SPARK Series

Eric A. Hoggard, Colonel, United States Army, Kellogg Senior Army Fellow

Military veterans have a breadth and depth of expertise, skills, experiences and perspectives not found in any other population and that are highly valued in the private sector. Their unique work inculcates a deep understanding of teamwork and leadership, along with a well-developed ability to manage complexity and ambiguity. Kellogg research shows these characteristics pay off, including that CEOs with military experience perform better in economic adversity.

Join us in a conversation led by Colonel Eric Hoggard, U.S. Army Senior Fellow at Kellogg, with a panel of veterans pursuing their MBA at Kellogg. We’ll discuss hard lessons that shape how veterans think, how they foster a culture of accountability, what inspires them to study business, and more.

Eli J. Finkel, Professor of Psychology, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences; Professor of Management & Organizations

When interpersonal or intergroup conflict challenges our core values, we develop a moralized narrative that makes victory essential and compromise intolerable. In this presentation, we’ll consider how leaders can reframe seemingly intractable conflicts in ways that can push toward resolution. We use the case of American politics circa 2019, where the divide between liberals and conservatives has grown wider and more vitriolic, and it’s not clear how this trend might reverse. If we can devise an approach to conflict resolution that works in a context that extreme, we’ll have strong clues for conflict resolution in contexts like industry, labor, and the family.

Michael Rogers, Senior Fellow and Adjunct Professor within the Kellogg Public Private Interface

How does an organization turn the culture and mission it wants to embody into desirable outcomes? Change is necessary for any organization to evolve. However, organizations with large, complex hierarchical structures can find driving change especially challenging.

Admiral Mike Rogers will lead a discussion on how those leading change can leverage institutional knowledge and experience into methods for implementing change while fostering support for organizational goals. Admiral Rogers will address how to asses an organization’s values and what shapes its behaviors and attitudes, explore ways to channel those behaviors and attitudes to drive change, and discuss the integration of organizational culture and mission into the ultimate outcome.

Angela Lee, Mechthild Esser Nemmers Professor of Marketing

What psychological factors influence and affect a savvy, yet time-strapped consumer’s purchasing decisions? Behavioral research sheds light on the customer experience journey, from motivation to information search, preference formation to choice, and finally to loyalty. In this session we will explore how consumers’ basic survival needs shape consumption goals, and in turn, influence how we engage with brands. We will also discuss what drives brand loyalty, how loyal customers may react when their brand is under siege, and how the architecture and heuristics of consumer choice can produce seemingly irrational or economically suboptimal decisions.

Nicolo Persico, John L. and Helen Kellogg Professor of Managerial Economics & Decision Sciences, Director of the Center for Mathematical Studies in Economics & Management

Join us for a discussion of the impact of increasing political polarization, both within and outside companies, that is changing the landscape for business decision making. The discussion will also explore the difficulty of handling crises with conflicting values within an organization, and the extent to which leadership should view these crises as opportunities to affirm their values, or rather, to lay low and deflect.

Andrew Sykes, Adjunct Lecturer in Executive Education, CEO of Habits at Work and founder of BRATLAB

A company’s brand, culture and customer experience have traditionally been viewed as three distinct yet related phenomena. In this session, we’ll see the power of approaching them as a single phenomenon grounded in habits at work. For example, the habit of reflective listening is key to driving strong relationships between partners, colleagues, and customers.

Because so much of human behavior is habitual, organizations end up with brands, cultures, and customer experiences that develop over time and are very stable. But what if we as leaders want to change these habits?

Join us for this dynamic session on habit design in organizations. You’ll gain insights on how to break bad habits and intentionally design habits to create brands and customer experiences with intense customer loyalty, and to create company cultures that foster employee engagement.

Rachel Davis Mersey, Associate Professor, Medill School of Journalism

Ben Harris, Visiting Associate Professor of Kellogg Public-Private Initiative (KPPI)

Join Professor Ben Harris, previously chief economist and economic adviser to the Vice President of the United States, for an expert take on what this economic policy includes. You’ll see who won and who lost in the tax plan, what economic forecasters see as economic consequences of the Act, and what taxpayers and business leaders can expect out of future Congresses in the way of tax changes.

Jim Lecinski, Associate Professor, Medill School of Journalism

What does all this mean for business leaders, for brands and for marketers who increasingly rely on digital marketing? Has perhaps the "holy grail" of digital marketing, the quest for more and more hyper-targeted messaging based on personal information, in fact now become a "poisoned chalice" instead?

This session will examine (1) why hyper-targeting has always been the "holy grail" of digital marketing; (2) how the quest for more and better hyper-targeting has evolved; (3) how recent events that have called these practices into question; and (4) the implications for the marketing industry moving forward.

Mark Skroch, SVP, Client Services Fusion92

Diane Brink, Senior Fellow and Adjunct Professor within the Kellogg Markets & Customers Initiative

Michele Wucker, Founder and CEO of Gray Rhino & Company

The 2016 book, The Gray Rhino, which explores these questions, has shaped the thinking of financial planners, business continuity and risk managers, policy makers and central banks around the world. In this interactive workshop, author and strategist Michele Wucker shares the simple but powerful gray rhino framework that will help you and your team to strategically counter avoidable crises.

Derek Rucker, Sandy & Morton Goldman Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies in Marketing, Professor of Marketing, Co-chair of Faculty Research

Adam Robert Pah, Clinical Assistant Professor of Management & Organizations, Associate Director and Research Assistant Professor Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)

Andrew Razeghi, Founder and Managing Director of StrategyLab, Inc.

Tom Collinger, Associate Professor, Executive Director of Medill IMC Spiegel Digital & Database Research Center, Senior Director of Medill Distance Learning Initiative

Russell Walker, Clinical Professor of Managerial Economics & Decision Sciences

Paul Earle, Adjunct Lecturer of Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Sarit Markovich, Clinical Associate Professor of Strategy

Ned Smith, Associate Professor of Management & Organizations, Associate Professor of Sociology, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences

Lieutenant General Nadja Y. West, U.S. Army Surgeon General & Commanding General, Army Medical Command

Kristian J. Hammond, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

David Schonthal, Clinical Associate Professor of Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Tom O’Toole, Clinical Professor of Marketing and Senior Fellow

John Ambery, Psy.D., Leadership Instructor, Psychologist, and Executive Coach

Diego Klabjan, Prof. of Industrial Engineering & Management Sciences; Director, Master of Science in Analytics

Steve Franconeri, Director of Cognitive Science Program; Professor of Psychology, Northwestern University

One of the senior leader’s most important roles is to set and implement strategy. All too often, however, the challenge lies in creating compelling strategies that drive true value creation. In this interactive session, Peter Skarzynski will share practical frameworks, principles, and process through which leading organizations develop and act on strategies. You will learn:

• An overview of a comprehensive process for creating business unit and enterprise strategy
• Examples of specific frameworks and approaches to help ensure your strategy creates value for customers, internal stakeholders and shareholders
• Roles of the CEO and leadership team in developing and implementing strategy
• What you can do - and pitfalls to avoid - to make your strategy actionable

As interest in self-directed learning grows, online learning in many forms has exploded as a global phenomenon, introducing new kinds of complexity.  For example, how is digital-only learning faring in environments where face-to-face learning is an integral part of the organization's value proposition?  A new world of concepts arises, too, from “asynchronous” to “blended” learning, which mean different things to different stakeholders.  What is a “flipped classroom," for example, why has this concept emerged, and with what consequences?  Join Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, and Integrated Marketing Communications Professor Candy Lee as she explores the current and emerging state of online learning and its implications for the future, in the workplace as well as the classroom.

Neuroscience may capture market intelligence invisible to other means, but misinformation and over claiming abound. This session conveys the current scientific understanding of the brain’s reward system, what current neuroscience can and cannot offer, and which future breakthroughs may help shape marketing.

Join Professor Joel Shapiro for a session about how analytics can help you ask the right questions, understand what works, and better allocate scarce resources. By developing an early-stage strategy around analytics, you can more quickly identify and nurture opportunities that lead to success. This session will provide a framework and examples for how to ask smart questions and use analytics to drive business success.

Robin Nusslock, Assistant Professor at the Weinberg College of Arts and Science - Psychology Department

Are you stuck with the brain you have, or does your brain change based on your experiences? The outdated answer is that your brain is unchanging, but new evidence suggests the parts of the brain governing mental agility, memory, and emotion are more adaptable than was previously believed. Join Professor Robin Nusslock for an engaging session about this work and implications for mental and physical well being as well as maximizing personal and professional potential.

You can enhance your leadership effectiveness and ability to influence by telling brief and compelling stories. Join Esther Choy for this interactive SPARK presentation to unleash your narrative intelligence, learn the fundamental structure and elements of stories, and, as an example leave with a working draft of your response to, “What did you learn at Kellogg?”

The interactive session will feature Co-author and CEO of Second City Works, Tom Yorton, with Second City trained facilitator and Artistic Director of Training and Development, Mark Sutton. The session will include live exercises demonstrating the tenets of improvisation and how they can be used in executive professional settings.

Join Lieutenant General Anthony R. Ierardi for an evening devoted to the subject of leading in a complex world. In today's complex marketplace, organizations must be prepared to take advantage of emerging opportunities and meet demand around the globe. In this session, you will learn how the United States Army meets the challenges of the future security environment while navigating the complexities of competing stakeholders. Discover how strategic priorities such as leadership development, managing organizational change, and commitment to values and professionalism keep the All-Volunteer Army the most highly-trained and capable land force in the world, and how other organizations benefit from similar practices and ideas.

A company’s competitive position in a market is influenced by "rules of the game:” laws, regulations, and implicit norms of behavior. Antitrust legislation, product liability laws, and privacy norms are but a few of such rules. In this session we will explore a strategic framework for how successful companies excel at reacting to and even influencing these rules.

In this session, we will deconstruct what is most commonly referred to as executive presence and “gravitas." Participants will actively work to diagnose the common issues they see in the workplace. By the end of this session, participants will have a set of tools and strategies they can use in giving (and receiving!) feedback in this arena.