his research program is the idea that AI has been trained to be persuasive rather than scientifically accurate. This persuasiveness is so compelling that it can get us to change our minds about the right answers to simple math problems so that we endorse what is clearly wrong. What’s at stake here is that we need to deeply understand how we know what is true scientifically–beyond the frontier of what AI can reliably help us with.

Professor Carlos Inoue studies how people in different types of organizations–public companies, state-owned companies, private companies, governmental agencies, NGOs–solve a problem in ways that reflect the constraints and priorities of their employers. Physicians in public hospitals, for example, may not have access to the same kinds of equipment or even patients as their peers in private hospitals. By rotating personnel across organizations of different types, we can unlock complementarities as personnel learn from each other.

Professor Leandro Nardi studies pathways for achieving outstanding social and economic performance. He has examined the reasons for the persistently mediocre financial and social performance that can arise from CSR initiatives. Much of the problem has to do with the complications that arise with enfranchising the previously marginalized. Disabled persons, for example, are not rewarded with career advancement even after their inclusion in many companies. While the average company is not great at anticipating these consequences, truly outstanding companies distinguish themselves both financially and socially through creative long-term investments.

Professor James Orbinski accepted the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1999 as the International Council President of Medicins Sans Frontiers.   He talks with Anita about the essence of humanitarianism and the ways in which principles of mutual understanding, listening, dialogue and connection shape the public good.  Citing Socrates, he reflects on how dialogue requires dignity-infused listening and a willingness to change our minds.

Professor Jim Lavery has been a professor and advocate of healthcare for the poor for his entire life. What has he learned?The equitable distribution of drugs depends as much on the development of health systems as on new medicines. And decisions by companies to incur development costs are only one step in a cascade of constrained decisions that shape who gets essential medicines.

Professor Donal Crilly studies the ways in which business decisions are influenced by the concepts of time employed by managers, entrepreneurs, investors, and other stakeholders interested in achieving important outcomes. In this conversation, he describes how an emphasis in negotiations on a shared vision of the future–in which good outcomes arise and devastatingly bad outcomes are averted–can reshape how stakeholders work together. Once we agree on a vision for the future, then we can get much better outcomes in our negotiations over the hard work we need to take today to get there. As Donal explained, this approach changed the Northern Ireland Peace Process, for example. And it can change the ways that executives invest for climate sustainability and other important social goals.

Professor Pinar Ozcan is a superstar researcher, superstar teacher, and superstar thought leader. Among her many activities, she runs Oxford’s Said Entrepreneurship Centre and its FinTech Initiative. Ask her where she sees the greatest opportunity for addressing the world’s most pressing problems, and she’ll talk about innovation in investing through FinTech that can enable breakthrough tech advances, including through AI, that generate prosperity for everyone through social entrepreneurship. This insightful, optimistic, hopeful view opens our eyes to a whole new way of envisioning what is possible.

Professor Russ Coff is a pioneer in our thinking about strategic human capital and its importance to the competitive advantage of firms. So why do firms train employees in broad skills that make them more employable elsewhere? And why do the relationships that we develop with colleagues and with our employers matter so much to our decisions about whether to quit?In this conversation, Russ explains some of the paradoxes that arise in employment relationships, and how our perceptions and understandings rest on a lot more than what we are paid.

Professor John Bryson is a world-renowned expert in public administration and governance. Over the course of his career at the University of Minnesota, he has studied and written about eras in the prevailing culture of governance, particularly in the United States. We are now at a point where commitment to the core principles of the Constitution is fraying, with deep consequences for the work of government. How do we move forward?In this conversation with Anita, the two quickly turned from theoretical questions about public value to John’s high-school experience as an intern to the city manager in the Appalachian community where he grew up. He learned there that Hubert Humphrey’s adage to “keep talking” is at the core of what creates the sense of community that will get us out of the mess we’re in.