Chief Change Officer - #425 Waverly Deutsch: Love and Logic—Building Businesses That Actually Work—Part One
Episode Date: July 8, 2025Waverly Deutsch doesn’t just coach entrepreneurs—she translates English to English, reframes stories with strategy, and helps even the most logic-trained professionals tap into their conv...iction. In this three-part series, we walk through her unusual path from consulting to Chicago Booth to founding WyseHeart, her pitch strategy firm.Each episode reveals a new dimension of her journey: the personal (Part 1), the academic and instructional (Part 2), and the entrepreneurial, including her bold take on how to co-exist with AI (Part 3). Across every chapter, Waverly models what it means to coach with both love and logic—bringing clear frameworks to messy human dreams.Key Highlights of Our Interview:The Computer Scientist Who Loved Shakespeare“I’ve always had a foot in both worlds—logic and emotion, code and creativity.”How Waverly’s dual passions for computer science and theatre shaped her approach to business.The Pivot Into Entrepreneurship“I didn’t want to write code anymore. I wanted to solve problems worth solving.”Why she left tech to help build a startup—and never looked back.Real Lessons, Not Just Case Studies“Harvard cases are great, but I wanted to teach with my own stories.”How she built her curriculum at Booth from lived experience.Founders Aren’t Born“They’re shaped by experience, community, and the right mindset.”What makes someone capable of starting—and sustaining—a business.Emotion Belongs in the Room“Business is about people. If you’re not teaching that, you’re missing the point.”Why she teaches soft skills just as seriously as finance and ops._______________________________Connect with us:Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Waverly Deutsch --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.EdTech Leadership Awards 2025 Finalist.20 Million+ All-Time Downloads.80+ Countries Reached Daily.Global Top 1% Podcast.Top 5 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>200,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer.
I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. I'll show it is a modernist humility for change progressives in organizational and
human transformation from around the world.
Ten years ago, during the summer term of the Executive MBA program at Chicago Booth, I had the pleasure of meeting today's
guest, Waverly Deutsch. She taught one of the standout courses in the executive program
called Building New Ventures. In just a moment, I'll let Waverly introduce herself. The first, I would like to share a memorable memory
that really sets her apart. Throughout my extensive MBA studies at both Yale and Chicago
Booth, where I completed the full-time and executive programs respectively, I've sat through countless lectures taught by highly intelligent scholars
and well-experienced practitioners. Yet, Waverly is the only professor I've encountered who dared
to use the word love in a business school classroom. In the field of business education,
dominated by discussions of numbers,
strategies, formulas, and models,
all the logical stuff,
the concept of love has never surfaced
in any curriculum or textbook I've come across.
Yet, she boarded into our discussions
on angel investing.
It makes you wonder, how does love fit into building a business, advancing a business
career and fulfilling our life's legacy?
With that in mind, I've put together a three-part series called Love and Logic, featuring Waverly as
our special guest. She will be sharing and exploring, from three perspectives, how the
intricate balance of love and logic shapes our career decisions and life choices. Today's episode zooms in on Waverly's personal journey,
the love and logic that have guided her career path
and experiences.
In our next episode, which is about her being a teacher
and expert guide, we'll dive into a major chapter
of her career, 22 years at Chicago Bull.
There, she taught and coached a sharply focused group
of highly logical talents, all deeply engaged
in the passion for innovation, change, and entrepreneurship.
From that structured academic environment,
she has transitioned to her current
role as a coach for a more diverse group of entrepreneurs.
In the third part of our series, we'll come full circle and focus back on Waverly herself.
She is now more than a coach. She is an entrepreneur herself, actively building her own new venture.
It's a fascinating mix of her ever-changing experiences.
["The New York Times"]
Good morning, Waifuli.
Welcome to my show.
Good morning, Vince.
I am thrilled to be here.
Usually I kick off our interview with a little introduction about my guest.
Today I'd like to switch things up a bit.
I was browsing through the website of your new venture, Wiseheart.
And a specific sentence really stood out to me. It said, as a young person, I had an enormous
love for the theatre and a passion for logic. Love and logic, what a fascinating combination. So, Waverly, can
you unpack that for us? Tell us, who are you really at the intersection of these
two worlds? Wow, what an interesting question to start with. I think a lot of people gravitate towards
one or the other. And what I mean by that is we are taught
that we have a right brain and a left brain, and our right
brain is rational and our left brain is emotional. But people
really have both sides of their brain and they're using both
sides of their brain. So for me, the way this man accounts to
me as a child,
I fell in love with theater.
I fell in love with performance.
I fell in love with acting.
I fell in love with theater.
My mother and I would go to the theater together.
It was a very special time for us.
But at the same time, I was good at math and logic puzzles.
And people would say, were you good at computer science?
You have to remember I'm fairly old.
We didn't have computers when I was growing up.
As I was approaching my college years
and really thinking about what I wanted to do with college,
I had done so much in high school with theater
and so much in high school with many other subjects,
economics, psychology, math. I went to an excellent high school. And I was
approaching my college years thinking I still want to do
theater. But I recognize in myself that I don't necessarily
want to have the kind of career where you have a job and then
you don't. And then you have a job and then you don't, and then you have a job and then you don't,
that I wanted something that would create stability for me.
So I approached college saying,
I'm gonna do a dual major in theater and business.
And ultimately what happened was I had a conversation
with a guidance counselor in my freshman year of college.
He said, don't do an undergraduate
business degree.
Companies want MBAs and MBA programs want to teach you their methodology.
Do something, do a deep dive in something that's related to business that you can
leverage in the business world, but would also be a good foundation
for going to business school.
So I said, okay, I will take the computer science class for computer science
majors instead of the one for business majors, and I will check out computer
science and again, being a child of the 70s and 80s,
this is the very early 80s,
I had not been exposed to computers before.
And I fell in love with the logic of computers
and how it was incumbent on a programmer
to break something down into its fundamental elements
to teach a computer how to do it. That's programming.
I ended up with two majors, one in theater and one in computer science. Computer science was
starting to have an impact on theater. I had to learn how to program a lighting board, for example,
but they were really very separate disciplines that I was bringing together in
my own life and in my own mind.
As you indicated, that was late 70s and early 80s.
There must be very, very few females in your computer science class.
How did you navigate this deeply men dominated world?
You're 100% right that in the early 80s, the late 70s, early
80s, I was one of three or four women in my classes in my
computer science classes.
Women, of course, one of sorry, you're saying one of the four.
One of three or four women in the advanced computer science class.
Like how many students were in that class?
Anywhere from 20 to 35.
Oh, okay.
Yes, you're 100% correct in thinking that it was very male dominated.
I think today in college classes in computer science, in STEM,
you'll have a higher percentage of women, but it still won't exceed.
It won't reach 50% in a lot of cases.
But it was 5% at best when I was studying computer science.
I was very lucky in that the head
of the computer science department
at the University of Pittsburgh happened to be a woman.
So I at least had visual role models
because of course in computer science,
most of my teachers were also men.
So I did have a female role model to look to
when I was a computer science student.
I got along really well with the nerdy guys. I've always had nerdy guys as friends. I have my nerdy
side. I'm a science fiction fantasy fan. I cut school in high school to go see The Empire Strikes Back
on its very first day in release with my friend Michael,
who we called Zonar.
I am a nerd, and I got along really well with my nerdy
computer science classmates.
I also got along really well.
I have, I don't want a bride, but I have what I think is a
fairly well-developed EQ from my mother.
I got along really well in theater and I got along really well with my much more artsy feeling theater friends.
They were two totally different worlds. They did not overlap at all. The question of gender, I think,
is a really important one in the conversation
that we're having because you're talking
about love and logic.
And very often, love gets attributed to the feminine
and logic gets attributed to the masculine.
And they have always been a blend in my life.
And I fundamentally believe that they are a blend in humanity
that we artificially separate into.
Have to be honest and maybe this is a little too much information
for your podcast audience, but I do not comply with gender norms.
I never have.
I was a tomboy growing up.
I am tall for a woman.
I wear my hair very short.
I have a deep voice.
I frequently get mistaken for a man.
I identify 100% as a woman, as female.
My pronouns are she, her.
But I have always felt this blend of the masculine and
feminine in my life. And it goes right to this question of love and logic. So as a woman
who had tomboy characteristics, that's what they would have been called in that day.
Even when I grew up, I'm younger than you by about 10 years. Tomboy was still a commonly used term in my generation.
Don't forget we're now in June 2024.
The month of June is the month of pride.
So we are proud of our identities.
Yes, and I love that you bring in Pride Month because I think one of the amazing
things to watch over the last several generations is how the younger
generations have embraced this gender ambiguity, gender fluidity that when you
and I were growing up was not really available to us.
when you and I were growing up, was not really available to us. Nevertheless, let's go back to this conversation of how I did as a female in the computer science
department.
I was accepted by my male colleagues and I thrived.
I did very well.
You asked a follow-up question, what then took you back to theater?
Yep.
So I loved computer science and I loved programming, but I'm not a solitary person, I'm a social person.
When I was thinking about what I wanted to do after college, I was pursuing a couple of different tracks.
I had the good fortune during college to be awarded twice the Provost Scholarship to teach. And one of the times I taught in the theater department
and one of the times I taught
in the computer science department.
I knew that what I wanted to do was teach.
That was truly my calling.
And if you think about a marriage of love and logic,
if you think about a marriage of theater
and computer science,
being able to structure a subject in a way
to present it to people,
but then to present it with a little bit of theatricality,
a little bit of entertainment, a little bit of humor
to make it more interesting, more intriguing,
more engaging as a subject for learning,
this is where these two things came together in me.
So as a senior in college,
I was applying for graduate degrees, I was
applying for fellowships, and I was applying for jobs. And I was offered jobs in the computer
science department of ExxonMobil in the leadership training program of what was then MetLife Insurance in the computer science department's digital equipment corporation.
But I won a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities to pursue my PhD so that I could teach.
That's what took me back to theater.
I really wanted to teach.
And I thought that the way to be able to teach was to do a PhD, and I ended up doing a PhD
in theater history.
Teaching has always been your calling.
But I was wondering, during this journey from PhD to teaching, there's something called
Ferrester. from PhD to teaching. There's something called Feresta.
I believe you joined this firm
and helped it grow from a boutique
into a major institution over a couple of years.
You joined as employee 20 something,
27 I believe that's what you told me.
So with your calling for teaching, with your PhD degree,
you could have stayed in the university,
building your academic career from assistant professor
to associate to a tenure professor,
a very well predicted career path.
Then what happened in between?
Well, talk about Chicago, your teaching career,
22 years teaching careers in Chicago. But before that, let's talk about what happened
in the 90s.
My career is nothing but a new example for twists and turns. It's an excellent question.
How do I end up at Forest? Graduating with my PhD, we were at the height of the late 80s,
early 90s recession, and the Baby Boomers kids
hadn't reached college age.
College enrollments were plummeting.
I was a theater historian.
That's what my PhD was in, theater history.
And colleges were cutting theater programs.
You had to maintain your acting program.
That's what students came for.
But you could shave down classes like theater history
and allow the English department to teach Shakespeare.
You could use the English department
to cover some of the theater curriculum.
And so there were no jobs.
Every job I was applying to was 200 to 400 applicants,
many of whom had been tenure track faculty
who had lost their jobs, right?
And so they were applying for the few available jobs.
At the same time, I was realizing that
while I loved the teaching part,
and I had taught at Tufts University where I
got my PhD, I had taught as a graduate student, I loved that part of my job, I
did not love the research requirements of the theater history discipline.
In the humanities you have to publish on things that nobody has ever written about before and you end up getting
very esoteric. My dissertation is on the career of a woman named Laura Keane who was a 20th,
19th century theater manager. She was the most successful woman to run a theater on Broadway
in the 19th century. She had her own troupe. It was in fact her troupe that was playing
our American cousin in Ford's theater the night Lincoln was shot. She was the person who identified
John Wilkes Booth and no one has ever heard of her. And you get into these very esoteric topics.
What does it mean to have been a woman theater manager in the 19th
century and what happened to women theater managers as theater changed in
the 19th century? And I started to realize these are not really impactful
issues in our day-to-day lives. I wanted something that was more current, more
contemporary. But when I couldn't get a job as a junior faculty member in theater, I said,
I am not going to stay in the world of academia.
I am going to return to the world of technology, which is much more pressing, more relevant now.
Again, beloved logic.
I love the theater. I love teaching, but I don't love academia.
I don't love a career as a humanities academic. I will go back to technology.
Now this is the early 90s. This is 1991, 1992. So technology is in a boom. It's in
the very early stages of the internet bubble. In fact, it's a little bit pre bubble
It's as the internet is becoming part of our daily life. We're really using
dial-up AOL or CompuServe and
I'm having a conversation one night with a friend and we're out to dinner with my
partner and and her husband my friend's husband
with my partner and her husband, my friend's husband.
We're having this conversation and she turns to her husband and she said, she'd be perfect for Forrester Research.
And I said, I'll buy it, what's a Forrester Research?
I had never been in the business world.
I had never thought about careers in business.
And it turns out he was an analyst for Forrester.
They were a tiny little boutique market research company
that looked at the
impact of technology change on big business.
Their tagline was helping companies thrive on technology change.
So why was this an unbelievably opportunistic moment?
I call it luck, karma, fate, the world, just throwing open a door when you need one.
If there's one thing a PhD proves that you can do it's research. That is
the fundamental thing that you do right as a PhD student. And
I had a technology background. I knew how computers worked. I
knew how to talk that language. I could very quickly learn the
modern technologies and I joined Forrester as the first research
associate that they hired directly. The woman who preceded me had created the
position she had been an admin on the sales side. She created the position of
research associate. I was the first person they hired into that job. I went on to experience a great company with the entrepreneur founder CEO still in place.
We were less than $10 million in revenue.
We were 20 people. I was employee number 27. There had been a little bit of modest churn. And we went on our rocket ship.
We had hired a new VP of sales out of IBM and he revolutionized the approach to
go to market and sales and the company took off and we were the first company to
tell Fortune 1000 chief technology officers, chief information officers, you
have to pay attention to the internet.
And that was what put us on the map.
We were working in the early days that I joined
with their transition from big mainframe computing
to client server computing,
and the PC and the role that the PC would play.
And we were establishing ourselves
as a leader in technology market research,
but it was really our call around the internet that took Forester to the public company that it became
and is today.
The founder CEO, still the CEO, personal friend, lifelong relationship, but I got to work very
closely with him, see his journey, see what it means to scale a company, see what it means
to take a product idea and turn it into reality. And that's where I fell in love with the entrepreneurial process.
While listening to you, I felt like we were having coffee together. Your story had me nodding,
loving, and utterly fascinated. You present this blend of strong analytical thinking with a very
human social side. Considering your career shifts and external pressures you faced, you
mentioned some kind of luck or perhaps karma. It got me thinking, how aware are you when it comes to making what you call
calculated decisions? This ties into our theme of love and logic, the heart and the head.
When you reach a critical point in your career path, how much do you lean on your analytical side?
I'm not just talking about money or job titles,
but evaluating the broader prospects of a position,
diving deep into the industry.
How much of it is a calculated assessment?
Or perhaps, is it more about that feeling that tells you,
hey, this is the right move?
So do you consider yourself primarily analytical when making career
decisions? Or do you tend to go with the flow? Or maybe you have your own unique approach or system
for navigating these decisions. How does that work with you? I love that question and I think that for me it changed very much over time.
The moment in my life, I was 29 years old when I graduated with my PhD, the moment in
my life where I had the opportunity to join Forrester, no analysis was involved.
No examination of the job, the market size, the career potential, no analysis.
It was a gut feeling that this was an entry back into the world of technology that I wanted to get into.
And a real sense that I could learn a ton from the people I met in my interview process.
I could learn about business.
It's not that I hadn't been working.
I had only been doing a PhD.
I actually taught for Stanley Kaplan test prep for 15 years.
Was it 15 years?
Oh my goodness.
No, I guess it was about 15 years. From about years, oh my goodness. No I guess it was about 15 years from about 18 to about 29, so 11 years teaching people
to prepare for the GRE, the GMAT, the SAT.
I had been working in the office at Stanley Kaplan, so I had been in the world of business
education. So I had been in the world of business education, but this was an entry back into technology
and there was no, is this the right job for me?
Let me look at the market size, due diligence on the company.
This was, I am so lucky to have this opportunity presenting itself to me. Fast forward, I leave Fulleristert in 1999 and I take a much more strategic
approach, a much more logical, thoughtful approach to what I want to do next. I
see a career coach, get some skills assessments done, I evaluate some jobs
and realize that I don't want any of them as full-time jobs.
But I enjoyed the people that are coming to me.
So rather than take another full-time job after recovering from my stint at
Forrester, and I say recovering because we were growing so fast, we were working
50, 60 hour weeks, it was very stressful. We had gone through an
IPO. We'd reached 200 million in sales and 400 people in the company all in the seven
and a half years I was there. So I took a little break after I left Forrester. Instead
of joining any one company, I decided I would create a small consulting company and work
with all of these companies, an independent consulting company, work with all of them
at some level of their large companies on their e-commerce strategy, internet companies
on their go to market, technology companies on raising funding from venture capitalists.
I did some consulting to see what kind of work
I really liked and to see if there was a company
that I wanted to throw in with full time.
So I went from as a 29 year old leaving one field
that I had deep experience in, the academic field,
and getting into a new field
and literally just taking the leap
based on a leap of faith that I had this opportunity to join this company that I really
liked these people and knew I could learn a lot. Fast forward 10 years, almost 10 years,
and I'm taking a very different approach to what I want to do next. There are two other words that perfectly capture
the essence of love and logic.
They are heart and head.
Can you recall a pivotal moment or a situation
when you were torn between following your heart or your head?
What ultimately guided your decision then?
Wow.
I want to tell you a story
that I haven't actually told a lot of people
about when I learned how to manage the conflict
between heart and head.
And the time at Forrester
with the entrepreneurial CEO George Colony
was fabulous and I learned an enormous amount and I grew enormously.
But it was also when I had to confront this heart-head challenge.
head challenge. Many of us hate confrontation. We hate having to deliver bad news or have a difficult conversation. We, we
hate it. And when I get frustrated, when I have to face confrontation, I get teary. And I was
having an incredibly hard conversation with George about my role at Forrester
and my future at Forrester. And I started to cry. And George didn't know what to do. And he wanted to end the conversation. And I literally said to the
man, George, I can cry and think at the same time. We can have
this conversation. Yes, I am having tears because my emotions
are involved in this incredibly important logical conversation.
We are human beings. We have emotions and we have logic.
And I can think and cry at the same time.
And for me, that was an extremely liberating moment.
Because in the past, I had always tried to get through the thinking situation
and then go off and burst in tears.
That had happened to me when I found out at Tufts that I had passed my exams, my PhD exams, and I was going to be awarded my PhD degree.
The way that the Head of the Department presented it to me was hateful.
He said, we expected much more of you than this.
And if we could give you a pass minus, we would give you a pass minus.
And had been taking care of a partner who was suffering from chronic fatigue.
And I had been working a job at Stanley Kaplan and I had been studying for my exams and I was emotionally exhausted.
And I said to him, did I pass?
And he said, oh, yes.
And I said, thank you.
And I ran downstairs into the bathroom
and burst into tears.
To be able to have the confrontation with George
and to cry and to have logic
and to have a successful outcome was an amazing moment for me in learning that both things can happen at the same time and both can come into play at the same time.
And I think a lot of people, especially women, our emotions tend to be a little bit more at the surface than a lot of men experience.
Although, believe me, I've known a lot of men have sat with me and cried.
This gift of being able to say you can have your emotions and we can have this important logic-driven discussion at the same time
was a really critical moment for me in my evolution as a professional and as a human
being, to tell you the truth. Growing up, I learned a straight rule. No crying at work
is simply unprofessional. That was the norm in all the places I've worked and studied,
or the places I've worked and studied, both in the US and abroad. But let's be real.
Whether you are a man or a woman, we are human, and humans have emotions.
Crying is simply one way we express those emotions.
I believe that as our views on gender roles continue to evolve, it's becoming clear
that we also need to rethink our attitudes towards showing emotions in the workplace.
I think that just to comment on what you said, I think one of the biggest myths that we've created
in the world of business is, hey, it's not personal, it's just
business. Right? Oh, yes, people. Businesses are made of
people and people are human and they have emotion. And I also
think it's we're learning that a lot of our emotional sense is
tapping into some subconscious knowledge that is actually
leading us in a better direction than the purely analytical,
right? So no entrepreneur has enough data to make a purely analytical decision.
You have to go with your gut. The one time that I accepted a job based on the logic of it. The title, the career path, the money, the benefits, the moment in my life where I needed to
establish myself in Chicago because I had moved from Boston. But there's this little red flag in
my emotions saying, I don't know about these guys. There's this little tickle in my gut that I don't know about
these guys. The one time I went with head it was a disaster and
lasted six months.
I parted ways with the company.
The my intuition about the guys was right.
Ultimately the VCs that backed the founder of the company had
to remove them as CEO and claw back some of their money and allow the business model to change without him.
And to the one time that I actually made a career decision with my head rather than my heart, it was a disaster.
And I think I learned a lot from that. Ultimately, the emotional side of you, the intuitive side of you, you know, what Malcolm
Gladwell writes about in Blink, is accessing the fact that our brains are firing off billions
of neurons.
We can't keep up with it at a conscious level, but our gut can, and our gut is telling us
things that are important to listen to.
And that's the thing that drives entrepreneurs is the need, the emotional
need to do this business, to see if it will work, to bring this value, to improve the world with a service or an innovation or a technology.
I am firmly in the camp of do all the logical analysis and don't do something
that is clearly stupid, but when ultimately faced with that choice, if
your gut is telling you, this is where I got to go, and If your gut is telling you, this is where I gotta go. And if this gut is,
if your gut is telling you this is a bad idea, listen to it. There's a piece of the love and
logic puzzle. I haven't talked about much yet. So far, I've discussed following your heart as a standalone element.
But our hearts, they are heavily influenced by our peers, the people around us, and the
social environment we're in.
Take my MBA classmates.
For example, among my classmates, I am the outliner.
Most of them are in finance, CEO, CFO, senior bankers,
senior management consultants, managing partner at P.E.
and V.C. houses.
If I had stayed long enough at certain companies,
I would have ended up in those roles as well.
But I made different choices along the way, guided by both heart and head.
The reason I bring up my own story at this juncture is that I've noticed many people
struggle not just with the emotional versus logical decision-making,
also with not seeing role models who reflect their aspirations.
There's also often a deep-seated fear of judgment and fear of failure.
These fears influence our hearts and ultimately impact our decisions.
I'm curious about your experience.
How much have external factors like peer pressure,
societal judgements, or even social norms influenced you?
You mentioned earlier that you aren't bound by gender norms.
But what about other societal expectations?
How have you managed to filter out the noise and make your laws of change along your career
path?
I think you're 100% right that our emotions and our heart are influenced by the people
around us. And in fact, there's a lot of evidence that community is one of the primary sources of happiness in life.
So being able to find a community that supports you and that accepts you is one of the big challenges of people's lives.
And the way that community views you, right,
being accepted by that community, like you said,
by your peers in graduate school or in the career world,
or, you know, that's an important part of life and happiness.
I would argue that it doesn't just affect the heart,
that it affects the head,
that the very value systems that we're using to
appraise things from a so-called logical standpoint, salary, title, right, career
potential, use of our talent, all of those are based on societal judgment factors
that are all driven by society, peer, upbringing, community. So I 100% agree with you on the incredible
importance of other people.
Humans are a social animal.
I might disagree with you on that it hits the heart
and not the head.
I think it defines a lot of both.
That being said, for me,
one of the things that I think gave me the kind of
resilience that I've had in my career and my life is the fact
that I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian
household. And I had to separate from my community, the community
that I grew up with, the people that I grew up with. I had to accept myself as non-conforming with what
I had been taught as a kid was right, normal, appropriate, in fact made into a life or death
decision. And by doing that, by having as a very young person, a young teen and a teen, having to give up community,
give up, even give up family for a while, it made me more resistant to heavy influence by outside
community forces. It made me more able to listen to myself, my own values, my
ethics system, my moral system, and be less judgmental about
things like my career. To be able to leave a career in which
I was experiencing some success and make a huge change where I
had to go back to the beginning again, not something that was
supported by my graduate school friends,
my, the people who knew me as an academic
and as a thought leader in a particular field.
And I think that having to lose a community
and having to rebuild the community gave me a sense of,
not a complete inoculation to what other people think
about what I'm doing, but much less strength in that particular pressure on me and my life.
We began today's interview by exploring Waverly's personal journey.
Intricate blend of love and logic that has guided her from her undergraduate days all the way to retirement.
To our listeners, I hope today's episode inspires you to integrate your own love and logic in whatever paths you choose to pursue.
In our next episode, which is the second part of our three-part series, will dig deep into
a significant chapter of Waverly's career, her 22 years as Chicago Booth.
There, she taught and co-authed a selected group of highly logical talents, undergraduates, full-time, part-time, and executive MBAs from around
the world, all of whom were passionate about innovation, change, and
entrepreneurship. Yet despite their brilliance, these individuals faced their
own challenges. Waverly has learned to tailor her coaching approach,
sometimes offering a bigger dose of love,
other times amping up the logic.
How exactly do you manage this?
Stay tuned, we'll explore that in the next episode.
next episode. check out our website and follow me on social media. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host.
Until next time, take care.