Posts by Laura Counts

Healthcare organizations don’t just have an efficiency problem—they have a culture problem. Siloed specialists, misaligned incentives, and fragmented decision-making leave patients frustrated and clinicians burned out. Jonathan Kolstad is a professor of economic analysis and policy at UC Ber…

The office has never been just a place to work, it both reflects and shapes an organization’s culture. The furniture, the light, the layout, the ratio of private to shared space—all of it sends signals, whether leaders intend them to or not. Paul Cooper and Christopher Good have spent their [&he…

 Culture doesn’t just shape behavior; it shapes the emotional states people value. Those values operate largely below the surface and can drive some of the most consequential decisions organizations make—who gets hired, who gets promoted, who looks like a leader, and increasingly, how we desi…

We tend to treat organizational structures—such as job titles, departments, and reporting lines—like furniture: always there, moved around a bit, but rarely questioned. But what if AI is about to redesign the whole office? And in a world where you have humans and agents working alongside each ot…

Most organizations say they want to foster creativity. But decades of research by Jack Goncalo, PhD 04, reveals they misunderstand it in fundamental ways: Leaders often implicitly reject novel ideas and penalize creative people when they’re up for leadership roles. In our Season 5 kickoff, Goncalo…

On this special episode, Sameer turns the tables on Jenny and puts her in the guest chair to talk about the new book she wrote with Stanford Professor Glenn Carroll – Making Organizational Culture Great: Moving Beyond Popular Beliefs, out April 2026. Based on decades of research, Glenn and Jenny�…

Should you bring your “whole self” to work? Why does authenticity matter for organizations? And what does being “authentic” even mean? On this episode of The Culture Kit, Jenny and Sameer sit down with their colleague Erica Bailey, whose research is changing how we think about authenticity a…

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in or company you work for–—bad meetings are an unavoidable pain. But they don’t have to be. Rebecca Hinds is an organizational researcher who has spent the past 15 years helping teams fix their broken meetings—and broken collaboration in general. H…

With the majority of our waking life spent at work, conversations around mental health are crucial for a healthy workplace culture. But how do you open the conversation at work? How can leaders build the trust and psychological safety needed for these conversations? On this special episode, David Ko…

Think your workplace runs on pure merit? Think again. In this season-opening episode, Berkeley Haas professor and leading sociologist Toby Stuart reveals how hidden status dynamics shape whose ideas get heard, who advances, and why meritocracies might be a “nice myth to think about” but nearly i…