Tuck Knowledge in Practice

In this episode of the Knowledge in Practice Podcast, Davin Chor discusses his new working paper, An Anatomy of the Great Reallocation in U.S. Supply Chain Trade. Chor explains how global trade—once seen as a settled issue—has returned to the center of economic and political debate, reshaping how firms think about sourcing, risk, and resilience. Tracing the impact of U.S. tariffs introduced in 2018 and intensified in recent years, he shows how American companies have steadily shifted supply chains away from China, with lasting consequences for consumers and managers alike.As Chor puts it, “We’ve come full circle in 25 years—China’s share of U.S. imports is now back to where it was when China joined the WTO.”The conversation explores who has gained from this shift, why it’s better described as selective decoupling rather than deglobalization, and what business leaders should expect as trade uncertainty becomes the new normal.Davin Chor is the Michael G. Fisch 1983 Professor at Tuck and a chair in Dartmouth's academic cluster on globalization, which studies the far-reaching repercussions of globalization on world markets, governments, trade, and society. Professor Chor's current research focuses on international trade and political economy.

Why are women still underrepresented in leadership roles? And what can organizations do about it? In this episode of the Knowledge in Practice Podcast, Tuck professor Sonya Mishra explores the hidden dynamics shaping career advancement, from “likeability penalties” to the unequal expectations placed on women at work.Drawing on her latest research, Mishra explains how leadership pathways themselves are gendered, often limiting women to narrower routes to advancement while exposing them to backlash for behaviors that are rewarded in men. She also examines the difference between power and status, why women’s gains in authority can trigger resistance, and how data-driven decision making and exposure to new leadership models can help organizations build more equitable systems.Research papers discussed: Psychological drivers of gender disparities in leadership pathsWhat Is Mine Cannot Be Yours: How Zero-Sum Perceptions of Power and Status Shape Men’s Perceptions of Ingroup Harm From Women’s Hierarchical Advancement

As a sector commander in the Coast Guard, Amy Florentino T’10 directed strategy and operations for all Coast Guard missions across Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and northeastern New York. In that role, she developed a command philosophy that people should feel motivated, nurtured, and valued. Florentino draws on that philosophy as a clinical professor of business administration at Tuck. “A lot of it is about this idea of creating an environment where people can be successful,” she said. “Tuck students are quite capable of doing amazing things, so it’s my job to create an environment where they can excel.”In this episode of the Knowledge in Practice Podcast, Florentino talks about her career in the Coast Guard, and her time at Tuck as both a student and a professor. Courses and Programs discussed: Management Communications, Advanced Management Communications, Client Project Management, Crisis Management, Tuck Bridge, Next Step, and Impact Academy. 

Kirsten Detrick T’92 spent more than 30 years as an executive in the biopharma industry, working for firms such as Takeda, Amgen, and Bristol Myers Squibb. Detrick recently returned to Tuck to teach the mini course “Contemporary Issues in Biotechnology,” which is offered every year in the spring.Detrick discusses her career, her course, and some of the most pressing challenges faced today in the biopharma space. Detrick uses her position as an adjunct professor to teach, coach, motivate, and inspire. As she explains in the conversation, biopharma is a business, “but unlike other businesses, it has humanity at the very core of what it’s about. The people who succeed, thrive and find themselves attracted to this industry are those who hear a higher calling and want to use business to address that higher calling.”

In a new paper, Raghav Singal creates a model that answers an important counterfactual question for people harmed by delay-and-deny: what if the procedure was approved in a timely fashion? Using specific healthcare data, Raghav’s model can answer that question with striking accuracy, showing the probability that a timely screening or procedure could have had a positive impact on a patient’s health.

Adjunct professor Joshua Lewis spent 35 years in venture capital and private equity and has a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford. He brings that experience and knowledge to bear in a new course he developed for Tuck called Moral Reasoning: From Machiavelli to The Bomb to AI. In it, he blends classic moral philosophy with real and fictional protagonists to inspire students to contemplate and discuss ethical decision-making in a variety of contexts. In this episode, Lewis talks about the genesis of the course, his teaching style, and some examples of the protagonists the students study. Two students, Leen Ajlouni T’25 and Ryan Montgomery T’26 also share their thoughts on the course.

In this podcast, we learn about the role laundromats can play in connecting low-income people with health care and social services, and how a startup called Fabric Health co-founded by Tuck alumna Courtney Bragg T’18 is helping to make those connections. 

What do gunpowder, Julia Child, and the iPhone have in common? They are all “epic disruptions” that changed the world. In this episode, Tuck clinical professor Scott Anthony D’96 discusses his new book Epic Disruptions: 11 Innovations That Shaped Our Modern World.Listen in as Scott dives into a few of these epic disruptions and explains disruptive theory, the influence of Clayton Christensen, and the lessons we can learn from disruption about creativity and strategy.

In 2024, Tuck professor Daniel Feiler had a series of confidential conversations with executives of numerous NBA teams. As an expert in the psychology of judgment and decision making, Feiler was curious how these executives were using the proliferation of in-game data to make decisions about which players to trade, recruit, and draft. He found that, like managers in any organizational environment, NBA executives were prone to making biased decisions without even realizing it. They evaluated players using differing standards, or they didn’t fully account for the context of players’ performance, or they over-weighted how certain players performed against them.In this podcast, Feiler discusses how he worked with NBA teams, and what he learned about decision biases that can apply to other corporate settings.

All businesses must endure a crisis every now and then. But not all businesses are digital platforms, such as Facebook, Uber, and eBay. What sets these businesses apart is their role as an intermediary between sellers and buyers, two stakeholders who are crucial to the business model but who can react to a crisis in very different ways, and with different consequences.In this episode, Tuck marketing professor Prasad Vana talks about a new paper that takes an in-depth look at platforms in crisis. The paper is titled “When Crisis Hits the Platform Economy: The Effects on Supply, Demand, and Spillovers.” In it, Vana studies two crises that the platform Kickstarter went through, and the impact those crises had on people looking to fund projects and the backers of those projects. He finds that the crises had bigger effects on the supply side stakeholders than on the backers, and that projects that relied on a fan base—such as art and culture-related efforts—were especially likely to respond negatively to crises. 

If the 20th century business landscape was populated by behemoth corporations like GE, Berkshire Hathaway, and Siemens, the 21st century is the era of technology titans such as Apple, Amazon, and Tesla. But these huge firms are separated by more than the border line of Y2K. As Tuck professor Gordon Phillips explains in this episode of the Knowledge in Practice podcast, the modern tech giants achieved their status not by gobbling up firms in various industries and putting them under one big roof; they did it by developing technologies that have applications in numerous, related sectors. In a new paper, Phillips identifies these companies as “21st century firms” and shows that they have used R&D to increase the scope of their operations by 60 percent between 1989 and 2017. This has resulted in increased valuations, and a significant boost to the markets overall.  “One of our major findings is that valuations go up as scope goes up,” Phillips says. “This is the opposite of the old line conglomerate literature. What’s interesting is that on a per-dollar-of-sales basis, the market is liking these increases in scope.”

Tuck Associate Professor Emily Blanchard, an international economist and former Chief Economist of the U.S. Department of State, unpacks the far-reaching effects of the intensifying global trade war. From sweeping tariffs to supply chain disruptions and shifting geopolitical dynamics, Blanchard discusses the economic and strategic risks posed by today’s trade tensions.

Upwards of 83 million people in the U.S. have a disability, but firms still struggle to make their goods and services accessible to everyone. Part of the challenge is that non-disabled people view accessibility accommodations as tradeoffs against other interests, such as environmental stewardship and convenience, and they are loath to make those sacrifices.  In this episode of the Knowledge in Practice Podcast, Tuck professor Lauren Grewal discusses her paper on this topic: “Hidden Barriers to Marketplace Disability Accessibility: An Empirical Analysis of the Role of Perceived Trade-Offs,” which was published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2024. In it, she finds that if firms clearly communicate the rationale for and benefits of their accessibility efforts, non-disabled people will be more likely to accept and appreciate them. 

In this episode, we talk with marketing professor Peter Golder about how to foster creativity and his new elective course: Creating Winning New Products and Services. In this course, Golder teaches MBA students a “process for identifying market opportunities, creating new product or service ideas, and turning those ideas into valuable new products and services.” One crucial step in this process is learning how to think creatively, which is actually a skill that can be practiced and honed.

Tuck professor Vijay Govindarajan argues in a new book that the same AI and big data advances that brought success to the tech sector will soon unlock enormous value in the industrial sector.In this episode, VG discusses his book Fusion Strategy: How Real-time Data and AI Will Power the Industrial Future, and he shares how his 40-plus years of studying strategy and innovation have culminated in a bold prescription for the $75 trillion industrial economy. 

Praveen Kopalle, the Signal Companies’ Professor of Management, has already shown that machines can write human-like reviews. Now, in a new paper with his Tuck colleague Prasad Vana, he shows that generative AI can produce accurate product reviews that require domain expertise—in this case, for wines. He and Vana accomplished this by creating a transformer model that predicts the wine tasting experience based on three conditions in the grape growing process: precipitation, temperature, and soil.  Kopalle also talks about his forthcoming book, AI-Driven Pricing Analytics, and the elective course he teaches on the subject, Retail Pricing Analytics. 

Social media has been both a blessing and a curse, giving us new ways to connect but also digital addiction and misinformation. How can we redesign the AI in social platforms so they are socially beneficial? That’s one of the main research questions that fascinates Tuck assistant professor James Siderius. In the final episode of season one of the Tuck Knowledge in Practice Podcast, Siderius talks about his interest in Artificial Intelligence and social media, some of the research he has done (and is doing), and his new elective AI-Driven Analytics and Society.

Did you know that manhood is a precarious trait, and that the precariousness of one’s manhood can influence men’s perception of being flirted with at work? In episode five of the Tuck Knowledge in Practice Podcast, Tuck assistant professor Sonya Mishra, an organizational psychologist and gender researcher, discusses her research and its implications in the workplace.

Successful entrepreneurs used to be lauded for their grit and perseverance. Then the idea of the “lean startup” introduced the mantra of “fail fast and fail often” as the way to strike startup gold. In this episode, Hart Posen, professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at Tuck, discusses his recent research that puts a framework around the “fail fast, fail often” idea.Research paper discussed: Programs of Experimentation and Pivoting for (Overconfident) Entrepreneurs, Academy of Management Review, 2024.

Tuck professor and trade economist Emily Blanchard served as the chief economist at the U.S. Department of State from January 2022 to November 2023. In this episode, Blanchard recounts her motivation for public service, what life was like as a top official in the State Department, how that experience changed her, and what she’s excited to work on now that she’s back at Tuck.

In a new working paper, Tuck professor Laurens Debo, together with Ran I. Snitkovsky of Coller School of Management, Tel Aviv University, tackle the tipping conundrum from an analytical point of view. The paper, “A modeling framework for tipping in the presence of a social norm,” details a mathematical model that can help explain why people tip and why, perhaps, tipping isn’t the most efficient way to pay servers for their work.

In this first episode of the Tuck Knowledge in Practice Podcast, Dean Matthew Slaughter talks about the origins of the Tuck School in the late 19th century, what makes it distinct from other top business schools today, and his personal journey as a researcher and academic.