This month, we speak with Clinical Professor of Economics at DePaul and Principal at Black & Essington Solutions, Brian Thompson, about the behavioral components of decision-making and strategy. Cognition plays a massive role in how individuals and firms make decisions that ultimately might be suboptimal. With daily updates about the impact of COVID-19 on people, organizations, and the economy at large, we discuss how a couple of industries might experience pivots in the coming year.
We had plans to host alumnus and author of “The New Invisible Hand“, Kyle T. Westra on March 13th, but the event was unfortunately canceled due to the rapidly changing environment related to COVID-19.
However, we were pleased to announce that Kyle agreed to present his Strategy Talk in a webinar format on April 29th, 2020!
From a business strategy perspective, we teach that firms should avoid competing on price because that can ultimately lead to a “race to the bottom”. However, strategies concerned with pricing can be quite nuanced in this digital age where information is plentiful for both consumers and competitors.
Kyle discusses how pricing strategies can be approached in the real world through the lens of his book, “The New Invisible Hand”. His presentation lasted 1 hour and was followed by a Q&A session.
In this episode, we speak with Raffaele Colucci about the ocean shipping industry. Raffaele is the Deputy Sales Director for the Mediterranean Shipping Company. His role requires a bird’s eye view of his entire line of business, so having a clear perspective on how the industry evolves is extremely important for strategic planning. There are many ways to analyze an industry, but one of the more popular and effective frameworks is with Michael Porter’s Forces. Raffaele walks us through a Forces’ analysis to give us some insight into his highly competitive industry.
Dan Clark talks with us about his roles as Senior Manager at the e-commerce platform Shop Your Way and as Founder of Navigating Knowledge, an Ed-Tech startup focused on creating a new way to learn through spatial mapping. At first glance, the Retail and Education industries don’t seem to have a lot in common. However, Dan has found that his experience with information and how we process it, can have implications across the boundaries of what we’d normally see has two vastly different industries.
This month we are joined by DePaul Alumnus of the Economics & Policy Analysis Masters Program, Aksh Gupta. Aksh is the Cofounder & CEO of Occasion, a startup dedicate to solving tech challenges of experiential businesses. Occasion addresses a common problem in such disparate industries like nail salons, live theatre, and pilates studios: A better reservation system. Now, reservation systems aren’t novel, and its apparently very a crowded industry. So what will be the key to Occasion’s success?
This new year will bring a number of exciting developments for the newly created Business Strategy & Decision-Making Program in DePaul’s Department of Economics. However, to ensure that our planned initiatives are useful and valuable to our community, we’d like to invite you to take a brief survey. It is 5 short sections that will only take you 10-15 minutes to complete. Your feedback will help shape the future of the program and will also present some opportunities for you to be involved should you desire.
DePaul University’s Economics & Strategy Podcast is a monthly conversation with individuals who use frameworks discussed in Economics and Business Strategy & Decision-Making. The interviewees will represent multiple industries and institutions, and hold various roles within their organizations. The premise of the podcast is to examine how economics and other related strategy frameworks are practically applied in real-world situations.
This Strategy Talk presented by DePaul University’s Business Strategy & Decision-Making Program hosted a diverse panel of consulting professionals to discuss the basics of consulting in their areas and how they leverage strategic frameworks for their clients. The panel was followed by a networking hour with small plates and drinks.
Panelists (Industry Specialization)
Kristy Nittskoff of Vista Consulting (Human Resources)
Admira Ibisevic of Illumia Consulting (Organizations & Leadership)
Sanel Kostic of Illumia Consulting (Organizations & Leadership)
Matthew DalSanto of Winston and Strawn (Antitrust)
Kate Moberg of Berkeley Research Group (Strategy & Operations)
Amy Lewis of Berkeley Research Group (Data Privacy & Information Governance)
The event was held at:
Lewis Center
25 E Jackson Blvd
Room 1001
Chicago, IL 60604
The panel was from 5:30 pm to 7:00 pm. A networking opportunity immediately followed the panel.