Chief Change Officer - From Curtain Calls to Business Cases: Waverly Deutsch’s Path from Theatre Historian to Chicago Booth Professor

Episode Date: December 26, 2024

Kicking off our “Love and Logic” series, Part 1 features Waverly Deutsch, who shares how her career and life choices have been shaped by a blend of passion and reason. This episode unpacks her jou...rney, with the following installments focusing on her impact at Chicago Booth and her entrepreneurial coaching with WyseHeart Advisory, driven by “tough love for entrepreneurs.” Why Waverly? Known for her direct approach, Waverly has earned the nickname “the Simon Cowell of Chicago Booth,” but with a key difference—her feedback always comes with actionable solutions. She might point out, “You just talked for ten minutes and we have no idea what you do,” but she’ll also say, “Here’s what we can do to make it crystal clear.” That’s the hallmark of her coaching—honest, constructive, and deeply invested in your success. Key Highlights of Our Interview: A Love for Theater and Logic “I fell in love with theater and acting as a child. My mother and I would go to the theater together—it was a special time for us. At the same time, I was good at math and logic puzzles. I ended up with two majors, one in theater and one in computer science. They were separate disciplines, but in my mind, I was always bringing them together.” The Gut-Driven Leap “At 29, with a fresh PhD, analysis didn’t guide my career move. Joining Forrester was pure gut instinct. I saw it as a chance to dive back into technology, learn from brilliant people, and expand my horizons—no spreadsheets, no market evaluations, just a leap of faith.” Academia or Impact? The Career Crossroads “Graduating with a PhD in theater history during a recession, teaching jobs were scarce. Colleges were cutting back on theater programs, and the research focus in humanities felt too esoteric. I wanted to do something more contemporary, more impactful.” Burnout and Breakthroughs “After nearly eight years at Forrester, experiencing explosive growth, an IPO, and 60-hour weeks, I needed a reset. By 1999, I was ready for a new direction and decided to approach my next move more strategically.” Empathy for Everyone “Emotions aren’t just a ‘women’s thing.’ I’ve sat with many men who’ve cried during challenging discussions. The key is understanding that emotions are human, not a weakness, and they have a place in even the most logic-driven conversations.” _________________________ Connect with Us: Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Waverly Deutsch ______________________ Chief Change Officer: Make Change Ambitiously. Experiential Human Intelligence for Growth Progressives Global Top 3% Podcast on Listen Notes World's #1 Career Podcast on Apple Top 1: US, CA, MX, IE, HU, AT, CH, FI, JP 3+ Millions Downloads 80+ Countries

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hi everyone, welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. I'll show it is a modernist community 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. But first, I would like to share a memorable memory
Starting point is 00:01:08 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
Starting point is 00:01:37 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.
Starting point is 00:02:05 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
Starting point is 00:02:59 and expert guide, we'll dive into a major chapter of her career, 22 years at Chicago Booth. 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's now more than a coach. She's an entrepreneur herself, actively building her own new venture.
Starting point is 00:03:47 It's a fascinating mix of her ever-changing experiences. Good morning, Waverly. Welcome to my show. Good morning, Vince. I am thrilled to be here. Usually, I kick off an interview with a little introduction about my guest. Today I 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 theater and a passion for logic. Love and logic, what a fascinating combination. So Waverly, can you unpack that for us?
Starting point is 00:04:41 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 brain and a left brain, our right brain is rational and our left brain is emotional, but people have both sides of their brain and they're using both sides of their brain. So for me, the way this manifesto did, 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.
Starting point is 00:05:25 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
Starting point is 00:05:50 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 recognized 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. That I wanted something that would create stability for me. So I approached college saying I'm going to 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
Starting point is 00:06:41 programs want to teach you their methodology, do something, do a deep dive into 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 do it. That's programming. I ended up with two majors, one in theater and one in computer science. Computer science was starting to
Starting point is 00:07:45 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 man-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, out.
Starting point is 00:08:34 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 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
Starting point is 00:09:14 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. Hmm. 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 nerd computer science classmates. I also got along really well. I have, I don't want to brag,
Starting point is 00:10:12 but I have what I think is a fairly well developed EQ from my mother. 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 part 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
Starting point is 00:10:55 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.
Starting point is 00:11:19 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 convoy 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.
Starting point is 00:11:53 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. 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
Starting point is 00:12:48 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 that I'm not a solitary person 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
Starting point is 00:13:24 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.
Starting point is 00:13:52 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 departments of Digital Equipment Corporation. But I won a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities
Starting point is 00:14:22 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 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
Starting point is 00:15:09 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. Yeah, my career is nothing but a new example
Starting point is 00:15:47 for twists and turns. It's an excellent question. How do I end up at Forrest? 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.
Starting point is 00:16:06 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.
Starting point is 00:16:32 And so there were no jobs. I was, 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,
Starting point is 00:17:00 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 polish 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 Key, who was a 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.
Starting point is 00:17:34 It was in fact her trade 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?
Starting point is 00:17:56 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.
Starting point is 00:18:33 I love the theater. I love teaching. And 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's in a boom, it's in the very early stages of the internet bubble. In fact, it's a little bit free bubble. It's as the internet is becoming part of our daily life,
Starting point is 00:19:00 we're really using dial-up AOL or CompuServe. I'm having a conversation one night with a friend and we're out to dinner with my partner and her husband, my friend's husband. We're having this conversation and she turns to us and she said, she'd be perfect for forester research. And I said, I'll buy it, what's a forester research? I had never been in the business world. I had never
Starting point is 00:19:26 thought about careers in business. And 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?
Starting point is 00:20:03 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 Forester 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 growth company with the entrepreneur founder CEO still in place. We were less than 10 million dollars 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
Starting point is 00:20:58 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
Starting point is 00:21:34 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.
Starting point is 00:21:57 And that's where I fell in love with the entrepreneurial process. Well, listening to you, I felt like we were having coffee together. Your story had me nodding, laughing, 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
Starting point is 00:22:36 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?
Starting point is 00:23:23 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 it changed me 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 Borrester, no analysis was involved. No examination of the job, the market size, the career potential, no analysis.
Starting point is 00:23:59 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.
Starting point is 00:24:31 It's a 15 years. Oh my goodness. No, I guess it was about 15 years from about 18 to about 29 to 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. But this was an entry back into technology and there was no, is this the right job for me?
Starting point is 00:25:03 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 Fullerister 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 enjoy the people that are coming to me. So rather than take another full time job after
Starting point is 00:25:45 recovering from my stint at Forrester, and I say recovering because we were growing so fast. We were working 5060 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 and independent consulting company work with all of them at some level of their large companies on their
Starting point is 00:26:25 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.
Starting point is 00:27:22 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 wanna 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
Starting point is 00:27:55 entrepreneurial CEO George Colony was fabulous and I learned an enormous amount and I grew enormously. fabulous and I learned an enormous amount and I grew enormously. But it was also when I had to confront this Harphead challenge. Many of us hate confrontation. We hate having to deliver bad news or have a difficult conversation. 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, my future at Forrester, and I started to cry.
Starting point is 00:28:52 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
Starting point is 00:29:21 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 into 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 pedagogy department presented it to me was hateful.
Starting point is 00:29:56 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?
Starting point is 00:30:22 And he said, 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 may 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
Starting point is 00:31:07 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, both in the U.S. and abroad.
Starting point is 00:31:36 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. 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
Starting point is 00:32:25 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
Starting point is 00:33:01 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. I lasted six months. I parted ways with the company. The, my intuition about the guys was right.
Starting point is 00:33:28 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 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. I think 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,
Starting point is 00:34:26 to see it that 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 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.
Starting point is 00:35:27 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
Starting point is 00:36:17 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 judgments, 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 in our heart are influenced by the people around us.
Starting point is 00:37:14 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,
Starting point is 00:37:43 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 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.
Starting point is 00:38:14 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 books. 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,
Starting point is 00:38:49 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
Starting point is 00:39:46 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, the people who knew me as an academic and as a thought leader in a particular field. 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 begin 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 is by you to integrate your own love and logic in whatever paths you choose
Starting point is 00:40:48 to pursue. In our next episode, which is the second part of our three-part series, we'll dig deep into a significant chapter of Waverly's career, her 22 years at Chicago Booth. There, she taught and co-authed a selected group of highly logical talents, undergrads, full-time, part-time, and executive MBAs from around the world. All of whom were passionate about innovation, change, and entrepreneurship.
Starting point is 00:41:32 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, amping up the logic. How exactly they should manage this? Stay tuned, we'll explore that in the next episode. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you like what you heard, don't forget, subscribe to our show, leave us top-rated reviews, check out our website and follow me on social media.
Starting point is 00:42:12 I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Until next time, take care.

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