Posts by Laura Counts

What happens when you stop networking and start building something deeper—a community held together by shared purpose, vulnerability, and generosity? And how does the social space you operate in shape the creative work you’re able to produce? Noah Askin is an associate professor of organizat…

 Every organization says it wants to innovate with AI, but the ones that succeed are the ones that bring their people along for the ride. That tension between moving fast on technology and preserving the human relationships at the core of a business is one of the defining leadership […]

 If a picture is worth a thousand words, what are those words saying about gender and age in the workplace when women are overwhelmingly portrayed as younger than men in online images? This skewing of reality can lead to bias in hiring, applying for jobs, and evaluating people and […]

It’s essentially a law of human behavior: We feel most comfortable with people who are similar to us. But that similarity can lead to all kinds of dilemmas in the workplace, especially when it comes to hiring. Award-winning sociologist Lauren Rivera is the Peter G. Peterson Chair in Corporate Ethi…

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�…