‘Meet the Authors’: A roundup of Wharton faculty in print

In the “Ripple Effect” podcast series from the Wharton School, host Dan Loney interviews four faculty members with recent books on having it all in the workplace, hybrid and remote work, “hidden markets” and creativity and AI.

In “Having it All,” Wharton professor of business economics and public policy Corinne Low talks about her new book, “Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours.” “It is possible for women to have what they need to have a happy and fulfilled life, but they’re going to have to choose what their ‘all’ is. If you want to have that career where you’re going to be the equal to a man and equal to your male colleagues, and it’s going to move at the same pace—absolutely, you can have that,” says Low. “If you want to be the mom who never misses a soccer game and makes the homemade baby food and the hand-decorated birthday cupcakes—absolutely, you can be that. But those might be two separate full-time jobs.”

The second episode of this series features management professor Peter Cappelli, who discusses his new book, “In Praise of the Office: The Limits of Hybrid and Remote Work,” which examines some of the drawbacks that can come with hybrid and remote work. “If we have a good workplace, we help each other in various ways. We solve problems a lot faster. When we have conflicts, they don’t escalate the way they can if you’re doing it by email,” says Cappelli. “So, there’s lots about the way work gets done in offices that maybe wasn’t so clear to us before, because we never separated office work from an office structure. But now we’re trying to do office work without an office structure, and you can start to see how some of these problems are popping up.”

In “Lucky by Design,” business economics and public policy professor Judd Kessler explains the hidden economics that affect our lives, and how to gain an advantage in “hidden markets.” “The premise of the book is that there are all these hidden markets that allocate things that we value, that we want,” Kessler explains. “The markets are not necessarily visible to us. We don’t always know that we're in one. But if we see that they exist, we learn their rules, and then we play the right strategies, we can do much better in these markets than we might think.”

And in “Creativity in the Age of AI,” Lauder Professor Emeritus and professor of marketing Jerry Wind explores ways to use AI to unlock creativity for personal and professional success. “The fundamental of every approach to creativity is challenging the current status quo, challenging your current mental model,” says Wind. “By the mere fact that you start challenging the status quo, you’re then exploring whole new opportunities. We provide a set of approaches that people can use, and AI will help them in magnifying and amplifying the approach they’re using.”

For a full list of podcast episodes, visit the “Ripple Effect” website.