Andreea Gorbatai, Assistant Professor in Management of Organizations – How Soft Skills Have Become a Science
39m | Sep 10, 2020On this episode of the Here@Haas podcast, Dr. Andreea Gorbatai joins Ray to discuss her time at Haas and research in the field of organizational management. We talk about a few experiments that Andreea had participated in, including how Wikipedia found realized which pages were most viewed, and why women raise more money than men in crowdfunding. Finally, Andreea tells us how organizational management has evolved in conjunction with big data, and why it’s already a science versus just a set of soft skills.
Episode Quotes:
On the gender bias in venture capital
“Men and women entrepreneurs are asked different questions and namely, women tend to be asked questions regarding prevention. Like have you thought of what happens if things go bad? Which places the whole response and the discussion in a preemptive, negative, more fearful sphere.”
On the evolution of soft skills
“Soft skills have this reputation of being unscientific or being the leftovers after you do the scienc-y stuff. But the truth is that if you don’t understand how, confirmation bias, for example, factors in how you make estimates, how you estimate numbers in your predictions, it does affect your hard skills.”
On what is needed to successfully manage teams amidst the COVID crisis
“The perfect confluence of having the scientific understanding of what’s going on, and then having the soft skills to be able to show consistency, empathy, in terms of how you communicate as a leader.”
Show Links:
- Andreea Gorbatai (Haas profile)
- Research & papers published
- Don Moore episode
