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Cornell’s new Executive Women in Leadership certificate program

Women comprise 44 percent of the overall S&P 500 labor force, and yet they hold just 25 percent of executive and senior-level positions, occupy only 20 percent of board seats, and represent just 6 percent of CEOs. Power structures and gender dynamics often favor and reward the contributions of men over women, and even the most experienced and capable women can struggle to overcome these to attain leadership positions.

To empower accomplished professionals with the strategies and techniques needed to skillfully level the playing field while working to attain higher levels of leadership, Cornell has announced the launch of the new Executive Women in Leadership certificate program. Available online through eCornell, this certificate program equips learners with the tools needed to identify and reduce the gender bias and power dynamics present in their own organizations, and to bring greater parity to workplace culture.

“Research shows that when both women and men think of a leader, they think of a man,” says faculty co-author Dr. Deborah Streeter, the Bruce F. Failing, Sr., Professor of Personal Enterprise at Cornell’s SC Johnson College of Business. “For centuries, men have held the highest positions of power in most organizations, which has led people to associate leadership with stereotypically masculine traits, including aggression, decisiveness, strength, and willingness to engage in conflict. This certificate program allows learners to create a personalized action plan using recommended strategies to understand the gendered environments in which they are operating and then navigate the most effective path to leadership, status, and power in their organization.”

Women leaders in mid- to senior-level positions, women who hold or are interested in seeking board positions, women entrepreneurs and founders, and male leaders seeking to better understand gender dynamics in their organizations will find value in this program. Learners will refine their executive presence to improve interactions with people at higher power levels, improve their approach to negotiations, explore the strategies needed to develop a strong professional network, and assess the core competencies needed for board membership.

“In order to become a senior leader, an individual must first be perceived as one. This requires demonstrating myriad skills such as being an effective negotiator, a visionary, and an excellent networker, as well as personal characteristics such as gravitas, authenticity, and the right mix of authority and warmth,” says Dr. Susan S. Fleming, co-author, executive educator, and former Senior Lecturer at Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration and the Johnson Graduate School of Management. “Learners will explore ways to prepare for the challenges women face in developing and evidencing these skills and qualities.”
Once learners complete the Executive Women in Leadership certificate program, they are well-positioned to navigate institutional dynamics and achieve higher levels of leadership.

Courses include:

  • Power and Gender Dynamics
  • Developing Executive Presence for Women Leaders
  • Gender Bias and Negotiation Strategies
  • The Network Effect
  • Decoding the Gender Gap in Board Membership

Upon successful completion of all five courses, learners earn an Executive Women in Leadership Certificate from Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, 40 professional development hours, and 4 Continuing Education Units.

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Cornell’s new certificate program develops skills to lead with character

Servant leadership, a leadership philosophy where an individual shares power, puts the needs of others first, and helps people develop and perform at a high level, has several distinct advantages over traditional leadership models. The University of Illinois at Chicago Business School recently conducted a study at national food chain Jason’s Deli. Among the surveyed restaurants, stores with servant leaders showed a 6 percent higher job performance, an 8 percent increase in positive customer service ratings, and a 50 percent higher staff retention rate.

Recognizing the powerful professional benefits servant leaders and their organizations experience, Cornell announces the new Servant Leadership certificate program to help learners develop into effective, successful leaders who demonstrate courage, humility, and compassion.

“Character is not something we have or don’t have,” says Amy Newman, faculty co-author and Senior Lecturer, Cornell SC Johnson College of Business. “Leaders can develop character over time. This certificate provides you with skills needed to improve judgement and demonstrate character to develop a culture of servant leadership.”

Informal or formal leaders at any level in a for-profit or not-for-profit organization, as well as anyone who exacts influence at work will find value in this certificate program, which is available online through eCornell.

Using case studies and examples, learners will explore seven dimensions of leadership associated with strong character. Through self-reflection exercises, assessments, and activities, they will begin the work of developing these character dimensions.

“Servant leaders genuinely listen to their employees and focus on their development,” says faculty co-author Judi Brownell, Professor, Cornell SC Johnson College of Business. “It’s truly a lifelong journey toward becoming the best leader you can be by fostering a culture of collaboration and service.”

Upon completion of the Servant Leadership certificate program, learners will understand how to develop trusting relationships through authenticity, integrity, and accountability, as well as how to implement performance management practices that reinforce service leadership.

Courses include:

  • Building Leadership Character
  • Authenticity, Integrity, and Accountability
  • Courage, Humility, and Compassion
  • Developing a Culture of Empowerment
  • Leading with Credibility

“Some incredibly successful companies, including Whole Foods, UPS, and Ritz Carlton, have implemented servant leadership,” says faculty co-author Tony Simons, Professor, Cornell SC Johnson College of Business. “The benefits of a service leadership culture are undeniable. It is critical, though, that the implementing company take the care and time to consistently align policies, practices, and leader behaviors with the new direction. Half measures do not work.”

Upon successful completion of all five courses, learners earn a Servant Leadership Certificate from Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, 40 professional development hours, and 4 Continuing Education Units.

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Cultivate strategic approach to organizational management

Learners gain the leadership agility skills needed to operate in complex environments

Great leaders are always looking ahead. They embrace change instead of resisting it, recognizing that the world’s landscape in the 21st century is vastly different from that of previous generations. In order for organizations to thrive, leaders must see the way forward and point the way ahead.

To prepare yourself to effectively lead through volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) and improve your organizations, Cornell has announced the launch of the new VUCA Leadership certificate program. Available online through eCornell, this certificate program will help leaders develop internal strengths and strategic skills, and improve their ability to influence people both within their organization and outside of it to accomplish their vision.

“When organizational leaders are able to identify and reduce the impact of VUCA in the workplace, their teams and organizations thrive,” says General George W. Casey, Jr., Faculty Author and Distinguished Senior Lecturer at Cornell SC Johnson College of Business. “This certificate program equips you with the tools to lead more effectively in a VUCA world.”

Leaders and executives at all levels will find this certificate program valuable. Learners will match their strengths and weaknesses with the leadership characteristics that are vital for success in today’s fluid world, and be able to formulate action plans to increase their opportunities for success.

Upon completion of the VUCA leadership certificate program, learners can immediately begin applying their new skills in the workplace. Whether it’s developing a clear and succinct communications plan to implement your vision and strategy, constructing an effective vision statement, or identifying the antidotes for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, learners can address today’s challenges with the viable solutions learned through the program.

Courses include:

  • Leading in a VUCA World
  • Developing and Communicating Vision and Strategy
  • Building Great Teams
  • Setting Internal and External Conditions for Success
  • Preparing for the Future

Upon successful completion of all five courses, learners earn a VUCA Leadership Certificate from Cornell SC Johnson Graduate School of Management.

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Careers, Family, and Gender: Managing Effectively in Today’s Shifting Workplace

Over the past fifty years, America has seen steady shifts in the makeup of its workplace. Managing these changes in career, family, and gender have needed to be addressed by both HR and workers themselves. Pamela Tolbert, professor from Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, has been studying how social changes affect organizations and vice versa. She sat down with eCornell’s Chris Wofford to discuss how organizational leadership can address challenges for workers in today’s workplace and what they can do to create a more progressive environment that leaves everyone at the table more fulfilled.

What follows is an abridged version of that conversation.

Wofford: I think one of the through lines to today’s conversation, the thing we’re going to be talking about is work-life balance. Why is that an issue today? What’s the landscape look like? Give us some perspective.

Tolbert: So this gets into how organizations affect social life in part. And I think there are a couple of things that have led to this becoming a really big issue today particularly. I mean people have always worked, people have always had families. But there’ve been changes in both families and the workplace that have kind of lead to a perfect storm in how these two spheres relate to each other. We moved from the kind of traditional family where you have the husband is the bread winner, and the wife stays at home and takes care of things, to a place where you have dual earner couples are common place. And that change occurred pretty quickly actually. About 50% of all families, the husband worked, the wife stayed at home. By the 2000s, it was somewhere between 60% to 75% of the workforce were dual earners.

And then the workplace really didn’t change that much. You know, you have this big social change going on outside the workplace that affects it, not so much adaptation.

Wofford: I’m curious what companies are doing.

Tolbert: So there are a couple of major experiments in particular that I think are really promising. And part of the thing that makes them I think work, is that they’re really focused on rethinking how we work. Not just trying to help people manage work family relations, but the basic premise, these are a couple of experiments. One was done at Best Buy.

Wofford: What happened at Best Buy?

Tolbert: In the case of Best Buy, it was called Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE). So in that case it was started by their HR, but they were very conscious of the fact that part of what had gone wrong in the accommodations arrangements, where you have to ask your supervisor if you’re going to take a leave, or you have to make a deal to have flexible work arrangements. So it’s clear that it’s very important to get the supervisors involved in this. That it’s not something that’s just imposed upon them. So what they did was to bring together teams of employees and their supervisors, and the supervisor was responsible for helping the team come up with the ideas and to think the processes through essentially- everything is fair game. Let’s think about the meetings that we have. Let’s think about whether we could use technology more effectively to do things, rather than having all these meetings. If we made some kind of scheduling arrangements, could we then allow people to have more time off, so that they’re not having to be there constantly? Just to be more effective in thinking about the arrangements for coordinating and controlling.

Wofford: They would close the loop on a lot of their initiatives.

Tolbert: Yeah, yeah. So they could readjust. And it turned out it was a very effective program. I mean the employees were incredibly enthusiastic about it. It spread to a large number of others- it started at headquarters, and then it spread throughout the company, and actually a number of other organizations adopted it. They had data, it reduced turnover by almost half.

And the employees reported that they were getting more sleep, they had more energy, they could focus better, because of being able to control their work. So I think part of what’s important here is that because people were motivated to try and think, how can I work better? Because they have the carrot at the end, that your life would actually be improved. It’s not like, think how to work more efficiently so you can work more often.

With a national policy you could kind of provide incentives for employers to spread the work out a little bit more. Everybody would benefit. Including families. And all kinds of things. So that’s one direction that things could go. We also have model organizations to provide pathways. I mentioned the SAS corporation. There is a case study from … I think it’s in the Harvard. But anyway, it’s about this big data analytics company which has been around since, I don’t know, 1976 maybe. It’s a successful company. Always done well. This is the one where they have a 35 hour work week policy. Although people are also expected that if you’re needed you will be there. But the norm, you have a norm that work is not supposed to wake up every day of your life. They provide childcare policies. It’s a very employee centered company.

And the case makes it sound like Shangri-La. But the thing is is that it’s a private company and I think it’s easier to do that than in a public company because in a public company you start getting pressures from stockholders to cut out the fat and make it run more effectively. It is a private company but it’s had like a 10% sales growth on average every year since it was founded. Clearly it’s succeeding. It’s not like the “fat” is being wasted. You can’t make it an HR sort of project. You’ve got to get it spread throughout the company. But HR’s historically been sort of the champion of these kinds of initiatives.

So I think that the thinking about work and family as kind of integrated whole is an important thing for policy. For national policy but also for company policy.

Want to hear more? Watch the recorded live eCornell WebSeries event, Careers, Family, and Gender: Managing Effectively in Today’s Shifting Workplace, and subscribe to future events.

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Workplace Harassment: Making Sense of Rapid Developments in the #MeToo Era

Workplace harassment is a complex and multi-faceted issue that affects every industry. Susan Brecher and Katrina Nobles from the Scheinman Institute at Cornell University are faculty experts in the fields of conflict resolution, employment law, and employee relations. They sat down with eCornell’s Chris Wofford to discuss the various ways in which organizations can respond to workplace harassment.

What follows is an abridged version of their conversation.

Brecher: Katrina and I worked for the Scheinman Institute, which is the institute for conflict resolution at Cornell University. I am the Director of Employee Relations, Employment Law, and Diversity and Inclusion, all of which directly relate to today’s topic. Katrina is the Director of Conflict Programs for the Scheinman Institute. She works on many projects related to conflict both on and off campus. Harassment is a topic that often brings up conflict.

Nobles: In addition to our work with Scheinman Institute, we host a public workshop series. Organizations then ask us to bring the topics covered in the workshops to their offices. These training topics include employee relations, conducting investigations, and employment laws, as well as programs on cross-cultural communications and conflict. We also help build organizational structure around what was learned.

Wofford: What does harassment in the workplace look like?

Brecher: Federal law does not define workplace harassment, and therefore it is open to interpretation. The working definition of sexual harassment includes unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and physical contact. The other definition relates to all forms of harassment in the protected classes: race, gender, national origin, and age. Here, the focus is on verbal or physical areas of conduct, and how they denigrate or show hostility. The two areas of focus are power-based harassment, and environmental, or the existence of a hostile work environment. These all relate to federal law, but there are state and local laws with even greater protections.

Wofford: How do the workplace policies relate to the legal definitions?

Brecher: Policies contain the minimum legal standard, but many go beyond that. Companies are looking for a higher expectation of respect and dignity to bring them in line with their mission and value statements.

Nobles: For many, their mission and value statements represent the ideal. They want to represent these strong values. However, the actions and behaviors that would support this don’t often occur. Missions and values are hard to define and are perceived through multiple lenses.

Brecher: In our trainings, we encourage leaders to find out what the terms mean to the people they work with, instead of assuming they know the answers.

Nobles: We often talk about what respect and dignity looks like. For example, if you show up to a meeting late, is that disrespectful? Opinions differed.

Nobles: How do you account for differences in working style, or generational differences?

Brecher: Workplace styles don’t necessarily break down by generation. And while I know there are generalizations or stereotypes, and it gives us insights into individuals, that’s where we begin to have problems and misunderstandings. One of our goals is to really help people understand their reaction to behaviors.

Nobles: We approach each person as an individual. We try to understand employees’ working and conflict styles to determine how we work best together. We focus on individual culture, social identities, and upbringing. For example, what part of the country did we grow up in? The answers make a huge difference.

Brecher: There’s often a great “A-Ha!” moment when individuals can see you’re not attacking them, but instead recognizing that they come in with a different lens. Some of those lenses negatively impact behaviors.

Wofford: Are companies today concerned about liability?

Brecher: Most organizations are less concerned about liability and more concerned about media exposure, in particular social media. When I train managers I ask them, “Would you like to see yourself on the news engaging in these behaviors? Or on social media?” And all of a sudden another “A-Ha!” moment arrives. Managers need to know what to say because we tell managers they have to report. Some managers think, “If I don’t see it, I don’t have to report.” We now teach them that yes, they do have to do something. But we want them to feel comfortable speaking, so we teach them the words to say.

Nobles: Speaking up is powerful. We need to empower employees to speak up themselves if they’re put into an uncomfortable situation. If they’re not comfortable doing that, they need access to the appropriate channels where someone else can speak up for them.

Brecher: Too often, we’re reacting to the person that comes to us and says, “This person has been doing this for the last six months,” as opposed to supporting the culture in which that person may have said after the first time something happened, “I’d like to give you some respectful feedback.” Having those support points earlier on makes it a completely different organizational culture.

Nobles: Everybody has a different perception of what should be permissible, based on experience and culture. At work, our cultures are meeting everybody else’s culture, and we may have differences. Conversations help the shared understanding around actions and behaviors.

Wofford: Some HR managers are expected to have an enormous degree of responsibility. Is this fair?

Brecher: HR must partner with the experts in the organization to build relationships so that as a team, managers better understand their operations. Partnering opportunities are vital. You have to approach it as a group from an organizational perspective.

Wofford: Should managers learn to investigate instances of alleged harassment?

Brecher: Managers should not conduct investigations unless they know how. Sometimes this can be guided by people who have that expertise.

Nobles: The best tool is to have somebody from your organization attend a full training on how to conduct investigations, because it is complex.

Want to hear more? Watch the recorded live eCornell WebSeries event, Workplace Harassment: Making Sense of Rapid Developments in the #MeToo Era, and subscribe to future events.

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Order Out of Chaos: A How-To for Hospitality Planners and Developers

While project management is important in many occupations, for some it is especially crucial and can be a determining factor for success. Brad Wellstead, professor from Cornell’s SC Johnson College of Business, has over thirty years of experience in architecture and project management and has seen first-hand the importance successful project management means for planners and developers. He sat down with eCornell’s Chris Wofford to discuss the importance of leadership and management abilities in hospitality today.

What follows is an abridged version of that conversation.

Wofford: If you’re getting started in this field, what are the particular skills and ability that would benefit one most?

Wellstead: Good project management skills include understanding and getting your hand around scope of a project and being able to schedule and budget and build teams and so on. But then that works into the characteristics where you, as the leader of a project, it’s about team building and significantly excellent communication skills. You have to be a motivator and you have to be a coacher.

Wofford: Budget creation seems like it would be a particular challenge. Any advice on how to deal with that?

Wellstead: Real estate development is interesting because there’s usually one team that comes up with how much money we have to spend on a project. Then, it’s handed over to the group that has to actually execute the project. They say, “Okay. Here’s your budget and your scope, and, oh, by the way, a schedule and make sure it happens in all those conditions.” That handover, that nexus right there, is always a challenging one, particularly if there were any last-minute changes based on feasibility or needs of the project or so on. That gets smoothed over by having the involvement of a project manager who is running it throughout the entire project so, when in fact you are creating budgets, they are able to contribute and add-in the necessary factors of contingency, both time and money to incorporate those so that they’re in as part of it from the very beginning.

Wofford: When you’re involving stakeholders, what are the expectations as far as presenting the state of the project?

Wellstead: When you’re in the implementation stage, when you’re spending 60, 70% of your overall budget, design fees, and construction, that’s when the real money is getting spent. There should be often weekly meetings between the owner and the architect during the design phase and the project manager, of course.

That keeps them up to date and/or the project manager keeps the owner up to date on a weekly basis that way. As you move into construction, typically weekly, sometimes biweekly, meetings of the owner, architect, and contractor. Again, with the project manager representing the owner. That keeps everybody up to date with what’s going on.

Wofford: Tell me what somebody might get out of your course as it relates to what we have been discussing today?

Wellstead: It starts with the understanding of the project and getting your arms around it, the skills of creating a schedule and a budget and running through the whole impact management point of view with some … I don’t want to call them detours, but we talk about creating RFPs and team building and such.

And quality schedule and budget. I’ve never had an owner say, “You know what? Scope and schedule are critical thing. I don’t care about quality. Give me a bad project. It’s fine.” No, that never happens. It’s always come more down to schedule and budget.

Then, there’s this whole other part of that culture that we talk about in the course where it analyzes who the leaderships are and some of the things we talked about when we’re talking about contingency because it leads to understanding how you address contingencies. Is it white hot construction? Is it crazy municipality? Is it a community that’s going to be anti or for development? Is it a difficult site to work in and a whole lot of internal things that are happening as well as external things that could be happening so it gives you this really comprehensive, holistic view of the project that once having done that, you have a sense of how you’re going to move forward.

All of that pulls all that together. Those are the main things: the culture, schedule, budget and the team building and then the impact management aspects.

Want to hear more? Watch the recorded live eCornell WebSeries event, Order Out of Chaos: A How-To for Hospitality Planners and Developers, and subscribe to future events.

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Human-Centered Approach to Decision-Making Strategy

C-level executives are recognizing creativity’s role in strategy. A recent global IBM survey of over 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the most vital skillset needed to navigate an increasingly complex world. The ability to generate efficient and effective solutions to problems of significant complexity is a desired skill not only for engineers, but also for anyone whose job requires substantial decision-making.

As a response to the growing need for creative thinking in the business world, Cornell has announced the launch of the new Design Thinking certificate program. Available 100% online through eCornell, this certificate program will help learners adopt a robust, human-centered approach to designing and improving products, experiences, and systems at any scale.

“It’s often a challenge to blend design thinking with traditional systems engineering,” says Sirietta Simoncini, Lecturer at the Cornell School of Engineering and author of the Design Thinking certificate program. “Within this program, learners will leverage systems engineering tools that are integrated with the traditions of design thinking to make decisions that are intuitive, creative, and data-driven.”

Regional planners, engineers, user experience designers, program and product managers, consultants, systems analysts, marketers, and entrepreneurs involved in product conception will all find this certificate program valuable. The program offers a seamless and linear path from course to course, where learners have the ability to bring their group project and peer relationships with them as they move through the program.

Once learners have completed the Design Thinking certificate program, they can immediately begin applying their creativity in the workplace. Their new skills will enable them to define challenges, gather key user insights and emotions to help develop personas and user narratives based on empathy, and generate ideas and prototyping for potential solutions and improvements. In addition, learners will be able to iterate on and refine prototypes using design thinking methodology to ultimately generate a rigorous, viable solution to challenges.

Courses include:

  • Identifying and Framing a Challenge
  • Gathering User Emotions
  • Crafting User Narratives
  • Generating User-Centered Solutions
  • Design Prototyping
  • Testing and Iteration

Upon successful completion of all six courses, learners earn a Design Thinking Certificate from the Cornell School of Engineering.

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Giving Tuesday with Cornell’s Alternative Breaks

Cornell University fosters a broad, thoughtful, and giving community, both on campus and around the world. As co-president of Cornell Alternative Breaks, one of the largest student service programs at Cornell, Jessica Wu embodies Cornell’s commitment to service. Wu, a Cornell senior and biological sciences major from San Jose, California, recently sat down with eCornell’s Jamie Bonan to discuss how the Alternative Breaks program engages in impactful service projects throughout the year.

Cornell Alternative Breaks hosts over a dozen spring break service-learning trips for Cornell students to different agencies across the U.S., all of which address a variety of social justice issues. Throughout the year, students on the trip meet weekly for educational and preparatory meetings.

What follows is an abridged version of their conversation.

Bonan: Hi Jessica! First, how did you get involved in Alternative Breaks?

Wu: I entered the program my sophomore year as a team participant and visited the Goddard Riverside Community Center in New York City. Our student team engages with two of Goddard’s programs: The Other Place, which provides integrated services to adults with histories of mental illness, homelessness, and substance abuse; and Green Keepers, which provides community members with paid on-the-job training and coaching in horticulture and street sanitation. After learning and becoming invested in the social justice issues in this community, I decided to remain with the program as Goddard’s Trip Leader my Junior year.

Bonan: And Alternative Breaks is one of the largest student programs of Cornell’s Public Service Center. Can you give some background to the history of the PSC at Cornell?

Wu: The PSC was founded in 1991 by Cornell’s president at the time, Frank H. T. Rhodes, to institutionalize faculty and student community engagement and outreach. Overall, the PSC’s mission is to champion the conviction that the Cornell University experience confirms service as essential to becoming an active member of society. ‘Service-learning’ is the philosophy that guides the PSC and Alternative Breaks. Service-learning rather than service without learning enhances academic research with practical experiences, strengthens civic values, and responds to community needs. Right now, the PSC has over 30 organizations that are entirely student-led and engages over 6,000 students. We’ve also contributed 27,000 service hours to the community surrounding Cornell’s campus.

Bonan: That’s really incredible. How did Alternative Breaks get its start as a program inside the PSC?

Wu: Our program also started in 1991, after 11 Cornell students returned from a spring break service trip and put their energies into creating a more sustainable program. Our Program Advisor Joyce Muchan joined in 1999, and we’ve since expanded to include trips to 13 different agencies, all of which cover a wide variety of social justice issues.

Bonan: Wow, 13 agencies! What are some of those agencies and communities?

Wu: Most of our agencies are in New York City, upstate New York, and Florida. It’s really important to our program that we maintain our long-term relationships with the agencies we work with; the opportunities and access that these agencies provide our students is not something we take for granted. Some of our partner agencies, like Girls Educational and Mentoring Services (GEMS) and True Colors Residence, we have worked with for nearly a decade. Other agencies, like Harlem Grown, we are so excited to have recently begun our partnership in the last two years.

Alternative Breaks Team
Several Alternative Breaks Teams in NYC

Bonan: Your program accepts approximately 100 students each year. What does their involvement look like?

Wu: It’s definitely not just over the week of spring break! Before the trip, students participate in a rigorous 12-week curriculum that provides education on the principles of service-learning, which we use as tools to reflect on our own privileges and bias as we engage with the community and agency. Every student also works on an in-depth analysis of the root causes of social issues that the agency addresses, in order to dig beyond surface-level explanations for systemic inequalities. During the trip itself, participants complete workshops and projects with their agencies and hold nightly team sessions to critically reflect on their experience. After the trip, all students in the program write a reflection paper, present on their experience in a program-wide meeting, and compare their initial root cause analysis to an analysis they work on with agency members.

Bonan: You mentioned workshops and projects that students complete on the trip. What are some of those projects?

Wu: Our student team that visited GEMS in New York City recently completed an impact study looking at the 20-year development of the anti-Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children (CSEC) movement. Before this impact study, there wasn’t much research done on tracking the CSEC movement across time, so it’s been valuable for the agency, community, and even Cornell students back on campus. Some other students visited Womankind, a safe house in New York City that works with survivors of gender-based violence and trauma, and created a banner with quotes from survivors in their native languages, filmed a welcome video for residents, and hosted arts & crafts workshops and activities. And at Harlem Grown in New York City, students transformed an abandoned urban lot into a sensory garden, supporting the agency’s mission in urban farming, sustainability, and nutrition.

Harmlen Grown Before and After
Harlem Grown’s Sensory Garden: Before and After

Bonan: Giving Tuesday is just one day. What would you say to someone looking to become involved?

Wu: I’d say service is a life-long effort of continuous education, reflection, and community engagement. It’s never too late to start on the path toward becoming a conscientious member of society.

If you’re interested in following Alternative Breaks students on their journey, follow along on Facebook or Instagram, and you can also email Jessica Wu at altbreaks@cornell.edu.

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Why the ability to read data is just as important as the ability to read

Working with spreadsheets and analyzing data is no longer reserved only for those who crunch numbers. Today, all fields are relying more heavily on making data-driven decisions and utilizing spreadsheet modeling as a tool for growth. Donna Haeger, a Cornell professor of economics and management, sat down with eCornell’s Chris Wofford to discuss the growing impact spreadsheet modeling is having on business.

What follows is an abridged version of that conversation.

Wofford: How does spreadsheet modeling relate to business analytics? How do we distinguish the two?

Haeger: The spreadsheet modeling piece is really taking the unstructured data. We’re structuring it into an organized fashion. The business analytics piece is really the data-driven decision-making that we’re doing, so making the decisions on the model are what we’re doing when we’re performing business analytics. If we’re using optimization, we want the result of the model to tell us what we should do – how many of a particular product we should produce based on our criteria and our goals. We could also do predictive which is a forecast, like a simulation.

Wofford: What are some typical obstacles? For some people, this is very fresh and if you’re really starting to take your analytics and your modeling seriously, what are the typical obstacles that people run up against when they’re first starting to think about this as a strategy for their company?

Haeger: I think the biggest obstacle today is how much data we have. We’re drowning in data. I always tell my students data is not the problem. We have so much data that we don’t know what to do with it. Most of the startup companies that are working in data analytics are basically becoming specialists in spreadsheet modeling and other types of data modeling so that they can answer questions. And I like to say that every company that has data, which is every company at this point, they’re swimming in answers to questions they haven’t even begun to ask – and that’s a pretty amazing place to be.

Wofford: What is your experience as far as when you work with students? Can you just speak to that broadly about this as a career path or if somebody’s actually already established in a position, how might it benefit them to learn about this?

Haeger: That’s an interesting question and I get this all the time – things like what job titles am I looking for. I have not found a position, an internship or a permanent job, that does not involve data in the business realm as of late. And so that’s interesting because I like to say that this whole thing about data is ubiquitous, like it’s everywhere. There are very few jobs right now that do not relate to having some data literacy, so understanding how to take data and turn it from data to information, which is structuring the data and then analyzing it and turning it to some knowledge is it’s really hard to find a position where you don’t need to know how to do that.

In fact, we’re starting to hear that people are being encouraged to learn a programming language on top of being able to be working with the data.

Wofford: What is that?

Haeger: When you’re working with spreadsheet modeling, you have a lot of control over the data that you receive, however, it depends. Everyone has a choice. I call it a Venn diagram. We’ve gone from where we used to send an email to IT and say, “I need some data, please send it to me” and the business people would get the data from IT.

Wofford: I mean if we talk about data literacy across an organization, for example, there’s certainly a case to be made that everybody should be to literate in some way so we know what we’re talking about. Are visuals where it’s at?

Haeger: We all love pictures, right? I think most of us are visual and even if we’re not visual having the spreadsheet model – and when we say spreadsheet model, it could be a pivot table, table, columns, rows, a chart – when we turn it into a visualization, we’re answering a lot more questions in one image. When we illustrate it this way and if we do a good job with it, it’s much easier for people to answer their own questions and interact with the visual. We’re starting to actually create dashboards now where we’ll create several different pivot tables, pull out some visualizations, put them all on one tab and create slicers where the individual isn’t just looking at three or four images but also being able to hit the slicers and interact with the data. So now you’re answering thousands of questions by interacting with what you see on the dashboard.

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Adding It Up: Hidden Lifetime Costs of Sexual Assault and Misconduct

Victims of sexual assault, violence, and misconduct suffer in multiple ways following the crimes committed against them. Liz Karns, professor from Cornell’s ILR School, has been following the lifetime costs for victims of these sexual crimes. As both a lawyer and an epidemiologist, she is tackling the data from an interesting perspective and sat down with eCornell’s Chris Wofford to discuss the lasting effects for survivors both on campus and in the workplace.

What follows is an abridged version of their conversation.

Wofford: You are an epidemiologist and also a lawyer, so you’re coming at this from two very interesting angles that together make for a really compelling story, so tell me a little bit about when you started looking at this and your experience.

Karns: As an epidemiologist, I started thinking about it just in terms of the types of data we would have, right? But it wasn’t until I went to law school like 13 years after being an epidemiologist that I started applying it to sexual assault, and in that context, I treated, and I continue to treat those cases just as I would any type of medical malpractice case or environmental harm case. They are the exact same set of ways that we assess damage. We need the studies, we need the research, we need the experts, and, it’s been a while coming that we got all of those things together. But at this point, we have so much research, so much information that makes it quite clear that the cost is a lifetime cost, and that currently it is usually the person, the victim, who pays for that – and that’s my interest, is to shift that.

In 2015 we had like a banner year of doing lots of different studies, and these studies were all essentially asking the same, which was ‘Have you been sexually assaulted while in college?’ And, there was some slight difference in terms of the phrasing. This was a study that was done by Kaiser and the Washington Post, and we have 25% of people who were assaulted since starting college, 20% for women, 5% for men. We see pretty similar pattern across all the different places, right? It never varies in a big way. The one that says 27 AAU, this was a study that Cornell was part of. We had 27 different colleges that did the same survey, and it’s important to have this information because it’s consistent across studies. There’s so many people who will say, ‘Oh, but people just make that up or it was dependent on the respondents.’ There’s been a lot of reliability and validity testing on this and this is solid data. The sad thing is that this the exact same data that we had in 1987. The numbers are the same since 1987 – roughly 20% is a consistent thing and it has not changed with anything.

Part of the reason that we add this up is that money matters. Somehow when we start attaching a price tag, people become more accountable, and the different systems that we look at are the legal systems. We’ve got the criminal and the civil system, and the financial obligation that arises out of that. Let’s imagine that a perpetrator is found guilty, and under the criminal system, ordered to pay restitution. That means they have to pay the victim money, and that is a contract now. That cannot be discharged, under a personal bankruptcy, so it is something that will stay with that perpetrator forever until they’ve paid it off.

Wofford: Wow.

Karns: That would change the world.

Wofford: I would imagine.

Karns: This is the standard approach to all injuries. This is exactly what’s used in your car accidents, your slip and falls, medical malpractice, everything else, so it’s interesting that people don’t think of it when it comes to sexual assault. So it’s part of my job, to articulate it, and make people think about that. If we assign dollars, we’ll get societal change. I’m quite sure about this one. The person initially talks to the psychiatrist, and then talks about different situations that this arises in, to figure out how invasive it is in their life. I have had people who could not go to covered parking lots ever again in their lives, and that meant that they would drive 50 miles out of the way to go to a different train station because they didn’t wanna use that one that had the covered parking lot. That meant that she couldn’t take certain jobs, so it’s got this sort of ripple effect.

Wofford: Yes, exactly. So what I’m getting at, or where I was going with that was, linking this particular diagnosis to these behaviors, and I wonder often how that plays out legally.

Karns: Yeah, well, I mean it’s absolutely part of the case because you’ve got, first the initial injury, which is the assault itself, and that doesn’t have a huge amount of value, obviously, like in terms of money, but the ways that it impairs one’s life after that are what get documented. That is the job of the lawyer to go through and describe the day and the life – you bring in different experts to say, this person will have a very predictable set of problems when they have their own children, so that’s a cost that you should be thinking about.

So the expert is who ties this person’s diagnosis and situation and then projects it forward, and when I’ve worked on medical malpractice cases where we had something happening to an infant, we would do the same thing. We’d say this is what their life looks like in the future.

Wofford: Yeah. Okay, behavioral health, again, this is not a big surprise, that they are more likely to be using alcohol or hard drugs, and they’re aware that they need to cut down, so they are aware that they’re using it as a substitute for treatment, if you will. And then this is the one that the insurance company knows is that they continually use more healthcare than non-victims, so whenever somebody discusses, gosh, maybe we should decide this is a preexisting condition, you can see why the insurance company is interested in that ’cause these are very costly, they have higher costs, 20% higher.

Karns: So, when people start acknowledging that the assault occurred, and that’s a process in itself, and realizing that they need counseling, it’s not unusual to have a diagnosis come up from that. They don’t have to go and seek a diagnosis to say, ‘mmm, boom, I have it.’ It’s going to evolve, and you have this statute of limitations, so you have so many years afterwards, that depends on your state, to file this case, and so, you don’t have to seek it right away. If you’re gonna build a case, and you’re talking to your lawyer, right, a lawyer, then they will very much ask you, ‘Are you in counseling? Do you have a diagnosis?’ Most of us have health insurance that would cover some aspect of that so there’s some record of that as well.

Wofford: So you’re recommending that the damages are then directed to the perpetrator, legally. What is the state of the law, what’s happening out there, as far as cases like this? Is this line of thinking adapted?

Karns: Yeah.

Wofford: Okay, so this is nothing new.

Karns: This is not, nothing I’m doing is new. All I’m doing is calling attention to it in a different way, and the way that I check myself, if you will, is that I look at what are called default cases – these are cases where the perpetrator, who then became a defendant in civil court, never showed up and the plaintiff, the person who experienced the assault, has the right to make the argument of, ‘What are the costs?’ And then the judge assesses those costs and decides whether or not they’re warranted.

This is all about true economic loss.

But, compensation funds will actually pay for things like therapy, so you could get that immediate counseling that you need, it’s just onerous to get there. Second one is – I mentioned this before – criminal restitution. This is part of any court process, that the criminal court can order the perpetrator to pay the victim. And then finally, civil damages, and this is the one I think most of us are familiar with, where we undertake legal action. The plaintiff, the person who is the victim, brings the case against that defendant, and everything I’ve talked to today goes into that damages number, and then that number gets used all the way through the civil court process, so demand letter, complaint, arguments.

So shifting the burden is what we need to do. That is absolutely what we’ll have to do. So things we can change. One, sexual assault happens in schools quite a lot, and we need to address the fact that it interrupts their education, and we need to think about a student loan deferral on this. It’s absolutely mandatory. The legal ones, holding the perpetrators responsible. And then finally, support, engaging survivors in discussions about the economic impact.

Want to hear more? Watch an excerpt of the live eCornell WebSeries event, Adding It Up: Hidden Lifetime Costs of Sexual Assault and Misconduct, and subscribe to future events.