“I think every state is a microcosm of the country,” says Neil Malhotra, the Edith M. Cornell professor of political economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
It’s a perspective that helps him interpret the widening ideological gaps between different communities and how their views are formed. Seemingly minor details — like having ever eaten sushi or holding a passport — can strongly predict how people feel about immigration and globalization. For example, while nearly all tech executives Malhotra has surveyed are sushi-eaters and passport-holders, only half of Americans say the same.
But these divisions go beyond elite versus working class or coastal versus heartland. Instead, Malhotra favors a core-periphery framework that describes how Americans who are more connected to knowledge and cultural economies cluster in urban centers or downtowns — while those on the outskirts may feel economically and politically disconnected.
“If you ever fly over the country, you actually see what it looks like,” he says.
Making sense of these nuances is critical as businesses attempt to navigate a complex and fluid political landscape. “The key to being persuasive isn’t telling your own story,” Malhotra says. Rather, a little empathy goes a long way. So does seeking to understand the perspective of your users, customers, or clients: “Reframe what you want to do through their lens,” he suggests.
If/Then is a podcast from Stanford Graduate School of Business that examines research findings that can help us navigate the complex issues we face in business, leadership, and society. Each episode features an interview with a Stanford GSB faculty member.
Full Transcript
Note: This transcript was generated by an automated system and has been lightly edited for clarity. It may contain errors or omissions.
Kevin Cool: Centerville itself seems very Americana. Just the name. It’s like almost like a made up name in Hollywood. Centerville, really? You’re from Centerville?
Jim Colgan: That’s Kevin Cool, the host of this podcast. So who am I? My name is Jim Colgan. I’m an executive producer of the show, and as you can tell, we’re doing something a little different on today’s episode. We asked Kevin to tell us about the place where he grew up: Centerville, Iowa. And you’ll find out why we’re talking about that in just a couple of minutes. So, keep listening.
Kevin Cool: So, virtually my entire childhood was spent in Centerville. It’s a small town in the southern tier of counties in Iowa. Iowa has 99 counties.
When I was a kid, it had a population of about sixty-five hundred, now that’s down to about 5,000, 5,400 maybe. So it’s lost, what, 20% of its population or so.
You know, I can remember it was a prosperous place. It was a thriving place. The downtown had multiple department stores, I bought my first baseball glove in one of those stores. My first bicycle. I’ve been going back as a visitor now for decades, and now it’s sort of the opposite.
A lot of the neighborhoods have declined. The homes are very old now. There hasn’t really been any housing development there. And I think this is true in a lot of small places where the economy has been challenged.
I actually have a particular insight about this because a few years after I left Centerville and was out of college, I came back and for three years was editor of the local newspaper. This was in the mid-1980s, so a long, long time ago.
But while I was there, the community attracted a Rubbermaid plant to town. This is a global, well-known company. I mean, you can go into any Walmart and there are Rubbermaid products all over the shelves. There was significant civic pride. Now, there had been a number of factories there earlier. Union Carbide was one, there was a McGraw Edison company there that I think made toasters. And then Rubbermaid came in and that was like 500 jobs or something like that, it was really a big deal.
Well, all of those are gone now. And so if you amplify that times two or three of those then you can see right away that, there are forces at work that the community can’t really recover from or do much about.
But, I can only speak from my experience, I felt like I had a childhood that was enriched by diversity even in that small place. I couldn’t tell you who was a Republican or Democrat or really even conservative or liberal, maybe on the edges if people were super, super activist in one direction or another. But it felt to me like there was a very large contingent in the middle.
Iowa is very much a red state at this point. I think Trump won the state by something like 13 points. It used to be a purple state. it’s not that anymore at all.
Jim Colgan: So why are we hearing about Kevin’s hometown? Well, the story of Centerville is the story of economic and cultural shifts in towns and cities all across America. Today’s guest, Neil Malhotra, is a professor of political economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and he captures and quantifies these changes in his work.
Neil Malhotra: They used to do polls in the 1950s, which was, name someone in your community you look up to. That was a question. And inevitably most people would mention a business leader. It could be the person who owned the local factory or owned the car dealership or whatever. Now you ask people that survey question and the most common answer is, I don’t know. I don’t know anyone in my local community.
Jim Colgan: So, how did we get here? Today we’re talking about politics and what research tells us about the forces behind the political world we live in. This is If /Then, a podcast from Stanford Graduate School of Business, and I’m going to turn it back over to Kevin Cool, senior editor at the GSB.
Kevin Cool: Well, thank you for being with us, Neil. Uh, we love having you here on our, on our show. What was the pathway that started you toward studying politics?
Neil Malhotra: Yeah, that’s a great question. Um, so I was very much on the track to be a financial analyst, to have a career in finance, and it just, I kind of realized it wasn’t something I was passionate about. And I would say the definition of passion is when you start doing stuff that’s out of character for you.
Kevin Cool: Hmm.
Neil Malhotra: So, uh, I’m still not a morning person. It really is a struggle for me to get up at 7:00 AM, 7:30, and I was like that in college. I would, you know, wake up at 10, roll into class at 10:30, 11, that kind of thing. But during the 2000 presidential election, and I know some people don’t have memory of this, but it was a very close election.
Kevin Cool: So that was the Bush-Gore
Neil Malhotra: recount election.
Kevin Cool: Right, right. The hanging chads in Florida and all of that
Neil Malhotra: Hanging Chad. That’s right. and I would get up at 5:00 AM to like listen to the court hearings to find out what the news was, like, who was gonna win this election.
Kevin Cool: Which was out of character for you.
Neil Malhotra: Highly outta character. And so I thought when you kind of do something out of character, that’s a sign that, that might be your true passion.
Kevin Cool: Mm-hmm.
Neil Malhotra: ‘cause you’re kind of going against your natural instincts to, for something you care about.
Kevin Cool: And that 2000 election was, I mean, talk about an introduction to a scholarly pursuit of politics. What have you observed in the last, say, eight years that was different or that somehow signals a change?
Neil Malhotra: Yeah, I mean, we’ve always had, um, ebbs and flows of populism, but kind of the rise of populism both on the left and the right is I think the main characterizing force of the last eight years. And a lot of this is stemming out from what we saw in the 1990s. So you basically have globalization, huge advancements of technology. Thomas Friedman called this the world Becoming Flat.
Kevin Cool: Mm-hmm.
Neil Malhotra: And there’s a lot of political implications of that that you don’t see for decades later. And that’s kind of what we’re getting at, where there’s been a reaction to globalization, the financial crisis, Covid, et cetera. And so there has been populous revolts on, on both sides that we’re coming to grapples with.
Kevin Cool: And what has sparked that? Let’s start with the United States. I know it’s more of a global phenomenon, but what has sparked that?
Neil Malhotra: Well, let’s just look at a few examples. Um, so when you have free trade, right, you’re able to basically invest in your comparative advantage. So the idea that we are not gonna now produce things that other countries can produce, even if we’re better at producing them, that’s not our relative advantage, right?
So we had let basically places like Bangladesh or Vietnam or China produce things like textiles, different types of manufacturing and that obviously is gonna like hurt some people in the United States. Then you have kind of issues like immigration, so that’s the offshoring, but also now we have access to labor that’s a lot cheaper.
So these are all things that you would say are very good business decisions and make sense if you view the globe as like a cohesive thing. But that’s not how elections are done, right? Only people in countries can vote in elections.
Um, then there’s also the more broader questions, which generally globalization is good for companies, right? Like getting, um, more efficient labor, more efficient production, all of these kinds of things. But that actually has increased populism and that might actually harm companies. So companies I think, have to be thinking about how much do they actually wanna lobby to make these regulations less strict, et cetera, that might be good for their short-term, bottom line, but could have these negative long-term implications by making political systems more unstable.
So you have this kind of tension between things that make sense from a global economic perspective, but things that are going to adversely harm people within countries and then you get these reactions to it.
Kevin Cool: And a sort of pushback against elites. How would you characterize what that means?
Neil Malhotra: Yeah, it’s a very, um, obscure category. Like what does it mean to be an elite? So let me actually give some examples of, from our research, things that, like you may not think of as elite, but actually kind of make a difference. So in a survey we did, we asked both, people who have founded technology companies, so maybe people you would consider to be elite, and then regular kind of ordinary Americans. And so we ask them questions like, do you have a passport? Have you ever eaten sushi in your life?
Kevin Cool: Hmm.
Neil Malhotra: So these are kind of questions trying to reflect cosmopolitan values, you know, being a citizen of the world. And about a hundred percent of tech executives, uh, have passports and have eaten sushi.
Kevin Cool: 100%?
Neil Malhotra: Like 99.5%. Maybe that’s not shocking, right?
Kevin Cool: Yeah.
Neil Malhotra: And maybe a lot of listeners think it’s not abnormal to have a passport or to eat sushi. Uh, but in the general population, those answers are closer to 50%. And the answers to this question strongly predict your attitudes on things like trade and immigration. So if you have a passport, have eaten sushi, eaten Indian food, you’re much more likely to support legal immigration, pathways for illegal immigrants, as well as free trade, reducing tariffs, reducing restrictions to, the mobility of capital and goods, those kind of things.
So I guess my view is is that, an elite thing is not just the most 1000 powerful people, but it’s people that kind of are integrated into the global economy, the knowledge economy, the creative economy in ways that other people are not.
Kevin Cool: Now what you’re describing, you know, have you ever eaten sushi? Do you have a passport. What can you sort of tell us about these other things that sort of divide the country, whether it’s culturally, economically, geographically, and so on?
Neil Malhotra: Yeah, so you’re not gonna find sushi restaurants everywhere. Um, I have had sushi in Billings, Montana, by the way.
Kevin Cool: You wouldn’t find it in my hometown, which is a small town in Iowa.
Neil Malhotra: Uh, so what’s the name of the town?
Kevin Cool: Centerville
Neil Malhotra: Yeah, I know Centerville.
Kevin Cool: You know Centerville? Okay.
Neil Malhotra: Yes.
Kevin Cool: Wow.
Neil Malhotra: Well, when you’re in political science you have to know a little bit about geography, political geography, um, and also I wouldn’t recommend having sushi in many small towns too.
Um, but let’s talk, talk about this idea of coastal versus heartland, because I actually think that is not really what it is because I think every state is a microcosm of the country, which has its own core and periphery. That’s how I would phrase it. Not like coastal/non-coastal, but core and periphery. So, um, yes, it is true that like California is a coastal state, but the inland parts of California look a lot more like Centerville, Iowa. Whereas I could look at Iowa City, which is a college town, and that looks a lot like a lot of coastal towns in California.
Kevin Cool: Right.
Neil Malhotra: ‘cause it’s kind of core/periphery. And um, they’ve actually found even more intense stuff, which is this core/periphery divide even occurs in very small towns. So what I mean by that is that a lot of very small towns, including Centerville, probably have a downtown or a main street. Maybe there’s a train station connected to them. Even in these small Centerville towns, the more liberal people live on Main Street, they live closer to the train stations and the people out of that periphery or more. So if you ever fly over the country, you actually see what it looks like where you have these concentrations of downtowns and then it kind of turns into farmland. And so that’s how I view it, is that there’s people that are kind of living in the core, which are kind of more connected in the economy and then people living more in the periphery.
Kevin Cool: Well, and there also seems to be a fair amount of disaffection, just kind of with the state of things, right? Whether it’s liberal, conservative, Republican, or Democrat. there’s been a lot of surveys done where people are asked the question, is the country going in the right direction?
Neil Malhotra: Yep.
Kevin Cool: And the numbers are like 35% agree with that, or something like that. Are we in a period where it’s just harder to govern because there’s this sort of broad kind of disillusionment with things?
Neil Malhotra: Yeah, I mean, when pies are growing and everyone’s slice is getting bigger, it’s easier to govern, and it gets much harder if people perceive that, uh, the opportunities are not there, that there’s not an era of abundance and everything like that. Uh, there was a poll that just came out. I, I can’t speak to its veracity, but I’ll just tell you the results because I found them to be interesting.
So they asked Jill Stein voters, who’s the Green Party person, who was your second choice? Most said Trump. They asked, um, RFK voters, who was your second choice? Most said Trump. And actually Kamala Harris did the best among the Libertarian Party’s second choice.
Kevin Cool: Huh.
Neil Malhotra: Now, this is not a huge percentage of the population, but it does I do think it says something to what your question is implying, which is there’s people who feel disaffected, separated from the process, and they’re just voting for people who will disrupt that.
Kevin Cool: Then how do we get out of that cycle?
Neil Malhotra: Well, I think the first step is that I think people who are in the more traditional sector of politics have to start acknowledging problems and saying, okay, like here’s the solution. So if you think about what these elections are… You can think of it as like getting advice from two exterminators.
Okay so let’s say you had tons of cockroaches in your house. You bring one exterminator and one exterminator says, ‘Oh, I got a good solution to your cockroach problem. I’m gonna put gasoline all over the floor and then light it on fire. And then we’re get, get, get rid of all the cockroaches.’ And you’re like, ‘okay, uh, interesting suggestion. Let’s hear what the second exterminator has to say.’
So they come in and they say, ‘What are you talking about? There’s no cockroaches in your house. ‘And you’re like, what are you talking about? There’s cockroaches all over my house.’ And they’re like, ‘I don’t see any cockroaches.’
Which of those two exterminators would you hire? And I actually don’t think it’s unreasonable for people to say, maybe the first one is the better one.
Kevin Cool: The scorched earth policy is the, yeah.
Neil Malhotra: Well, at least they like
Kevin Cool: It gets rid of the cockroaches.
Neil Malhotra: Well they’re also understanding the basic thing, which is there are cockroaches.
Kevin Cool: Yeah.
Neil Malhotra: Whereas the second person views you as a very odd person, which is like, they don’t even see that there’s any issues. So I think the first thing is just to say, there are lots of cockroaches and here’s actually like the right way to maybe address them that maybe we could put some traps out or blah, blah, blah, rather than having gasoline to burn the whole house down. But why would you vote for someone who doesn’t even acknowledges that there’s infestation going on?
Kevin Cool: Is there a sense in which, if, sort of the cultural zeitgeist is a needle and it moves too far one way or the other, does it kind of automatically come back somewhere to a different place, or…?
Neil Malhotra: That is what political scientists have found. So they call it, um, thermostatic, uh, politics.
Kevin Cool: Oh, so there’s a name for that?
Neil Malhotra: There’s a name for it.
Kevin Cool: Wow. Okay.
Neil Malhotra: So they don’t use the metaphor of the needle, or the pendulum, or something. They use the metaphor of the thermostat.
Kevin Cool: Okay.
Neil Malhotra: And, you know, the logic of a thermostat is, uh, when it starts getting too hot, it shuts off. And when it starts turning, getting too cold, it, it turns on it, keeps everything at 72 degrees. Um, and that’s, I think, what we expect to see, which is that the country’s gonna move to the left in the next four years. That’s what thermostatic things would predict, just like the country moved to the right in the last four years, is that generally people try to use their political mandates to get a lot of stuff done, including a lot of unpopular stuff, and people try to adjust the temperature back and kind of keep everything in the middle.
Kevin Cool: Does this explain why often, historically anyway, the party in power loses in the midterms?
Neil Malhotra: Yeah, people do say that they’re trying to balance, um, I think there’s many reasons why the party could lose in the midterms, including that, I think sometimes people overread their mandates, um, which is, these elections are generally very, very close and especially over the last 20 years, 30 years. And it’s, I think there’s been a lot of weird narrative that this was somehow some landslide election. It it was a close election. And one side won. Just like the 2020 election was a close election and one side won.
Kevin Cool: So if you can look around the corner a little bit, Donald Trump can’t be reelected. He’s in his second term. J.D. Vance has, I, I think, echoed a lot of the populous themes that, that Trump has. But is this phenomenon related to a kind of MAGA worldview, or is it bigger than that? And are we gonna continue to see these sorts of tumultuous changes in politics?
Neil Malhotra: That is the billion dollar question, and…
Kevin Cool: Well that’s why you’re here to answer it for us.
Neil Malhotra: Well, this is sad because, uh, I think that’s such a good, hard question, and I will admit that I don’t know the answer to it, but I can actually say something, uh, insightful about it at least. But no, that is the, that is the fundamental question, which is, is Trump creating a movement that is separate from himself or is it identified with himself? So, I mean, F.D.R. created the New Deal, but that wasn’t really about his identity, really. Like it created a change in the way politics works that was not tied to him.
Neil Malhotra: On the other hand, you know, if you’re the Democratic party, they’re doing all these postmortems and hemming and hawing. But one respect is that the Republican Party has one rockstar, which is Donald Trump. And a lot of people have tried to do what he’s done and with very little success, at the gubernatorial elections and the Senate elections.
I could give you a list of 15 people, 20 people who tried to exactly do what he did and lost. So the question is like, what is the party gonna look like in four years? And you have a group of people who are kind of the populist wing. J.D. Vance is the most prominent member, but there’s other people too. So the question is, are those gonna be the future of the party or are there people who don’t really like the direction the party is headed and don’t like the populism and they’re just waiting Trump out, and they’ll think it goes back to normal afterwards. It remains to be seen. We don’t know.
Kevin Cool: This must be a fascinating period historically to be a scholar in this area. So what’s, what are the questions you have going forward? What’s, what are the next things you wanna study?
Neil Malhotra: Well, I, I can, not just myself, but I think kind of the field more broadly. Um, I think people are very interested in racial depolarization. Um, so what I mean by that is, you know, in 2016 everybody predicted that we were gonna have a polarized country on racial lines. And people are very scared of that because if you look at other places like Yugoslavia or whatever, whenever you have political and ethnic identities aligned that fractures countries.
Um, but that’s not what happened. You have all of these people who are people of color moving into the Republican Party, but more importantly that people don’t, this is what’s less reported is you have lots of white people moving into the Democratic Party. So that’s making both parties more racially diverse, which, you know, many people would say it’s a good thing.
Kevin Cool: Mm-hmm.
Neil Malhotra: On the other hand, you have other forms of polarization that are increasing, so you have educational polarization, right? People who don’t have college degrees or gravitating towards the Republican Party and what you mentioned just a little while ago, regional polarization, so you have urban cores being more Democratic, and then rural areas being more Republican. And I think we have to study whether that’s gonna be a, a dangerous thing, potentially.
Kevin Cool: So, you teach in executive education, these are all men and women who are leading companies in some respect or another, what do you think the lesson for them is? From what we’ve seen politically?
Neil Malhotra: Yeah. So, you know, Stanford is a big proponent of design thinking, as maybe some listeners know. And like a big key of design thinking is kind of being empathetic and kind of seeing where your users are. And this is one thing we teach in our book and everything, which is, the key to being persuasive is not to tell your own story, but to kind of understand what the story and values of your users are and reframe what you want to do through their lens.
And so I think kind of business people who are grappling with like a group of masses who like might be upset or everything is not from the top down to say, well, your concerns are not valid. Or, we know the right thing that’s logical, and if you just kind of trust us, then everything will work out. But to say, okay, well what is the story that you see the world through and how can we kind of reframe it?
Um, I mean, you saw this a lot during the Covid pandemic where you had a lot of people trying to get people to do things and a lot of people didn’t want to do them, but they kind of still said, okay, well you’re, you’re illogical or you’re uneducated if you don’t do what we say. Instead of saying, okay, like, how do you see the world and how can we convince you?
And part of that is like messengers, right? So like, some people, the scientists are not the right messengers. You know, its people like their local churches, their, police officers, their firefighters, like these are the authority figures that they wanna look up to. So I think part of it is just being empathetic and having a design thinking lens.
Kevin Cool: Historically, are there examples of when businesses were out of step with the mainstream culture and what did they do about that?
Neil Malhotra: Yeah, so I mean, you basically saw this during kind of like the, the Robber Baron Gilded Age era. It’s so different because like the media environment was so different back then.
Kevin Cool: So late 19th century, more or less?
Neil Malhotra: Yeah. I mean you basically have kind of like the, this post-Civil war era through the Great Depression where you basically saw a lot of divides and you know, there’s a lot of economic crises. So it wasn’t just the Great Depression, but there’s a lot of panics and a lot of stuff was, it was a very complicated time period. And I would say to look more towards the post-World War II era, uh, where I think there was a lot of good relationship between companies and people. And part of this is that companies and, and corporate leaders view themselves as members of their community, and that they serve their communities. And I don’t exactly know how you would replicate this given how complicated the information environment is, but I think there are some lessons we could draw.
So one thing I ask my students is, um, how many of you are members of the Rotary Club or the Lions Club? And most students have no clue what those things are. But it used to be that when you were a business executive in the 1950s, it was kind of expected, like you would be a member of the Lions Club. And as such, a lot of it was the community service.
Um, they used to do polls in the 1950s, which was, uh, name someone in your community you look up to. That was the question.
Kevin Cool: Mm-hmm.
Neil Malhotra: And inevitably they would mention, most people would mention a business leader. It could be the person who owned the local factory or owned the car dealership or whatever. Now you ask people that survey question and they, the most common answer is, I don’t know. I don’t know anyone in my local community.
Kevin Cool: Hmm.
Neil Malhotra: And so I don’t exactly know how to translate this. But in the post-World War Two era, business leaders served their communities. They were leaders in their communities. They understood that what they did had impacts on their communities, that there was a lot of company towns. The world’s more complicated than it was in the 1950s, I understand that, but I think there’s some core values to that we could learn today.
Kevin Cool: Yeah. A quick example from my experiences in Centerville. When I was a kid it was quite prosperous, there were multiple manufacturing plants. I played on the little league team sponsored by Union Carbide.
Neil Malhotra: Mm-hmm.
Kevin Cool: People were so proud of Union Carbide, because they were this big global company, and here they are in our little town. Well, then of course, union Carbide implodes.
Neil Malhotra: Mm-hmm.
Kevin Cool: Later on, shuts the factory, leaves the town and sort of leaves a bad taste in everybody’s mouth. You were talking about how business leaders were, you know, members of their community and leaders in their community. The extent to which corporate America has left behind communities seems to me to be a serious issue in terms of how people view, going back to elites —
Neil Malhotra: Mm-hmm.
Kevin Cool: Or people in charge, right? Like, well, look what’s happened to our town, right? Now we don’t have any factories.
Neil Malhotra: Mm-hmm.
Kevin Cool: Now the biggest employer in the town is the school system.
Neil Malhotra: Yep.
Kevin Cool: Or the hospital.
Neil Malhotra: Yep.
Kevin Cool: Um, so isn’t it understandable at some level that people would gravitate toward someone who they think hears them?
Neil Malhotra: I think it’s totally understandable. I think it also is not just the business’s fault. I think there’s these trends, I mean, I don’t think that anyone’s to blame for this. I think there’s just, the world has kind of moved in a complicated direction and it’s actually resulted in a lot of decreased trust between, um, different people.
And it’s not just between elites and masses. It’s among masses themselves. So if you think about like what are like some good ideas the left and the right have had? So I think a very good idea the left had was out of human capital. So what do I mean by that? It’s that if you invest in people’s education, their health, at an early age, that unlocks a lot of value. Right? Believing that capital is not just like machinery, which is how we used to think of it in the industrial revolution. Like human capital is a form of capital.
Kevin Cool: Yeah.
Neil Malhotra: One of the best ideas that conservatives ever had was the idea of social capital. And social capital is the idea that there is value in the trust in community that people have to each other.
Kevin Cool: Mm-hmm.
Neil Malhotra: And if you can unlock this value, it lets you have more, um, growing of the pie beyond just what human capital is within people. And so what are I, what are some ways you get social capital? It’s by having churches, by having local volunteer organizations, by having local singing groups, local bowling leagues.
Kevin Cool: Like rotaries.
Neil Malhotra: Rotary Clubs. Right. And so I think there’s just a broader thing where people are on their phones, they’re disconnected from other human beings. They have, you look at like the, the friendship statistics, the sociologists have found people, plummeting, people have much fewer in-person friends and contacts than they used to have. I think there’s just an overall sadness and sickness that you see in the country that cannot just be blamed on companies. They’re, they’re a victim of it, but I think there’s just more broader problems with social trust and social capital that go beyond, you know, Union Carbide.
Kevin Cool: Yeah.
Neil Malhotra: Leaving and not sponsoring the little league team.
Kevin Cool: Right.
Neil Malhotra: I think it’s all symptoms of the same problem.
Kevin Cool: Right. That feels like a good place to, to end. Thank you, Neil. This was really, really interesting. It’s fascinating talking to you and I appreciate you being here.
Neil Malhotra: Yeah. Thanks for your time. And always great to hear stories of Centerville, Iowa.
Kevin Cool: Oh, there are a lot more where that came from
Jim Colgan: Does this place really exist, Kevin? I haven’t fact-checked.
Kevin Cool: Here’s a funny story even about that. When it was originally named, it was named after a man named Thomas Senter, S-E-N-T-E-R, and the person who was plotting the town and, and you know, the official in charge thought that was a misspelling and changed it to C-E-N-T-E-R. So instead of Centerville with an S, it’s Centerville with a C, which of course completely changes the character of the name.
Kevin Cool: If/Then is a podcast from Stanford Graduate School of Business. I’m your host, Kevin Cool. Our show is written and produced by Making Room and the content and design team at the GSB.
Our managing producers are Michael McDowell and Elizabeth Wyleczuk-Stern. Executive producers are Sorel Husbands Denholtz and Jim Colgan. Sound design and additional production support from Mumble Media and Aech Ashe.
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