Business

 Brandon Copeland, the New York Jets linebacker heading to free agency next month, and a Wharton graduate, returns to his alma mater to teach Inequity and Empowerment, Urban Financial Literacy along with Brian Peterson, the director of Makku, Penn's Black Cultural Center, calling the course Life 101.

The Wharton School’s Barbara Kahn spoke about changes in Valentine’s Day gift-giving trends. “It’s easier and easier to acquire stuff, but people are also saying I don’t need just stuff anymore,” she said, in response to this year’s uptick in gifts that center a shared memory or experience.

The Wharton School’s Maurice Schweitzer weighed in on intentionally high-pressure job interviews, which are “neither new, nor on their way to extinction.” The format, he said, is the result of “managers who work in a high-stress environment, managers who experience excess demand for jobs in their firm, and managers who believe that they can learn how people deal with stress by stressing them out in an interview.”

The Wharton School’s Adam Grant was cited for his research about the effects of expressing gratitude on employee performance.

Victor Pickard of the Annenberg School for Communication commented on a possible takeover of Gannett Co., publisher of several major daily papers, by Digital First Media. “If Digital First acquires Gannett it will be good for their business but bad for everyone else, including employees that work at Gannett papers and the local communities that those newsrooms serve,” said Pickard.

The Wharton School’s Maurice Schweitzer offered commentary on Feld Entertainment’s decision to remove gun-related imagery from Monster Jam trucks. “The risk is, they may suffer a backlash from some of their customers who don’t like the idea that they’ve adopted a more politically correct stance, that some of their favorite characters have been defanged, or that it looks like censorship,” said Schweitzer.

The Graduate School of Education’s Alexandra Michel spoke about stack ranking systems like the one employed at Facebook. “If you have an environment that is completely cutthroat like Wall Street, this system works pretty well,” Michel said. “But if you have employees who come in and want to be taken care of, want to learn, want to be part of a warm group and people who care about them—that’s a very jarring mismatch.”

The University of Pennsylvania was highlighted as a great place to launch a startup, thanks to incubator and other supportive programs.