Olin Business School

As businesses around the country are closing their doors and transitioning to remote work, Andrew Knight, a professor of organizational behavior at Washington University’s Olin Business School, said they should expect a period of adjustment as people develop new routines, norms and shared understandings about how work will progress through a new medium.

The U.S. Senate, with significant prodding from the Trump administration, is working on a plan to directly provide cash assistance to millions of Americans amid the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic. Experts in economics and finance from Washington University in St. Louis’ Olin Business School weigh in on how it could help housing and households and maybe pay some bills — but still not answer the problems at hand.

Olin Business School faculty at Washington University in St. Louis offer perspectives on the economic, financial and everyday business reactions to the novel coronavirus outbreak.

Dennis Zhang, assistant professor of operations and manufacturing management at Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis, has won the 2020 Olin Award for research that creates a human-focused algorithm to improve warehouse workers’ packing time while also reducing material costs.

Leadership, at its core, is about influence. In Olin Business School’s popular MBA elective “Power and Politics,” students learn how to navigate leadership positions, which necessitates building power and gaining influence in the workplace.

Two WashU alums and one current student helped take a cosmetics startup from a dream to a reality.

Panos Kouvelis, who teaches and helped to popularize the Waffle House Index regarding natural-disaster responses, says the outbreak’s impact on global supply chains promises to be two times worse than when the SARS virus emerged in 2002 in China.

Menstruation is considered taboo in Ethiopia, and girls often miss school or drop out because of their periods. Freweini Mebrahtu designed a solution — and, with support from St. Louis-based charity Dignity Period, founded by a Washington University faculty member, it has benefited nearly 800,000 girls and women. Mebrahtu was recently named CNN’s “Hero of the Year.”

Training, and retaining, tech talent is essential to St. Louis’ continued economic growth. A new partnership between Washington University in St. Louis and the nonprofit organization LaunchCode makes the transition from apprentice to full-time employee at the university easier for LaunchCode graduates.

Olusegun Obasanjo, an economic innovator in Africa and two-time leader of Nigeria, will make his first stop in the Midwest to kick off the third annual Olin Africa Business Forum at Washington University in St. Louis.