‘Meet the Authors’ at Wharton

The latest books by Wharton faculty are explored in conversation for the summer series of “Ripple Effect,” Wharton’s faculty podcast.

Wharton management professors Harbir Singh and Michael Useem discuss their book “Resolute Japan: The Leaders Forging a Corporate Resurgence,” which explores how a new model of leadership has transformed Japan’s top companies by fostering innovation, resilience, and competitiveness. The authors describe four elements of these management models, the first of which is that the firm is responsible to more than just shareholders.

“One of the most fundamental things that we see among the leaders is that they’re actually instilling a sense of vision that has a wider aperture. It’s not just that particular business, and not just the product,” says Singh. “It is like a set of services, [or] a set of new knowledge that they’re trying to develop. Then also, there’s a sense of going beyond the traditional hierarchy, creating a greater element of informality.”

In “The Growth Dilemma,” senior marketing lecturer Annie Wilson explains how brands can balance growth with consumer satisfaction.

“The approach we’re taking is also focusing on brand at the segment level. Not just thinking of your brand as this monolithic thing that all consumers are going to want the same thing from it and think of it in the same way, but that actually different segments might care about different things from the brand, and that might be one of the drivers of fragmentation or brand dilution,” says Wilson. “Our hope is that brand managers will focus more specifically on managing brands at the segment level, rather than across the whole customer ecosystem, or thinking about the brand and the customer relationship. But also recognizing that customer groups relate to each other in unique ways. And those dynamics between customers are essential to pay attention to.”

In “Unstoppable Entrepreneurs,” Lori Rosenkopf profiles different entrepreneurs to show there’s more than one path to founding a business.

“I talk about an entrepreneurial mindset, which has six Rs, and one of them is resilience. Each of the entrepreneurs that are profiled in my book had many, many obstacles and challenges,” says Rosenkopf. “And part of their ability to succeed was having—some people call it growth mindset. Some people call it grit. But a mindset that allows you to say, ‘I’m going to need to try a lot of things in order to get to the finish line. I’m going to hear negative feedback, and I’m going to treat that as a learning experience, and then adapt my efforts in order to do better with that.’”

In “Private Finance, Public Power,” Peter Conti-Brown talks about his new book that traces the history of bank supervision in the U.S.

“When we talk about regulation, these are the rules created by agencies like the Federal Reserve or the FDIC. They matter enormously. But that’s not how risk is managed in our financial system. It’s managed behind closed doors, in conversations between employees of the private banks and employees of these regulators who are doing something very different,” says Conti-Brown. “They’re not writing rules. They’re making judgment calls, and they’re managing risk through the processes of examination and enforcement, what we call supervision.”

Marketing professor Barbara Kahn and neuroscientist Elizabeth “Zab” Johnson explain the power of visual marketing and discuss their book, “Visual Marketing: A Practical Guide to the Science of Branding and Retailing.”

“When you think about visual marketing in terms of branding, what people sometimes erroneously think about is design. And yeah, the brand should look pretty, and we want people who have good eyes and know what colors go together, what shapes go together. It does matter, but that’s not what we’re talking about with the visual brand identity,” says Kahn. “If I’m going to create a brand identity, I want people to see that everywhere you encounter the brand at every single touch point. I’ve got to design the brand system so that you pay attention to the things I want you to pay attention to, and that you understand what the message is about the brand.”

And in “An Introduction to Early-Stage Impact Investing,” Katherine Klein and Tyler Wry explain how impact investing works.

“It’s like any type of investing; there’s going to be way more companies, way more opportunities that you could support than you actually can. You have to be really, really focused in terms of, where do you want to look? And then, how are you going to recognize quality?”, says Wry. “When you’re talking especially early-stage impact investing, which is what the book focuses on, this gets really tricky because not only do you have to project out on financial metrics like any other investor would, you also need to try and project out on social impact. And that gets really, really tricky.”

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