Jennifer Lynn Aaker of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business is our MBA Professor of the Year for 2018
When Stanford GSB Dean Jonathan Levin needed a professor to help develop and teach a novel course on artificial intelligence this year, he turned to a familiar and charismatic face on the business school campus: Jennifer Aaker. His decision to pair Aaker, a social psychologist, with Fei-Fei Li, a professor of computer science at Stanford and the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, to teach the course was no accident.
In 2019, Aaker’s 20th year teaching MBA students at Stanford, she has established herself as one of the most creative creative thinkers and innovators at the school, having taught elective courses in such topics as happiness, humor and purpose are rare at most business schools. She already was teaching another truly unique offering, Designing For Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality: Scaling Empathy In An Immersive World. So it seemed something of a non-brainer to move onto AI. “He knows my goal is to scale social science through both technology and business practice to positively impact human well being,” says Aaker.
“A lot of my research is anchored on how meaning and purpose shapes choices that individuals make,” she says. “And how money and time are spent in ways that cultivate long-lasting happiness, meaning and purpose. But I ams also very interested in how technology can be used to positively impact people.” So this coming winter quarter, she will be co-teaching Designing AI To Cultivate Human Well-Being.
MBA PROFESSOR OF THE YEAR: JENNIFER AAKER
For bringing such unique perspectives into the MBA classroom over the course of her 22-year-old career as a professor, Aaker is Poets&Quants‘ MBA Professor of the Year in 2018. She is only the second professor to earn the honor which was given last year to UVA Darden’s Greg Fairchild for the honor (see MBA Prof Of The Year: Darden’s Greg Fairchild).
While the 51-year-old Aaker has racked up her fair share of honors in best paper awards and outstanding teaching accolades, she is no ordinary business school professor. She has devoted her professional life to studying the psychology of time, money and happiness. Aaker attempts to find out how people chose to spend their time and money, and when and why those choices are associated with lasting value. Noted for her early work on the dimensions of brand personality, Aaker’s current research is rooted in the psychology of choice and the shifting meaning of happiness.
“When you think about what decisions you make when you are optimizing for happiness, you tend to make decisions on the here and now and what you are feeling,” she believes. ‘You often make decisions that are self-centered and self-orientted. You also tend to make decisions that are optimIzing for positive affect and minimizing negative affect. This idea of how do I feel happy all of the time and never sad or fearful becomes front of mind. When you are making decisions around meaning, you tend to think of different things. You think of the past, present and future and you tend to be more other oriented.”
DAUGHTER OF TWO TEACHERS INCLUDING AN ACCLAIMED ACADEMIC AT BERKELEY HAAS
Jennifer Aaker with her father, David Aaker
It was perhaps inevitable that Aaker would become an educator. Her mother was an award-winning school teacher for 50 years and now works with hospice full time serving others. Her father, David, was an acclaimed academic at UC-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business where he taught marketing for 30 years. Many consider him the father of modern branding.
“I was lucky to grow up with two remarkable parents and role models,” she says. “It was my desire to have an impact in the world, serving others and having impact on the lives of others.”
Her desire to serve did not come as a result of many dinner conversations, however. “At most of our dinners, we focused on what we did today and what we were going to do tomorrow. We had to eat liver and it was awful,” laughs Aaker. “Instead, we saw their actions and that made a difference.”
Her journey into the academic world, starting with an undergraduate degree in psychology from UC-Berkeley in 1989 and later a Phd in marketing from Stanford with a minor in psychology in 1995, was also a conscious one. “I thought about what I was disproportionately good at. I was always strong at math and science so becoming a social scientist and using social science in ways that I could positively impact others didn’t come early. It’s always an ever evolving journey.”
A CLOSET-INTROVERT, SHE FINDS SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH A JOY
A self-described “closet introvert,” Aaker says she naturally found research to be a joy. “It’s where I spend by far the most of my time,” she notes. “But these classes I view as an opportunity to learn. Each of our classes is very academic and the social science guides the content and the frameworks.”
Over her 22 years in the classroom as a teacher, Aaker has taught MBAs more than a dozen different courses, starting with such basics as Consumer Behavior to such highly novel business courses as How To Tell A Story, Designing For Happiness, and Humor: Serious Business. Those are classes that you would rarely find in a course catalog at any typical business school. But Stanford is not your typical B-school and Aaker is not your typical business school professor.
Yet, Aaker insists, she has learned far more from the students in her classrooms than they have learned from her. “I usually teach subjects I know very little or nothing about,” she says. “So on day one I usually tell them we are all going to be learning together. My students have taught me significantly more than I’ve taught them.”
What Asker Has Taught MBA Students
• Designing for VR/AR (2017-present, Stanford MBA)
• Humor: Serious Business (2017-present, Stanford MBA)
• Rethinking Purpose (2016-present,Stanford MBA and d.school)
• Designing Story in a Digital World (2014-2016, Stanford MBA)
• The Power of Story (2012-2017, Stanford MBA)
• Building Innovative Brands (2010-2016, Stanford MBA and d.school), with Chris Flink
• Designing (for) Happiness (2010-2013, Stanford MBA)
• How to Tell a Story (2008-2012, Stanford MBA)
• The Power of Social Technology (2008-2010, Stanford MBA)
• Creativity and Innovation in Marketing (2006-2008, Haas MBA)
• Understanding Cultures and Consumers (2001-07, Stanford MBA)
• Marketing Management (1996-2001, UCLA and Stanford MBA)
• Culture and Persuasion (1999, 2000, 2002, 2005, Columbia and Stanford Ph.D)
• Consumer Behavior (1996, 1998, 2001, 2003-2007 UCLA, UC Berkeley and Stanford Ph.D)
Jennifer Aaker in class
WHY HUMOR IS AN EFFECTIVE TOOL FOR POWER
One of her favorites is her humor course, which she has been co-teaching with lecturer Naomi Bagdonas since 2017. While a course on humor in a business school may seem out of place, it’s just more evidence of the new thinking that Aaker has brought to business. The pair believe that humor is an effective and under-leveraged tool for power, offering a competitive advantage against peers, higher retention rates of employees, innovative solutions, and teams that are more resilient to stress.
Yet, Aaker has found what she calls a “humor cliff,” when young professionals enter the workforce. “The interesting thing is that as kids, we are all hilarious — we’re killin’ it on a daily basis,” she says. “As middle schoolers and teenagers, we continue to be funny. But then something changes and we stop being funny. And in our research, we think we’re beginning to pinpoint a shift — a humor cliff’ when people enter the workforce.”
Gallup surveys, for example, show that when people are asked to rate themselves against the prompts “I believe I am a funny person” and “I laugh frequently” people’s responses to the questions plummet around age 23. “We go to work, and all of a sudden we’re very important, and we’re very efficient, and we’re no longer allowed to leave the house in sweatpants or count ice cream as a food group,” says Aaker. “Plus, some of us have a scarring moment of a joke gone wrong — so we stop trying.”
A HUMOR COURSE ROOTED IN SADNESS
Jennifer Aaker
That’s a mistake in her view because humor and be used to make and scale positive change in the world, to achieve business objectives, and to cultivate stronger bonds, especially at a time when some research has shown that workplace stress is causing real harm. “Humor can build bonds and strengthen relationships. This is particularly important because workplaces are killing us,” she says. “Recent research by Jeff Pfeffer, Stefanos Zenios, and Joel Goh shows that workplace stress — fueled long hours, job insecurity and lack of work-life balance — to at least 120,000 deaths each year and accounts for up to $190 billion in health care costs. This concept of tackling big challenges but doing it with a sense of levity is powerful.”
Ironically, her class on humor is rooted in sadness. Eight years ago, with the publication of The Dragonfly Effect, a book co-authored with her husband Andy Smith, Aaker explored how it was possible to harness the power of social media to achieve major goals. One of the most inspiring stories in the book started with an MBA student in one of her classes.
For a final assignment, the student had emailed her a PowerPoint doc that told the story of his best friend, Sameer Bhatia, a South Asian who had been recently diagnosed with leukemia. Sameer needed a bone marrow transplant to have a chance to survive but the one-in-20,000 odds of finding one made that unlikely.
‘IT WAS SOUL CRUSHING, FRANKLY’
The Stanford student essentially started a business to get 20,000 South Asians in the bone marrow registry for his friend. Leveraging Facebook, Google Docs, and YouTube to organize bone marrow drives, he was able to recruit 24,611 potential donors in 11 weeks and found the perfect match for his 32-year-old friend. The transplant was made, but sadly it was not in time, and Sameer died.
“So what Andy and I thought we would do in the first year of the book launch was to work with 12 volunteers in the Haas school to get over 100,000 people into the bone marrow registry in a year,” recalls Aaker. “During that year, we worked with 17 families to find a bone marrow match for their sons or daughters or moms. Out of the 17 we worked with, we lost 16 of them. It was soul crushing, frankly. There was no humor in it. It was the opposite of fun.
But it brought me to this realization that the power of humor was so significant. The only person who survived was both fun and funny and the way his friends, family and my students worked with him was really based on a culture of levity. That power of levity really created a truly happy ending. As we take on these big challenges in the world, I think there is power with designing for levity and humor.”
‘WE ARE AT A MOMENT IN TIME WHERE DISTRUST IS ON THE RISE’
Fei-Fei Li will teach a new AI course at Stanford with Jennifer Aaker
Aaker’s newest course on artificial intelligence takes direct aim at all the fear and anxiety that technology is now arousing in the world of work. “We are at a moment in time where distrust is on the rise, and the negative unintended consequences of our technology are being flushed out,” she says. “We used to get a lot of our meaning from the jobs that we have and as we move into the next decade there is high potential for job displacement. This is going to be a course focused on AI that has the goal of trying to build matching learning capacity. Our goal really is to envision what AI technology might look like when it is used to as a tool to collaborate and to augment people, not displace them.”
Her partnership on the course with Li also fulfills for Dean Levin a goal of increasing the connections between the business school and the rest of Stanford University. No less crucial, though, it has exposed Aaker to new thinking. “We really bonded as humans and friends,” she notes. “We are both moms of kids who are scientists. Our parents are important to us. Our partners are important and our careers and our research is really important to us. When we started brainstorming around the class and what we wanted to do in the course, our mutual commonalities was the starting point.”
For Aaker, integrating social science lessons into the technology that students are building can ultimately optimize the positive impact of that technology and minimize stress-inducing worry and fear from the inevitable disruption and dislocation that the technology will cause. “It’s about how to harness tech for social change and impact,” she says. “The VR class was how to cultivate empathy for people who are not similar to us and empathy for the planet.”
Even in her newest class on AI, there is a direct link to her earlier studies on happiness, purpose and meaning. “A lot of our research on this and our humor class tries to make the case that what makes us really human is what creates meaning and bonds us with others and a larger purpose in the world,” says Aaker. “What I find to be so interesting is we are in a moment in time where individuals are starting to be potentially more interested in understanding what drives human thriving. We have these preconceived notions of what creates our happiness and what I’m hoping for is that there will be an increasing amount of insight into understanding what is actually good for us.”
DON’T MISS: 2018 DEAN OF THE YEAR or 2018 MBA PROGRAM OF THE YEAR
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