Business & Entrepreneurship

It’s possible the Keebler Elves aren’t as happy at work as they seem. Or SpongeBob SquarePants’ dour fast-food colleague Squidward might be a little cheerier than he lets on. New research from Olin Business School shows that people working in customer-facing companies, such as retailers (or cartoon burger joints), tend to be happier at work, while workers for companies further removed — manufacturing, for example (or treehouse cookie factories) — tend to be less happy.

Two U.S. retailers made moves this week to regulate their gun sales based on principle — moves that legislators failed to make in recent years despite public outcry following each incident in a line of mass-shooting tragedies. A pair of Washington University in St. Louis experts say that these actions represent “an expansion of corporate social responsibility,” even if the retailers financially may suffer amid something of a consumer backlash.

A new study out of Olin Business School found that CFOs with oversized signatures — a proxy for narcissism — were more likely to make over-aggressive choices, have a higher-than-expected level of restatements and partake in other questionable activities.

An international research team, led by Washington University in St. Louis, studied vocal expressions uttered by people in the United States, Australia, India, Kenya and Singapore, and found that people were better at judging emotions from fellow countrymen.

A new Olin Business School study suggests maybe there is no one best negotiator; maybe the person you should send into a negotiation depends on whom you’re up against.

One proud chapter of Washington University’s history is the founding of The Consortium for Graduate Study in Management. Since 1966, the consortium has been driving diversity in business education and corporate leadership across the country.

Alumni of The Consortium for Graduate Study in Management do well by doing good.

Washington University management professor “stuck his neck out” to establish what has become the oldest and biggest business education diversity organization.

The university’s Office of Technology Management is organizing the Women in Innovation and Technology symposium later this month. The event is one way the office is helping to educate, train and guide women through the commercialization process.

The current volatility of the U.S. stock market is no cause for alarm, but a Washington University in St. Louis expert who helped to create a volatility index knows the difficulty in predicting if a fluctuation like the current one will subside quickly or slowly: “It is hard to time volatility spikes.”