Topic: Management
Stripe CEO says he used to be a ‘misanthropic introvert’ and would still prefer to be a ‘cave dweller’ than work in the office
Meet the MBA class of 2026: Vicky Fam, UC Berkeley (Haas)
From an Iowa dairy farm to global consulting leader: Brian Gross, MBA 08
Growing up on a dairy farm in Iowa as one of 14 children, Brian Gross, MBA 08, had never heard of Boston Consulting Group. But he did learn a lot about problem solving, which may have led him to launch a 16-year BCG career.
“I spent my whole childhood watching my dad fix things all day,” he said at a recent Dean’s Speaker Series talk, co-sponsored by Q@Haas. “That’s all you do in farming. It’s in a very complex environment with tons of variables coming your way, most of which are out of your control, and you fix stuff and you make it work better. So that part I got.”
Gross, after interning at BCG while at Haas, went on to become chief operating officer of BCG’s North America region, leading operations, human resources, and business services teams for 1,800 employees.
Listen to the talk on the Dean’s Speaker Series podcast:
First in his family to go to college, Gross said his parents didn’t support his plans to attend university. After earning an undergraduate business degree, he said he never saw himself as “a kid who belonged at a top graduate school.” But after attending a Q@Haas outreach event he said he was drawn to the program’s inclusivity.
“When I got to Haas, I was largely a closeted professional,” he said. “It was such a jarring experience, frankly, to come to an admissions event because I was out and gay and was willing to show up. But I had never had an experience like that before. I always revealed drips of myself before. I tested the waters. I played it safe. I checked where I could be comfortable, but this was really the first place.”
Gross went on to work in talent acquisition and account management at BCG, eventually moving into logistics and supply chain management. Working in the firm’s San Francisco office, he found a passion for human resources and combining operations, people, and HR.
“Each of our interactions, internally and externally, is an extension of our brand and our culture of who we want to be as an organization,” he said. “So there is power in any functional path you choose—you don’t need to pick one. And there’s not one that I would say has more value than the other.”
Gross said that he has learned the most in his role by listening, learning, and adapting.
“One of the ways that I try to not pretend I know everything about the LGBTQ community is in our benefits administration, our plan design, and how I think about what people need,” he said. “I have a panel of people that represent different parts of the LGBTQ experience and they advise my team, who every year we sit down and think about our benefits and our strategy for benefits and how we support people.”
He said he’s also learned a great deal by sitting on BCG’s Racial Equity Taskforce and as a member of the company’s Pride Network.
“I sit in rooms where there’s underrepresentation,” he said. “I think I carry that with me, and I really think about who’s not here today and what would they be saying, what would they want in this conversation and I try to help us make the right decisions wearing those hats and using that input.”
Read more about Q@Haas, the organization for LGBTQ MBA students, partners, and allies at Berkeley Haas.
Read more about the Dean’s Speaker Series.
From theory to practice: how MBA students apply classroom knowledge to career and life
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Leveraging an MBA to create new opportunities
New Product Management Club at Berkeley Haas gears up for first conference
Berkeley Haas has a thriving community that cares deeply about product management. Among that group is Ansu George, EWMBA 25, who aims to make it even stronger in her role as president of the new student-run Product Management Club (PMC).
With a collaborative team of 13 MBA students, George is now gearing up to host the inaugural Haas Product Con on Oct. 26 at Chou Hall’s Spieker Forum.
“This will be a landmark, full-day event for the Haas community,” said George, the lead product manager at B2B software company RollWorks, a division of NextRoll. “We’re expecting 250 attendees, with 20 speakers, and participants ranging from students to seasoned product professionals across the Bay Area. It’s a chance for us to unite, learn, and support each other’s growth in product management.”
The day will include hands-on AI product experience workshops, personalized coaching sessions, speed networking, and sessions on navigating the job market in today’s economy—along with lightning talks on gaming and healthcare tech.
The Product Con event will feature influential industry speakers including Todd Yellin, former head of product at Netflix, Ami Vora, chief product officer at Faire and former vice president of Product at Whatsapp, Shreyas Doshi, product coach, leader, and founder of High Leverage Labs, Tatyana Mamut, co-founder and CEO of Wayfound, Hubert Palan, founder and CEO of Productboard, Navnith Ramkrishnan, director of product management at Tanium, Rupa Chaturvedi, founder of the Human Centered AI Institute and a partner with Reforge, Ajit Ghuman, co-founder and CEO of Monetizely, and Ashwinder (Ash) Ahluwalia, a former product management head at Google and chief product and UX officer at Findem, among others.
Last month, the PM club hosted its first retreat, a half-day boot camp attended by more than 70 people. George and Sri Josyula, EWMBA 25, opened the retreat, which featured an interactive panel of Haas students who shared product management pivots from careers in the U.S. Army, consulting, design, and engineering. The panel, moderated by the club’s VP of careers, Riddhish Doshi, EWMBA 26, was followed by a session on PM internships moderated by co-president Shilpa Gopal, MBA 25, and closing remarks from Sparsh Agarwal, EWMBA 25, director of product at Salesforce.
A PM Speaker Series also launched this year, kicking off with organizational theorist and management consultant Geoffrey Moore, author of “Crossing the Chasm,” Marty Cagan, founder of the Silicon Valley Product Group and author of “Inspired,” will join the group Nov. 19. Cagan built products for Hewlett-Packard, Netscape Communications, and eBay.
A challenging pivot
A former software engineer, George pivoted to become a product manager in 2019 while working at Yahoo!
“I went through a full year of struggle to make that pivot happen,” she recalled. “At the time, my resume purely read ‘software engineer,’ with no projects or specific PM skills to showcase.”
Drawn to product management because it calls for solving a diverse array of problems on a daily basis, George said she pitched Yahoo’s VP of product, asking for an opportunity to work on a project. “That project was a success,” she recalled. “It opened the door for me to lead the launch and development of a product called Business Maker for Yahoo Small Business.” She left the company as a product manager.
The club has made significant progress over the past year. “I am especially grateful to Henry Hercock and Prachi Mehta, both EWMBA 24, who initially pitched the idea of forming this new club focused on product management,” George said. “Their vision came at a time of growing interest in the field, and their efforts laid the foundation for what the club has become today.”
Swetha Kalyanaraman, MBA 25, who holds a master’s degree in biotechnology, has found the club to be a great source for connections and career advice as she navigates a pivot to product management. She said she was inspired by a product management class she took earlier this year and that she’s now particularly interested in finding a role in the medical device space.
“There’s a lot of science involved in product management in this space, which enables you to talk to surgeons and doctors and medical practitioners,” she said. “The digital health space is also coming up right now.”
Part of George’s role with the club, which is open to all MBA students, is to help students like Kalyanaraman make the career change. ”If the club helps even a few students to pivot to a first-time product manager job or if we help a product manager become a chief product manager that’s a big win,” she said.
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How chain IVF clinics improve infertility treatment
People are wary of for-profit healthcare. Professor Ambar La Forgia demonstrates that, at least in the realm of infertility treatment, chain clinics perform significantly better than independent operators.
In the U.S., demand for in vitro fertilization (IVF) increased almost 140% between 2004 and 2018. Among other things, this trend suggests a business opportunity; in that same span of time the market share of for-profit chain clinics grew from 5% to 20%, with chains now performing over 40% of IVF treatment cycles nationwide.
“Chain organizations are very common in hotels and restaurants,” says Ambar La Forgia, an assistant professor at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. “But when it comes to healthcare, because it hasn’t traditionally been delivered in this way, it seems to be making a lot of people uneasy.” Policymakers are particularly concerned that chains will chase profit at the expense of patient outcomes.
A new study by La Forgia, published in Management Science and coauthored by Julia Bodner of Copenhagen Business School, provides a more optimistic view in the case of fertility clinics, suggesting chain ownership has improved results. The researchers found that clinics acquired by a chain serve more patients, increasing IVF treatment cycles by 27%, and they increase live birth rates by nearly 14%.
Significant improvement with chain clinics
IVF treatment cycles comprise five main stages that require over 100 distinct steps performed over four to six weeks. Along the way, many subjective decisions must be made.
The goal, of course, is to produce healthy babies, and the last step—when a physician transfers an embryo, or embryos, into a patient’s uterus—is particularly important. Transferring more than one embryo increases the success rate, which is measured by the number of live births divided by number of transfers, but it also increases the chance of multiple births, like twins, which is riskier for both the mother and the newborns.
To compare the performance of chain and independent clinics, La Forgia and Bodner collated a novel set of clinic and patient data that drew from the Centers for Disease Control, and the National Center for Health Statistics. They also manually checked the ownership of every fertility clinic in the U.S. From this effort, they were able to look at two main outcomes between the years 2004 and 2018: How many IVF cycles does each clinic perform? And what is the success rate, measured by live births per transfer?
The researchers found that after a fertility chain acquires a clinic, IVF cycles increase dramatically and live birth rates increase by 13.6%. “This means that these chain clinics are doing more cycles of IVF and converting more of those cycles into live births,” La Forgia says. “They are actually improving the quality of care in a meaningful way.”
Chain clinics are not doing this by simply transferring a lot more embryos, either. La Forgia and Bodner find that they are actually producing more “singleton” births—that is, the birth of one baby—than their independent clinic peers, which implicitly suggests a better embryo selection process.
A product of more resources and knowledge
But what if these results are driven by a more stringent patient screening process, or by chains being more selective about the markets in which they operate?
La Forgia and Bodner investigated these possibilities and found no supporting evidence. There is no appreciable change in the patient population after a chain takes over an independent clinic. In fact, the largest improvement in live births is among patients who are 38 years old and older—the population that typically has the lowest success rates. Nor are their significant differences in the broader demographics of neighborhoods in which chain clinics operate, the researchers found.
Instead, it appears that chains improve outcomes through two mechanisms: the availability of more resources and a heavier focus on sharing best practices. The researchers make this case through several analyses. For instance, chains tend to introduce new processes and procedures known to improve birth rates. In fact, the lowest-performing clinics see the largest improvements when taken over by a chain, and clinics acquired by the highest-performing chains experience the greatest improvements.
Most notably, the researchers found that affiliated IVF clinics, which pay chains for select management support and financing options but retain managerial independence, witness an increase in patient volume and number of IVF cycles, but unlike fully acquired clinics, they don’t demonstrate an improvement in birth rates.
“Basically, in affiliated clinics the number of live births is going up as an absolute value, but they’re not getting better at achieving live births,” La Forgia says. “Our hypothesis is that a chain is willing to share its resources widely, but it may not want to share specific knowledge with an organization it doesn’t own, so we’ll only see this knowledge transfer in acquired clinics.”
The authors demonstrated a final benefit of chains, which is that they increase access to IVF by expanding the market—performing more IVF cycles—rather than stealing business from competitors.
Supporting a better healthcare market
Some of the findings may be explained by the fact that compared with many other parts of the healthcare system, fertility clinics share some characteristics with retail stores and chain restaurants. It’s a relatively more competitive market and patients typically pay up front and out-of-pocket for care. Clinics are also legally required to send their data to the government. Other sectors like dialysis and nursing care are more opaque and dependent on insurance, so chains may have fewer incentives to improve quality of care. But the researchers point out that plenty of health care is shifting toward a retail model, including dermatology providers, urgent care clinics, and physical therapists.
The authors offer three recommendations to help these markets support the kind of competition that ultimately improves patient outcomes.
- Policymakers should increase transparency about quality of care. In the fertility sector, clinics are legally required to send their data to the government, which publishes them as an online report card, so patients can shop around.
- Price transparency is necessary to increase competition among providers. In most healthcare settings, patients do not know how much they will pay, often until months after treatment. Since patients typically pay up front for fertility treatments, clinic chains may compete more on prices to attract new patients.
- Finally, regulators should make sure patients have sufficient choice. In the dialysis market, for instance, two companies own 60% of clinics. Such concentration of power may negatively affect both prices and quality. As chains expand, regulators should make sure this growth doesn’t hinder patient choice.
“Very little research speaks to the ways in which chains are good or bad for patients,” La Forgia says. “We ought to start paying attention to what kinds of markets might lend themselves well to this business model.”
Read the full paper:
Getting Down to Business: Chain Ownership and Fertility Clinic Performance
By Ambar La Forgia and Julia Bodner
Management Science
September 2024
Related content:
Fertility Clinics Show How the Chain Model Can Improve Healthcare
By Ambar La Forgia
Harvard Business Review, October 15, 2024
World University Rankings 2025
The pitfalls of passion: How it can backfire at work—and what managers can do about it
When plotting their career trajectories, young professionals are often encouraged to follow their passion. And in the entrepreneurial world, passion is often seen as a key ingredient for success. But figures such as Elon Musk, known for his passion as well as arrogance, show that this drive is not without its perils—including what researchers call “performance overconfidence.”
So how can the passionate drive in the workplace be harnessed without backfiring? The answer may lie in understanding the connection between passion and overconfidence—and how managers can use that understanding, according to new research published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.
“Overconfidence is a really pernicious form of bias,” says Erica Bailey, assistant professor in the Management of Organizations group at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. Bailey and a team of researchers conducted a series of studies with more than 1,000 participants. “We wanted to explain some of passion’s goods and ills by exploring how passion may relate to overconfidence,” she says.
For example, if you’re an entrepreneur, the chances that your business succeeds are low. “So maybe in those cases you really need passion to overcome the barriers to entry,” she says. “But there are other careers where you really need to be cautious about passion, and you need to manage it.”
PERFORMANCE INFLATION
To demonstrate the link between passion and performance overconfidence, Bailey and her team of researchers first asked more than 800 employees at a Chinese engineering company to rate their own passion and performance as well as the performance of their teammates. They logged their ratings every morning and afternoon for 20 consecutive workdays.
Employees who reported high levels of passion were rated higher on performance by their coworkers. At the same time, the more passionate they were, the more likely they were to rate their own performance even higher than their coworkers did.
These findings underscore studies showing that passionate people inflate their performance beyond their actual improvement. “Something that didn’t make it into the paper is that we also saw some interpersonal costs associated with this,” Bailey adds. “When you see yourself as a higher performer than your colleagues see you, it can rub people the wrong way.”
EASY TO TRIGGER
In the next study, the researchers asked nearly 400 full-time U.S. workers to imagine they were either highly passionate or highly punctual in a hypothetical job. All were told that their performance had been rated “average” by colleagues and were then asked to rate how well they thought they performed.
Despite knowing their performance was only middling, participants who were led to think of themselves as highly passionate predicted that their future performance would improve more than those who were told to imagine themselves as highly punctual. The “passionate” employees also expected they would be more engaged at work, would work longer and harder, and that their performance would improve—even though they knew their performance had been rated only so-so.
“That was surprising to us, and to our reviewers too,” Bailey says. “But this association between passion and superior performance exists and is pretty easy to trigger in people’s minds—even just by telling people they were passionate about their jobs.”
MANAGING PASSION
When it comes to managing for passion, Bailey says it’s important to consider the employee’s role. For example, entrepreneurs, consultants, and salespeople may benefit from passion overconfidence. But it must be tempered in roles that require people to have an accurate view of their abilities, like surgeons, pilots, or financial traders.
The challenge here is that many managers encourage and even cultivate fervor in their team members. “There are lots of benefits to having passionate employees. They’re eager, they’re fun to talk to and fun to manage. They’re going to bring energy to the meetings. They’re going to move things forward,” Bailey says. “But you have to think carefully about how to manage the risks that could come about from your own biases towards passionate employees.”
Not only must managers police their own bias, but also the biases of their passionate employees, who are less likely to delegate, see blind spots, or be team players. “Managers have to think about how the passionate person is perceived by their horizontal coworkers and how to help them manage that reputation so that these groups can work together effectively.”
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Passionate people rate themselves higher than their colleagues.
- They also rate themselves higher than their performance data indicates they should.
- Managers must temper their own biases toward passionate employees.
READ THE FULL PAPER
Potential Pitfall of Passion: Passion is Associated with Performance Overconfidence
By Erica R. Bailey, University of California Berkeley; Kai Krautter Harvard Business School; Wen Wu, Beijing Jiaotong University; Adam D. Galinsky Columbia Business School; and Jon M. Jachimowicz, Harvard Business School
Social Psychological and Personality Science, May 2024
Jill Evanko, CEO of Chart Industries, discusses the payoff of taking risks, developing cleaner energy
Jill Evanko, president and CEO of Chart Industries, kicked off the fall Dean’s Speaker Series, discussing how taking risks as an energy industry leader has paid off for the global company.
Chart Industries, with $3.77 billion in 2024 revenue, makes products used in every phase of the liquid gas supply chain. The company’s fitting tagline is “cooler by design,”
“If you’ve ever had a refreshing nitro beer, you can thank Chart’s frost-free, vacuum-insulated liquid nitrogen equipment for making that possible,” Evanko said, in a Sept. 9 conversation with Olivia Halas-Dias, MBA/MPH 25, and Ashley Wong, MBA 25.
Listen to the podcast.
While Evanko joked that members of her family don’t understand what her company does, many of the company’s customers are household names—from Starbucks, which uses the company’s liquid nitrogen dosing technology for beverages like Nitro Cold Brews, to Viking Cruise, which is exploring using hydrogen fuel cells with their ocean vessels, to ExxonMobil, which, on behalf of Mozambique Rovuma Venture (MRV), is using Chart’s liquification technology in northern Mozambique.
The company is particularly adept at taking old-school designs and equipment into new and up-and-coming markets, Evanko said. “We’ve been doing hydrogen design and equipment-build for 160 years, and no one cared about it except NASA until May of 2020,” she said. “During COVID, (companies) became more focused on sustainability and the future of the world, so having 157 years of hydrogen experience gave us a great jumping-off point to be able to serve these different end markets.”
Under Evanko’s leadership since 2018, Chart has worked toward clean energy and sustainability goals, joining the UN Global Compact, a voluntary initiative to implement sustainability principles, and initiating strategic acquisitions that have allowed Chart to expand its product offerings.
She added that the company has made decisions to take calculated risks that would’ve been viewed “at the time as too risky or as something that no one else wanted to do.” But those types of decisions are critical to give your company an advantage, she said.
With a background in finance, Evanko discussed pivoting to the energy industry with no prior experience in the sector when a job opportunity came her way. Because of her openness to that opportunity, she said, “I fell in love with what I do today.”
But as a top female executive navigating a male-dominated industry, she said believes her gender shouldn’t be a defining issue, noting, “I just want to be the best CEO, not the best female CEO.” As Chart’s CEO, she received the 2020 ExxonMobil Power Play Rainmaker award, the 2020 S&P Global Platts Energy Award for Chief Trailblazer, and most recently, a 2023 EY Entrepreneur of the Year for the Southeast Region.
“I would say 100% of the accolades that I’ve gotten are the result of my team,” she said. “It’s really the people out there that are designing and building the product.”
Evanko also stressed the importance of being a kind leader, which is why she tries to answer every message she gets, from LinkedIn to text to email.
“At the heart of the company, we want to profitably grow; we want to deliver unique solutions,” she said. “But I never want any one of our team members or customers to walk away and say, ‘Jill over at Chart wasn’t kind.’”
Transcript
– Alex Mas: Hello everyone, can you hear me?
– Audience: Yeah.
– Mas: Terrific. I’m Alex Mas. I’m Associate Dean of Academic Affairs here at UC Berkeley [Haas]. I’m here on behalf of our interim dean, Jenny Chatman, who is traveling today. And I’d like to welcome you to our kickoff for the “Dean’s Speaker Series” this year. And it is my great pleasure to introduce today’s guest, Jill Evanko, CEO of Chart Industries. Welcome. Chart is a global leader in manufacturing highly engineered equipment for clean energy and industrial gas markets.
And as I’ve been learning, the range of activities that their equipment supports is just vast. They supply among others hospitals for oxygen, SpaceX; they support our cryogen operation here at UC Berkeley in physics and chemistry, which is vital for research. If you’ve ever had a refreshing nitro beer, you can thank Chart’s frost-free, vacuum-insulated liquid nitrogen equipment for making that possible. That’s a mouthful, but thank you for that.
And on a larger scale, their LNG systems have been an energy security linchpin in these tumultuous economic times. Jill has been at the helm of Chart since 2018, and she has skillfully navigated this complex macroeconomic environment with great success, delivering strong and sustained financial performance.
Under her leadership, the company has maintained an unwavering dedication to clean energy and sustainability, joining the UN Global Compact, a voluntary initiative to implement sustainability principles, and allowing and initiating strategic acquisitions that have allowed Chart to expand its offering of products across what Jill calls the Nexus of Clean.
Jill manages an almost 12,000 employee workforce around the entire globe with a commitment to diversity and inclusion. Before joining Chart, Jill held multiple financial and operational executive roles in industrial manufacturing and engineering. I’m sure we’ll talk more about that. And she has won numerous awards for her leadership, including the ExxonMobil Power Play Rainmaker Award and the S&P Global Platts Energy Award for Chief Trailblazer, just to name a few.
She serves on multiple boards, and I have been learning that she finds significant amount of time to mentor future leaders, and I did get her permission to say this ’cause I couldn’t believe it, but she actually answers every email and LinkedIn request that comes her way and views that as a mentorship opportunity. So that’s amazing. So we’re honored to have the opportunity to learn from someone who is making a difference every day. And I will now turn it over to our moderators, Olivia Halas-Dias and Ashley Wong, who will moderate today’s discussion. Thank you.
– Olivia Halas-Dias: Thanks, Alex. We’re really excited to be here today. My name’s Olivia Halas-Dias, I’m a second-year dual MBA and MPH, master’s of public health, student. Yeah, really excited to be here.
– Ashley Wong: Hi everyone, I’m Ashley, also a second-year MBA student at Haas. Thank you so much for joining us here today, Jill, as well as bringing a few members of your A team. We’re really excited to get to know a little bit more about you as a leader and your work at Chart today.
– Jill Evanko: Well, thank you guys for having me. It’s wonderful to be here. It’s always awkward to hear your biography being read, but I would love to also reiterate the message that if you don’t get the chance to talk to us today, make sure you reach out ’cause we love hearing from folks that are looking for opportunities in the future of engineering. So, looking forward to the conversation.
– Halas-Dias: Thanks, Jill, and we, excuse me, Ashley and I have her contact info if you need it. So, we’d like to start off by talking a bit about your career journey. You have a very diverse professional journey, starting your career at Arthur Andersen amidst the Enron scandal, then working for Honeywell and Sony before moving on to roles in the industrial sector. How did you eventually land in energy in engineering technologies at Chart?
– Evanko: Yeah, so just by quick way of background, when I started out of undergrad at Arthur Andersen, I was not on the team that did Enron. So, just to clarify. But it was an interesting time. And I think as many of you, either coming out of undergrad or out of grad school, you look at what is it that you want to do with your future? And one of the things that I have learned over my career is that it does not ever go according to the exact plan that you had at the outset.
So, you’ve got to be pretty adaptable to it. And that’s really what’s happened for me in my various different roles throughout my career. Basically, what happened was Arthur Andersen ended up, we knew that there wasn’t going to be an Arthur Andersen, and so, I was going to be in the job market with 100,000 other people looking for a job in my early 20s. And so, I took the job that came along, and that happened to be at Honeywell. And that was where I fell in love with industrial manufacturing. I started to get to know energy a little bit. And from there, I spent about 14 years at a company called Dover Corporation, where we did a ton of different energy applications but also diversified industrial manufacturing. So, one of the things that I love and from Dover, I came to Chart about eight years ago, about the business itself is the culmination of engineering and manufacturing together. Because if you design something, somebody has to build it.
The beauty of our company at Chart is that we design, and we build it. And that’s really fun when you start to see the world’s need for more sustainable solutions, whether that’s what we do in a step toward that way in LNG, but all the way to green hydrogen, which has been very active the last few years. We also serve water treatment. We serve carbon capture, utilization and storage, food and beverage, and multiple different industrial applications. But every single one of ’em, one of the parts of our strategy of the Nexus of Clean, so clean power, water, food, and industrials, is that we can help the world become greener. And that’s embedded in what we do every single day in the design and manufacturing at our company. So, through that journey, I’ve kind of done whatever the companies have asked me to do, but I’ve learned a ton. And I think it’s really important that when you set out to think about your career, that you do say, “I’m going to take on opportunities that maybe look different than what I originally thought it was going to look like.” I can tell you, I started my college and I wanted to be a museum curator, so art history was my thing. And I quickly realized that there were like 100 museum curator jobs in the United States, so that wasn’t going to be really great for me.
And so, I switched and went a different direction, and I fell in love with what I do today. And that’s really important, is that you find something that you really enjoy because you spend a lot of time doing it. And, as through the introduction, two of my team members here, Gerry and Joe, stand up. Gerry’s our Chief Human Resources Officer. So, if you want, if you’re interested in intern, a job, anything like that, talk to Gerry. And Joe is our Chief Technical Officer, and Joe’s been with the company for about 30 years. But these are two guys that are one of the reasons I love my job and I love the company because they’re really great people to work with, and they really understand what our vision is and what we’re trying to do.
Joe is a great example of career path being very different than what he set out for it to be. He was originally an engineer designing heat exchangers. And from there I said, “Joe, hey, I want you to run the water business.” He said, “Sure.” And then he said, “Jill, I really hate the water business.” And so, I said, “Well, how about you go help me and sell something, run the commercial team.” And so, he brought all of our global commercial team together and created our first One Chart commercial group. And then, about a year and a half ago, I said, “Hey, you have great skills technically, great skills commercially, a business-oriented mindset, will you be our CTO?” And he said yes to that. So, he’s got one of those great journeys that says, it didn’t start this way, but here’s where I am. And he kind of has the best attitude toward it all along the way.
And then, maybe I’d just add two personal comments to this answer. I did my MBA at Notre Dame, which I’m somewhat appalled by their football performance this past weekend. Unlike yours. But yeah, but that was something I did while I was working, and I gained a lot of understanding from that because I felt like some of the real-world experience that I had helped me take a lot more away from that experience that, and then most importantly, out of everything, and these guys will tell you, if not once a day, many times a day, you’ve got to be kind. You’re going to run into people again. That’s why I always answer every LinkedIn, every text, every email, because you will run into each other somewhere along the lines again, right?
So, at the heart of the company, we want to profitably grow; we want to deliver unique solutions, but I never want any one of our team members or customers to walk away and say, “Jill over at Chart wasn’t kind to the situation and the consideration of what we’re doing.” And I try to teach my daughter that every day. She just turned 11. She is a Swiftie, and so am I now. But we always say at the end of every day in our family, we say, “Were you kind?” So you got to say yes to that, and if not, you’re in trouble. “Did you whine?” No. And then, we always ask, “Did you pee your pants?” Which started when she was little, but we’ve kept that tradition alive. So, all that to say is, my career journey has been different than what I expected, but you’ve got to also weave in some personal elements to have a really fun and exciting career because, ultimately, people matter.
– Halas-Dias: Thanks, Jill, and it’s always reassuring to hear that career journeys aren’t linear, so appreciate that. And also that, also reiterating the importance of being kind because I know I want to work somewhere where I’m happy and I like the people I work with. So, you’ve won numerous awards, some of which Alex listed in your introduction, including being recognized as one of the 25 Most Influential Women in Energy. What do these accolades mean to you, and is there one or a few accomplishments that stand out?
– Evanko: Yeah, so I would say 100% of the accolades that I’ve gotten are the result of my team. It’s, you know, the money is in our company and the awards and accomplishments are not made by me sitting here and telling you what to do or anything like that. It’s really the people out there that are designing and building the product. What I really find impactful is when we as a company receive an award that says we’ve designed or innovated something new. So, something that is what I would consider next generation or unique. And that says that, you know, we’re continuing to be on the market-leading edge of technology, we’re taking calculated risks and bets. So, spending some money to do that, whether that’s organically developing a product or an R&D project, or whether that’s going out and saying, “Hey, we don’t have the skills to do it, but we’re going to invest in a company that does.” So, that, to me, is real impactful because it means that we are moving the energy transition forward through our own technologies, which ultimately benefits business because you’re going to be a market leader. And then the other ones that we love to see are sustainability awards. So, we love to get the awards that say you guys are making an impact not only in your own operations but also for your customers. And that’s one thing that we’re able to really tangibly measure and continue to progress on. And I point that out being in the most sustainable building here that I believe is in the United States or the world, but very cool building, and we love to try to make our operations less GHG emission impactful.
– Halas-Dias: Innovation. Innovation and impact definitely resonate with students here at Berkeley and I think the broader community. So, you spent your career in industries that are historically male dominated, finance and industrials. How have you navigated this, and how has it influenced your current leadership style?
– Evanko: Yeah, so, I get asked all the time, you know, “What’s it like being a female CEO?” And my answer is always, “I just want to be the best CEO, not the best female CEO.” And that’s something that is, I’ve always kind of carried that with me throughout. And what I would say is that: A lot of it is in your mindset and how you think about this question and how you think about the situation. I was, two weeks ago, three weeks ago, I was at the Raymond James Energy Conference, and that was held in Colorado, and there were 54 people there, CEOs, investors. I was the only female out of those 54. And, but what I can tell you is nobody blinked an eye, right? They respected the commentary, they, I had a seat at the table. It just so happened to be that in some of the spaces that we play, there’s less female representation, but I think we can do a lot more to increase that. And so, a lot of what we want to do is continue to open opportunities and roles and create the space for different ways to work and different ways to get, be a part of the organization. And that’s something that we really try to do, whether that’s being flexible for somebody who wants a certain type of role or has constraints as a mom—working moms have different constraints than other people do, right? And so, we try to adapt to that to be able to facilitate the future, the future generations regardless of gender. But what I would also say is that I’ve literally rarely run across someone who thinks of me differently because of my gender in the workplace. The opposite is actually true. There’s many times I get invited to things that our company would not typically be invited to because of the size of the company or the different scope or scale. And I, maybe being invited because I’m a female and they need a female CEO. And I always say yes to those invitations because you get more business from ’em, you get to meet different people. And so, you know, I say even if you view that as, “Oh, I don’t want to be invited because I’m the female being invited to this,” go. Because it’s a great opportunity to show that you have the skills and you have the table stakes. And so, don’t turn an opportunity down because you want to view it as, “oh, it’s, you know, it’s a bias toward me.” Can I tell a quick story?
– Audience: Yeah.
– Evanko: OK. So my, when I became CEO, June of 2018, the very first thing you have to do in the public company land is you’ve got to go out and talk to shareholders, existing shareholders, new shareholders. But existing ones, they hate a C-suite change. You know, it makes ’em nervous, and it’s like, “Who is this person, and what is she or he going to do differently than what the company has been doing?” So, I go out and there’s, in the public company world, you, there’s different ways you can go talk to shareholders. One of them is they have conferences, and you go to a meeting room, and you sit all day, and people come and talk to you. Very painful, by the way. The, I went to my first one, it was in New York City, and it was a room three times the size of this one with circular tables set up, and various different companies like ours that were sitting there. And then, investors were going to rotate between the tables. And so, we were in between one of these 30-minute meetings, and I stood up and just kind of was standing by my table, and an older gentleman comes over, and he says, “Would you please get me a coffee?” And so, I was like, “Well the coffee, I think the coffee’s back there,” or whatever, you know, kind of just whatever. And then, turns out, he was my next meeting, and he was super apologetic. He said, “I’m so sorry, I didn’t know what your role was,” and all of that, “And I should not have asked you to get me a coffee.” Anyway, he bought our shares, he’s still a shareholder. And you know, there’s always a good guilt buy out there. So, and I see, I still see him every now and then, and I think he’s just kind of like, OK. But how you handle something like that, right? Is it with grace and you know, if, he wasn’t ill-intentioned in the least, so.
– Halas-Dias: We always love a good story. I’ll pass it to Ashley.
– Wong: And Olivia and I forgot to mention this in our intros, but we’re both also Swifties.
– Evanko: Yes, love it, OK. We could have a whole different dialogue on this. I took my daughter to Wembley on her 11th birthday to see her. Yeah.
– Wong: That’s an incredible gift.
– Evanko: It was, yeah. I don’t think there’s any, I think we should stop there, right?
– Wong: Yeah, can’t beat that.
– Evanko: She should not have another birthday.
– Wong: Well, as we dive into Chart Industries and its role in the energy sector, we’d like to help ground everyone in what Chart does, given its complexity. By a showing of hands, who in the audience is currently in or aspiring to work in the energy sector? Great, so a few people who may already be familiar with Chart, but Chart is an industrial engineering technology company at heart and plays a significant role across many applications from transforming energy for heating and transportation, nitrogen dosing for beverages such as the Nitro Cold Brews at Starbucks that we all know and love, cooling systems for medical products, supporting the transition to clean energy. I don’t think that even covers a quarter of it. We’d love to hear in your own words how Chart’s applications might show up in the day-to-day of individuals like us and businesses. Are there any applications you think would surprise us?
– Evanko: Absolutely, so it is a lot going on in our company, right? But engineering design is the heart of what we do. So, engineers are at the heart of our 12,000 people. And then, behind that, we manufacture what our engineers design, and what that allows as a customer to come to us and say, “I either have this idea,” or, “I have this need,” and we’re able to design it or tweak the design and then build the mission critical pieces and parts for them. We have 64 manufacturing locations around the world, engineers at every one of them. And then, we have engineering hubs in each of our main continents that we operate. In conjunction with that, we have about 50 service centers. So we, like, we think of ourselves as design all the way through to service and repair. And that’s a really unique offering. But we also call ourselves molecule agnostic. So what that means is we can serve any molecule at low, low temperatures, high pressures. And these guys always make fun of me, Joe especially, right? ‘Cause I’m not an engineer by background, but sometimes I sleep at a Holiday Inn and pretend to be. So, that’s something that as a leader in management in our company, we have a ton of engineers that have come through either engineering programs or general management programs, but the best leaders that we have in our company understand the technical side. And many of them want to also understand other aspects of management. So, we encourage that as well. When you look at what we make and kind of what else do we serve, one of the reasons we’re able to serve such a variety of different end markets is because our manufacturing capabilities don’t have to change to serve them. And I’m going to answer your question about surprise in markets, but a lot of people say we’ve never heard of Chart, right? I mean, even members of my family still don’t know what Chart does. But when you talk about customers, you guys all have heard of SpaceX, you have all heard of Starbucks, you have all heard of Wendy’s and McDonald’s and Exxon, the list goes on in terms of the types of customers that we have. And then, there’s also customers that our customers serve with the molecule. So, you heard about the cryogenic facility here, right? Our, it’s not only our equipment here, but also our customers that deliver that molecule to your R&D center, as well as customers like Carnival Cruise Lines, Viking cruise lines, that may buy a hydrogen ferry from us or a hydrogen ship, or they may have an LNG ship, but they’re buying the LNG from one of our customers that we built a facility for in terms of LNG export. So those are kind of the types of things that we do. But what may surprise you is how we’re able to take really old-school designs and equipment into very new markets or up-and-coming markets. We’ve been doing hydrogen design and equipment build for 160 years. No one cared about it except NASA until May of 2020. And then, everyone during COVID became more focused on sustainability, the future of the world, health, and all of that. And so, then having 157 years of hydrogen experience gave us a great jumping-off point to be able to serve these different end markets. Do you guys know what an air-cooled heat exchanger is? OK, we got one, we got an air-cooled heat exchanger. Joe, you better know. Joe, describe what an air-cooled heat exchanger is and does without giving the end markets away.
– Joe Belling: OK, well an air-cooled heat exchanger does exactly that. It exchanges heat between two different fluids. So inside of some coil or tubes, you have a fluid that runs through there, it has an enhanced surface on the outside and then you have a large fan that blows air across those tubes taking a hot fluid and cooling it down. Very similar to the radiator in your car, for instance. There you go.
– Evanko: Good job, Joe. Yeah, he’s the head of engineering for us right there. But in ACHX as we call it internally, right? This, traditionally, way back when really just served the oil field. And so, you would see main installations of air coolers in oil field. So then, an air cooler, you know, OK, we manufacture this, and we had, I can’t tell you how many people we had tell us like, well, “What are you going to do with your air cooler business when the oil field declines?” You know, “when as more sustainable solutions come into the energy transition.” And we kind of shook our heads, “Well, they’re going to need air coolers, too.” So, you know, Oxy’s direct air capture project, that uses our equipment on that project. That’s one great surprise, kind of direct air capture. CCUS, that uses air coolers. And then, most recently, data centers. So everybody loves talking about AI, but it’s really about energy intensity and heat rejection. And then, air cooler is a perfect answer to that growing need on the data center side. Just a few months ago, we booked a large, $40 million order with a data center provider, a hyperscaler. And we expect to see much more of that going forward. So, a great example of kind of surprise end markets that you otherwise wouldn’t expect. A couple other fun ones. So, the doser, we talk about the doser. If you think about a plastic water bottle, it holds its shape because of the molecule that’s in there. One of the things that we’ve worked with really large customers, food and bev guys that you guys would all know in terms of beverages, to cut down on the PET in the bottling. And that’s a method that our doser provides. So, we’ve been able to reduce, I think the PET in bottling such as that, by about 50% for our customers. And what they like about it is it still gives their customers the experience of the firmness of the bottle because people like that bottle, they like that shape. And so, they don’t want to go away from that to like a paper container, like a milk carton. So, that’s interesting. Well, that same doser is the doser we describe in, for beer manufacturing, for making of various different bottlings of wine, and Starbucks, and so on. But it’s also used by folks who are making eyelash growth serum, like OK. It’s also used by folks that are making packaged liquid eggs. So, very unique set of different end markets that the doser goes into. And probably the coolest part of the doser story is the doser has multiple different customers that use it today. Those same customers typically will buy a CO2 tank from us ’cause they’re doing food and beverage. Now, those customers are buying small-scale carbon capture units because they’re as, think of a craft brewery. And if you’re making beer, you’re needing CO2, and you’re emitting CO2. Craft breweries have to go out to the market, to the open market, to actually buy CO2. And it’s hard to find. You’d be surprised, especially in places like the U.K. and Australia and sometimes the U.S., and it’s expensive. So, we serve them with a small refrigerator size carbon capture unit that can be installed in a few days. The ROI on it is typically sub-two years, and then, they don’t have to go out to market, and they’re more sustainable ’cause it’s a closed loop CO2 system that helps them brew their beer. Those same folks now are buying water treatment solutions because having a craft brewery, you know, sometimes can smell, that’s. So we treat their water, and that’s really what we refer to as the Nexus of Clean, so the interlinkages between end markets that all require molecules.
– Wong: As you mentioned, Chart is highly involved in hydrogen, a clean energy source and liquified natural gas known as a transitional fossil fuel. We’ve seen the news recently that there have been renewed investments, especially in the Middle East and Asia, in natural gas, which indicates that perhaps the transition to clean energy isn’t happening as quickly as we thought, or at the very least is looking differently across different countries. What role do you see hydrogen, LNG, Chart playing as countries aim for a lower-carbon economy but also must realistically meet its current energy needs cost effectively, especially in developing regions?
– Evanko: Yeah, that’s a great question, and I think the last part is actually a key part of the answer, which is around meeting growing energy demands. I mean, I live in Texas, and if the air conditioning goes out in July, I’m pretty unhappy, right? So, I don’t generally, if that happens, say, “Ooh boy, I really want my air conditioning to go on, but I only want it to go on if it’s from a completely renewable source.” And so, that’s a lot of the mindset that exists in terms of the world. The other part of it goes to the cost-effectiveness, right? So, let me touch on maybe what I think the end game is, and then I’ll come back to where we sit today and the reasons I think my view as the way I do. I believe that the world wants to progress this energy transition. I firmly believe that. I think we’ve seen both public and private sector take meaningful steps in moving this ahead, especially in the last four years. Like anything, it doesn’t happen as quickly, I think, as many people want it to. And so, you have this balance of continuing to meet the day-to-day demands while progressing down that path. And that’s how we feel like, we feel like we’re helping by having various steps along that transition. You can choose step A, B, or go right to Z, but what we found is the folks who wanted to skip some of those steps in the middle and go right to, for example, wholly green hydrogen, realized that there’s a lack of infrastructure in the world to support that. That the world, whether it’s regional, global, or even just one location typically is not going to rip out existing infrastructure to replace it with high cost of capital infrastructure. So, getting that cost-effectiveness down is a piece of it, but having the infrastructure is another important element. The other thing is, you know, I would say in the United States, there is a very U.S.-centric mindset. And that U.S.-centric mindset tends to say, “Everybody else, no matter where you are located or where what your current energy support system or lack thereof is, should behave like the United States.” And that is just not where some other countries and regions are on their progression. I mean, some of these folks are still building coal plants, and so, taking a step toward natural gas or a step on the way on that transition is actually a positive even though some folks would argue that it’s still not clean. But thinking about it in that context I think is super important. We also see a lot on the linkage of lack of power or clean power and lack of water or, and clean water. So, water-power nexus is super interesting outside of the Western world, primarily. And we’re starting to see some good investments being made in locations around both decel and clean water in connection with at least demonstration projects for moving to hydrogen. I think that we are well on the way of being pragmatic about that transition, whereas a few years ago we were far less pragmatic, and so there were lots of little pilot projects happening—but not a cohesive system. And for hydrogen to really become a larger percent of the total energy source in the future here, there has to be a few things that happen. There’s no global certification standard. So, we spend tens of millions of dollars every time we try to get a hydrogen piece of equipment certified in another country. And it can take two years, I mean two years and tens of millions of dollars. There’s not a lot of people that are going to want to do that, right? So we need to have the governments, the public folks that are working on schematics such as the IRA or the 45V or the EU Green Fund talk to each other so that we have global certification standards. And that’s also with respect to safety. Safety and molecules is super important. The second is around that infrastructure. So, right now, all you see really is these hub and spoke models. So, very small infrastructures, not global infrastructures. And I think those get driven by it being easier to do, implement hydrogen around the world. And then, lastly, unlike the price of oil or LNG or nat gas, there is no global pricing construct for hydrogen. And so, if I sell it to you, it’s, “What do you want to pay for today? Where can I sell it to Gerry? How much is he going to pay?” And so, there’s a finite resource that really requires a global construct to it.
– Wong: Thank you. Actually, I think you tackled my next question, which was going to be in a time where Chart solutions are so intertwined with not only sustainability but also energy security, access and independence, what are the most pressing challenges and barriers you’re facing? You mentioned infrastructure, policy, safety.
– Evanko: Yeah, I, some of the things I already mentioned, but I’d also, I would also comment that this concept of private investment versus waiting on public sector is a huge theme that we see in our customer base. And that’s not specific to any one country, but what you’ll have is there’s some capital that private companies are willing to put in, and we’ve done a lot of that ourselves, billions of dollars of investments into our company to either be cleaner ourselves or provide those solutions to our end customers, but at some point, we want them to also be spending the money. And so, this theme right now that you see in the energy transition is waiting on clarification for a rulemaking. And one of those is the IRA, the 45V. And the project funders are saying, “Well, if I don’t have certainty that this rule exists like this for the next decades, then my project really doesn’t make financial sense.” So, at the underpinning of all of this is funding, is certainty of how it’s going to work in the future. And that’s where the public sector comes into play, and that’s where this uncertainty resides. But I’ve seen this, I’ve seen this happen, and I would say this is the first time, the last few years is the first time in all of my career that I have seen any energy source molecule, call it what you will, have as much peer pressure as hydrogen has. And what I mean by that is, you know, who, did you ever hear Microsoft or Google talking about LNG? No, you just didn’t, right? UPS would buy a few trucks here or there on LNG, but it wasn’t really a theme. Now, you talk to any company in the world, hydrogen will come up in some way, shape, or form as part of their potential strategy or their existing strategy and how that plays in. So, that’s a great thing, right? That’s a great thing because you have companies that aren’t directly related to energy thinking about how they can use energy to become cleaner.
– Wong: I want to get back to something you mentioned earlier. You mentioned the closed loop system that some breweries could be using. So, those seem to be, came from investments in wastewater treatment and carbon capture. So, as we approach the next decade, what is Chart industries, what are you prioritizing in terms of its commitment to your own and other companies’ ESG goals?
– Evanko: Yeah, absolutely. You know, ESG is so important, right? And I think this is an area that you see headlines on the internet or in the news both ways. You see it, where ESG was a huge investor theme a few years ago, and now it’s not. And so, how, it has to be ingrained in your culture—it has to be ingrained in who you are as a company. We do our diversity inclusion activities around the concept of making Chart better, and that goes to a lot of different types of ways you can get involved. So, if it’s part of your fabric and your culture, then it doesn’t matter if it’s in favor, out of favor, or not. It’s part of who our company is; it’s part of our culture. And I think that’s super important and setting goals toward that. Listen, what you measure is what you achieve. And so, I don’t think that setting a goal that, you know, is aspirational is a bad thing. I think it’s actually a great thing. And I think that’s the way that you can get there and set a roadmap. One of the things that I really dislike is when companies set a goal that they don’t actually have what the year-over-year plan is to get there. And so, I highly recommend, and we do this, of what is that plan to actually achieve net zero carbon emissions by X date? How are we going to do that year over year? And we actually built it into our senior team’s compensation. So, it’s part of our compensation every year to achieve a GHG emission target on a year-over-year basis, off of the prior year’s baseline, which also requires you then to actually figure out what your prior year baseline is. And this is a great thing for customers; it’s also important thing for suppliers, and you’ve got to really utilize the tools that are out there and the measuring and the measurements. And we really do look at what changes and why because there’s a lot of aspects that go into that.
– Wong: Great, well, thank you, Jill, for so much for translating what can be highly complex, convoluted information into really great insights for us. Before we turn it back over to for audience Q&A, we’d like to ask a “Dean’s Speaker Series” staple, which is: We are living in tense political, economic, environmental times, but also an era of accelerated growth, innovation, and scientific development. What keeps you up at night? What helps you keep going? And what are you most excited for?
– Evanko: Well, first of all, nice addition of eras in your question. That’s a Taylor Swift reference. Oh boy, that list could go on for a while, so I’ll try to keep it short, right? Yeah, in my chair there are a lot of things to think about and a lot of things to worry about. You’re never going to be able to address things that are outside of your control. So, what can we do ourselves to make the company resilient, to continue to be leaders in innovation? And that may mean taking risks, and you got to be calculated risks, right? But there are a lot of times that, as a company, we’ve made decisions to take a calculated risk that would’ve been viewed in the macroenvironment at that moment in time as too risky or as something that no one else wanted to do. It was out of favor because interest rates are too high or uncertainty around geopolitics, but yet, those types of decisions, again, you, they’re not willy-nilly, right? They’re calculated, but those types of decisions are super important to advantage your company because if you’re just doing it at the same time everyone else is, or you’re doing it six months or a year behind them, that you, you’re never going to be that industry-leading innovator. You’re never going to be the company that people call to say, “I want you to design my first of a kind.” And some of the first of a kinds that we get called on to design are really, really stupid, but they’re willing to pay, right? So, that’s, and that’s part of what goes into our thesis of the future. But ultimately, to me, the No. 1 worry that I, that keeps me awake at night is keeping as many people as I can employed and adding jobs. And that’s so important. So, it really goes to making good strategic decisions. It goes to making hard decisions. And it goes to also making sure that you have the right people—people that want to be part of the company and have the right attitude toward their roles and toward the company and want to grow and want to contribute. And that’s the best way that my team can help me keep as many people employed at Chart Industries.
– Wong: Great, thank you Jill.
– Mas: Thank you so much, Jill, for your remarks. I hope you all found that as inspiring as I did. And now I also want to give a shout-out to Joe Belling, the CTO of Chart, and Gerry Vinci, who is the Chief Human Resource Officer of Chart for being here. We’re going to open it up for questions. If you have a question you can just come line up at the mic. And I want to kick one off, which is kind of segueing from adding jobs. You know, we at Berkeley are also in a sense in the manufacturing business, we’re at the end of the supply chain for managerial talent and global leaders. And you know, our, I understand that Chart is, has open roles for people like our students. And I want to ask, you know, what is it that you kind of look for in new managers and MBAs and students?
– Evanko: Alright, I’ll answer, and then I’ll also call Gerry up since he’s the HR guy. But no, we really look for people that have this ability to grow and the desire to do so. So you guys are all super amazing and very talented. You wouldn’t be sitting here otherwise. That also creates the situation where you have natural, built-in competition. And so we know that if you’re talking to us, you have the table stakes that’s required. What we look for is, you know, what is that, what are those characteristics that we look for culturally in the business and the desire to grow and not necessarily have your exact career path set, but say, “Hey, I’m willing to take on challenges.” And, you know, situational awareness is another thing we look for very much so because ours is a company that you’ve got to work across the company, it’s not hierarchical. So, influencing skills and various different types of characteristics that we would call qualitative, but ultimately we have so many different paths and channels for folks like you that have great skills. You can choose to go into an engineering rotation program, that’s kind of a path where you rotate to different various engineering responsibilities over the course of years. Or you can go into a general, what we call executive leadership program. So you have high impact projects across the business. Or you can go into a standard role and we, what we like to do is also create opportunities. So, even if we don’t necessarily have a job that’s open at this moment in time, but you say, “Hey, I really am interested in Chart Industries. I really want to come give it a shot,” we’ll make a role for you. And we do that regularly. I mean, we have a couple folks on my senior team direct reports to me that we, these were people that worked for customers and said, “Hey, I’d love to work for Chart.” We didn’t necessarily have a job, but we saw that they were talented and we brought ’em in and created a role and they’ve really flourished. So, there’s also an element of if you have the desire to be here, we want you. Gerry, you want to add anything? Gerry says, “No,” he doesn’t want anything.
– Gerry Vinci: I would say people that do well at Chart, they want more, they’re flexible or adaptable and they want to take things on and we have programs that would, that support that, programs we specifically created for people that want to do more regardless of what phase of your career you’re in, whether you’re at the beginning or in the middle. If you want to do more, we will accommodate that. And we love that. So flexibility, adaptability is really important to Chart, I would say.
– Audience: First of all, thank you so much for being here with us today. I’m Ella, also first-year student, second-year student here in the MBA. And your last answer was about like what wakes you up at night and it’s related to keeping the jobs and I imagine it also has relationship with AI and all the technical jobs. I wanted just to hear more about your thoughts on how the AI is going to change the engineering field specifically.
– Evanko: Yeah, so the question being around AI and I can tell you that, you know, I’m a firm believer that you can’t replace people in their entirety. You certainly, there’s certain types of roles and certain types of data or information, but when you talk about the type of business that we operate in, the level of IP and patents and know-how that goes into what we design and what we do, A, we wouldn’t want it to be in the ether, you know? This is information that, in some cases, we’re the only company in the world that can do it. And how that came about over the history of our 160 years is people. Now, within reason, what we would say is there are going to be robotics improvements, and we need to continue to evolve in that respect. A lot of our robotics automation improvements are actually on the shop floor versus in the engineering side because of that unique capability that. that’s required for the type of engineering that we do. So, we’re always looking for more improvement, but I’m, I just don’t think we can replace the core knowledge, know-how, and future of innovation with a machine.
– Audience: Hi, I’m Puneet. I’m a first-year EWMBA. So, you spoke about data centers and how you’re using the air cooled in those areas. What I’ve also learned is data centers require a lot of energy, and two of the solutions that are being explored are nuclear plants. And then, the other is building data centers around oil and gas, I mean, around shale. So, can you enlighten us a little bit more about energy requirements and how are some of the, how are we going to fulfill those requirements?
– Evanko: Yeah, it’s a really solid point. I mean, when you talk, everybody’s talking about AI and data centers, right? As this becomes more energy intensive, the more, the larger you build, the more you build, and the more that the machine learns. So, it’s not, as you build the data center and its initial AI, as the machine learns more, energy intensity goes up. So, there is actually a correlation even further from today on what is needed. And these data centers that are being built are really large. One of the debates happening with the hyperscalers is where to put them. And so, historically, within reason, these were around water. So, you could have water-based cooling, you could have different types of technologies, but now you’re going into cooler temperatures. You have to think about the solution differently and also access to what’s fueling them themselves. So, we’re seeing more discussions around carbon capture associated with data centers. We’re seeing more discussions around locating them in terms of traditional oil and gas locations. But most of the ones that we have seen so far without, I was warned that all of this can be made public at any given point in time. What we’ve seen so far is actually more Pacific Northwest movement versus coming the opposite way down to the Gulf Coast, which would be the logical, to the oil field. And I think a portion of that too is speed, where traditionally the oil field is a little bit slower to move to various different solutions outside of what they’ve known for many years, but it’ll end up being a mixed bag. And there’s also a thesis that, at some point, this extreme build is going to end. So, there’s various different views of it, whether it’s 24 months or a little bit longer, other than that. But the data center customers that we speak to regularly and that we know are looking for the ability to be modular, so build on and in locations that have strong connectivity to the grid.
– Lucas Davis: Hi Lucas Davis, Haas faculty. So Haas Nobel Laureate Oliver Williamson wrote about the boundaries of the firm and the make or buy decision. And I’ve been hearing echoes of this all day today. You’ve actually touched on this several times, but some of the toughest decisions that any business has to make is which opportunities to pursue and which opportunities not to pursue. And I’d love to hear a little bit more about how Chart thinks about those decisions, and in particular, the opportunities maybe that you don’t pursue and why, why you don’t go some of ’em, down some of those roads. Thank you.
– Evanko: Yeah, that is at the heart and soul of our hour-by-hour living in our world is, “What do we do ourselves? What do we have someone else do? Or where do we spend our time?” A lot of where we are today comes from lessons learned. So, it comes from doing it wrong or making mistakes, and you know, and I’ll set aside, you guys all know, right? There’s IRRs and ROICs on investments and things like that, but really the heart and soul is, “Where do you think a market is going to go, and are you the rightful owner of whatever technology or innovation is?” And if I may take just a couple minutes to tell a couple stories. One, Joe, do you want to tell the liquid hydrogen pump story or do you want me to? He wants me to. So, classic case, right? I mean listen, the heart of our company is engineers, so I love them, right? But on the other hand, you have to sometimes corral that positive energy and that tweakyness because, you know, it’s like you have something, engineers love tweaking, and it’s been a challenge for us because these projects can go long, or we have standard products that no one in engineering wants to actually be standard, right? Because they want to make everything bespoke. This story, my daughter was 3 ½, so she’s 11 now, and Joe’s team, well his now-team came to me and said, “We need a liquid hydrogen pump. It has to pump at 1,000 bar PSI or higher, never to be heard of before, by the way. And we said we have to have it, and we need to do it.” “OK, how long is it going to take?” “We’ll have it done by Christmas.” That was like, mid year. Christmas comes around, and there’s a little toy pump on my desk, and it’s like not, you know, so I say, “Guys, you know, when?” “Valentine’s Day, Jill.” Then, it was Easter, and we went through the holidays for a year, and every Christmas, then my daughter would be, “Mama, where’s that pump thing, right? Like, where’s that pump you guys keep talking about?” And I let it go five years. We ended up not being able to build the damn thing, and we ended up selling the IP to somebody who was the more rightful owner. That was on me, right? There was a point there that I should have said, “These resources are better utilized to go do something we’re, that’s our expertise that we’re really good at.” So, we know now we’re not a pump company, we’re not going to be a pump company, we’re not going to bring pumps in house, we’re going to buy pumps. And that has worked really well. Where that comes to be a rub sometimes is when pump companies then get bought by other companies and there’s fewer pump companies. Then you go, “OK, well, my supply is now limited.” And so, you got to think then maybe a little bit differently about what that looks like. And so, then, we say, “OK, we still don’t want to be a pump manufacturer, but we need an exclusive arrangement with one of these suppliers or something like that.” So, that’s one example. And then another would be, we did a minority investment in what everybody convinced me was next generation microwave plasma reaction technology to create hydrogen. And with the offshoot, other piece being acetylene, acetylene being used in vitamin manufacturing and nutrition and so on. Has not returned anything to us, and nobody’s using it, and vitamins are still being made. So, you know, that was probably, again, maybe one step too far afield. So, we’ve gotten much tighter in that new product development stage gate—and then also the circle, right? So, you can’t have engineers just on their own, you can’t have ops on their own, you can’t have commercial people on their own, you can’t have finance people on their own. All of that ecosystem has to work together. And I’d say that’s where we are in our evolution, is making that more seamless.
– Jenny Vaughan: Hi, thanks so much. I’m Jenny Vaughan. I’m professional faculty here at Haas. I teach an undergrad and graduate course on managing business and human rights. I wanted to ask about how Chart Industries thinks about social sustainability in addition to environmental sustainability. How do you identify and then manage your impacts on people, whether those are employees or community members and yeah, and how do your customers think about that? Thank you.
– Evanko: It’s a super important part of our business, and you know, I don’t think any piece of E,S, or G is more important than the other, but people are at the heart of the company. And so, one of the things that’s very important to us is that we think of, and I’ll start with giving back to our communities. We call it our cool communities, cool being cryogenics, but we’re really, we operate in interesting locations, so we’re not in the middle of cities. We’re in fairly rural locations where there’s a lot of need in the community. And we think about that in terms of not only hiring, but also ensuring that our team members can give back to those communities. And that’s not just the financial support. It’s also, we give everybody an extra day off a year to volunteer at charity of their choice. And that’s something that we get a lot of traction from our team members, and they feel really good about that relationship that we build with the community, which in turn, it does benefit the company, right? So, these, it’s a give-and-take relationship in our communities. In terms of people within our organization, you know, we have multiple different policies and procedures toward how we think about different metrics and approach to safety as an example being our No. 1 priority. But we also talk about mental health as part of safety. And that’s something that is I think fairly unusual in what I’d call more traditional manufacturing environment. But it’s very important. Every seven days a week I send a daily spotlight out to our whole organization highlighting a team member or a group of our team members that have done something, something kind or something related to our key themes. Every Monday, we have Motivational Monday, which is put together by the teams around improving your health, making sure you’re, you have this balance with thinking about your mental health and taking the time you need with your families. So, those are just a few examples. There’s also very specific programs in certain regions, like we operate in South Africa, and there’s a very different programmatic approach to how we are an employer in what is not considered a more high-employer location for us. So, we are extra conscious of giving back to those communities, and in turn, that allows us to develop more jobs in those locations. I could go on and on this topic because I think it’s so important to the communities but also to the future of the company because you want people to want to work for a company that wants to do the right thing.
– Mas: Time for one more question, so go ahead, yeah.
– Audience: Thank you, Jill. I’m Gary. I’m a second-year student at the Public Policy School, and I did some of research for the LNGO hydrogen. I find that the logic for the U.S. and the Europe for the hydrogen development is a little bit different. For example, Europe, they will have a RED or renewable energy directive or a lot of regulations driven, but U.S., here is much more like the business-driven. So, I wonder for the corporate side to thinking about the, these two, Europe side and the U.S. business, and are there any different for the hydrogen development? Yeah, thank you.
– Evanko: Great, great question. Very different. So, and I would say a little bit of that is unfortunate, but I think over time it will become a little more integrated. And even within Europe, it’s very different within countries. And so, that’s something that has created some challenges in terms of getting traction because one country will move fast on hydrogen while another is still saying, “I’m going to build small-scale LNG.” And so, that interconnection point is still lacking. But certainly the EU is more directive in public policy on the hydrogen front. Yet, that has not gained private traction. And so, that’s the rub in Europe in particular. But also, there’s, there is a balance where in Europe, there’s a lack of discussion about the fact that there’s still heavy reliance on LNG and also on what that plan is to move from LNG or from sources of LNG to cleaner and greener. Europe faces, I would say, a different challenge technically on hydrogen. So, Europe has, to date ,been primarily gaseous hydrogen versus liquid, which is more in the United States. Gaseous hydrogen is cheaper technically, but also it’s more difficult to fuel heavy duty transport in longer distances that are comparable to diesel. And so, we’re looking for a sign or a signal that Europe is going to pick up on the liquid side. We’re starting to see little bits of that on heavy duty—but still early days. And I think there’s definitely waiting on directive socially in this topic. Whereas in the United States, it’s been a lot of liquid. There’s still gaseous applications. It’s been very regionalized. You guys are in a state where hydrogen has, it’s been a leader state for hydrogen. And that’s come as a result of credit systems and the thinking ahead of, “What do we want this to look like?” Now, we need kind of the rest of the United States so that you can go from here to New York City and be able to make it in a hydrogen heavy duty transport or whatever the vehicle is. But I think the United States is much more kind of driving that on the private sector. And where I think you’ll see some uptick is marine. And the marine is funny ’cause it was ammonia, ammonia, ammonia for the longest time. And now, we’re starting to see hydrogen become certainly a reasonable answer on the marine side. So, you’re a port here, port of Galveston and Houston, I think you’ll start to see some interconnection points on the marine side, but again, mostly liquid in the US, mostly gaseous in the EU to date.
– I wish we could go on but, unfortunately, we’re out of time. Jill, Joe, Gerry, thank you. It’s been invigorating. Appreciate your visit. I hope you enjoy your rest of your time at Berkeley. Thank you.
– Thank you, Alex. Thank you, Olivia and Ashley. Wonderful job.
The race to control the gen AI market has begun. Who will come out on top?
Generative AI is at an inflection point between consolidation and true competition, argues Associate Professor Abhishek Nagaraj.
While generative AI (gen AI) is spurring a quantum leap of innovation in fields from consumer marketing to protein discovery, a rapid consolidation is taking place behind the scenes. A few major players may soon gain tight control over the future of the field—unless policymakers act fast to promote more balance and competitiveness, argues Berkeley Haas Associate Professor Abhishek Nagaraj.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that the market will be dominated by a few key players,” says Nagaraj, who sounds a warning in a recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, Old Moats for New Models: Openness, Control, and Competition in Generative AI. “The big question is how concentrated are we talking about? Even turning the dial on that a little will be really beneficial.”
The stakes are high: A landscape controlled by a few AI overlords could lead to less transparency, innovation, and efficiency overall, stifling potentially more transformative versions of gen AI technology for the future. The traditional “moats” that protect startup technology, however, such as patent protections and secrecy around intellectual property, are unlikely to be effective in the gen AI landscape due to the massive edge that large companies already enjoy, Nagaraj says.
How firms gain advantage
In the paper, cowritten with MIT Sloan’s Pierre Azoulay and Harvard Business School’s Joshua Krieger, the authors draw upon the pioneering work of Haas professor David Teece, who examined innovation and competition for more than 40 years in industries such as computing, pharmaceuticals, and the internet. Teece makes the distinction between two different ways to gain advantage in a competitive environment: appropriability, the ability to guard against copying an innovation’s core technology; and complementary assets, or control over the ability to transform the innovative know-how into a value proposition that customers might pay for.
“If I come up with the idea for a drug, for example, I can protect that idea with a strong patent, even if you can already see the idea,” Nagaraj says. “But I can also protect it by controlling distribution, or the capacity to gain approval or convince doctors to prescribe it.”
With AI technology, the foundational model for gen AI is well-understood, essentially published in open-source articles, making it difficult to protect the core technology. And even if it weren’t, the rapid turnover among Silicon Valley firms makes secrecy impossible. “In California, noncompete clauses are illegal, so it’s quite common for firms to hire from rival companies,” Nagaraj says, “as well as a relative willingness to discuss, even informally, how these things work.” Therefore, pioneering AI firms cannot use pure intellectual property to protect from competition like their counterparts in the pharmaceutical industry.
Massive computing power needed
On the other hand, he and his co-authors argue, the complementary assets big gen AI firms already enjoy are impressive. Chief among them is the massive amount of computing infrastructure needed to run systems, what they call the “compute environment,” which requires Herculean levels of data crunching. Meta alone is acquiring hundreds of thousands of Nvidia’s state-of-the art H100 graphics cards at the cost of billions of dollars, leading to runs on supply (and driving up Nvidia’s share price). “The scale required is mind-boggling,” Nagaraj says.
In addition, big firms are scraping the internet for immense amounts of data on which to train their models at a level prohibitive for smaller companies. Large players are able to use the data to set their own performance benchmarks and ethical standards in a way that other companies have little choice but to follow, giving the big fish advantage in the way their AI systems are ranked. “These benchmarks are all super-subjective, and tied to the training data that firms use, so they are implicitly designed in a way that makes the market leaders look good,” Nagaraj says.
The role of open source
Ironically, the gen AI environment has so-far continued to remain competitive due to one of the big players themselves. Bucking the trend of its rivals, Meta released an open-source version of its gen AI model called LLaMA, which was accelerated through an accidental leak last year. In its wake, multiple knockoffs, including Berkeley’s Vicuna, Stanford’s Alpaca, and other “spawns of LLaMA” flooded the market, instantly creating a renaissance in the field, the authors argue. “There are so many ways people are experimenting with it that wouldn’t be possible with just OpenAI,” Nagaraj says. While promising, Meta hasn’t been completely open with its training data, and Nagaraj speculates it may go the way of Google with its Android cell phone technology, trying to exert control over the platform through other means, like Google does with Android.
A national AI infrastructure?
In the meantime, Nagaraj and his coauthors argue for a more hands-on role by policymakers to better control the complementary assets that give big companies an advantage—before it’s too late. One intriguing idea is a national AI infrastructure open for any company to use, similar to the way that a national highway system aids in interstate commerce. “It could really lower the bar to democratize the compute environment,” Nagaraj says. Even though the bill is controversial, California’s SB 1047 regulation includes a provision for a system called CalCompute which would be similar in spirit. Apart from that, regulators could standardize benchmarks for performance and safety in a way that creates greater transparency, setting more objective measures that could level the playing field and allow more innovative companies to showcase their abilities. “We can’t let a small number of companies decide what’s good or what’s safe,” Nagaraj says.
Even as they are implementing curbs, Nagaraj warns, policymakers must be careful not to overregulate in a way that could reduce competition. Placing limits on training data by requiring companies to reimburse content providers for use of their data would be great from the perspective of compensating content creators. But, from a competitive perspective, it could actually lend advantage to larger firms with deeper pockets to pay, unless a provision were in place to exempt firms under a certain size. Policy-makers must balance these competing effects.
In the end, the first-mover advantage for larger companies may be too great to overcome, leaving smaller startups to innovate on the margins of foundational models, Nagaraj says. After all, computers, cell phones, and cloud computing have all become dominated by just a few firms. On the other hand, the early internet offers an example of a much more democratic model, full of messiness and possibilities. The extent to which gen AI can follow suit can only increase its potential to be a truly transformative technology for the future.
Read the paper:
“Old Moats for New Models: Openness, Control, and Competition in Generative AI”
By Pierre Azoulay, MIT Sloan; Joshua Krieger, Harvard Business School; and Abhishek Nagaraj, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley
NBER Working Paper
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Special issue of California Management Review dives into the metaverse
The academic journal California Management Review has released a special issue on “the metaverse”—a term used broadly to describe the immersive virtual worlds being developed by technology companies.
Published at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business for 60 years, California Management Review provides evidence-based research “that inspires, informs, and empowers stewards of modern organizations.”
The summer 2024 special issue includes six articles:
To Be or Not to Be: Will Virtual Worlds and the Metaverse Gain Lasting Traction?
by Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein
Virtual worlds have experienced two major media hypes in their short lifetime. This article analyzes the reasons behind current caution expressed by companies and offers insights into the future trajectory of the metaverse.
The Diffusion of the Metaverse: How YouTube Influencers Shape Mass Adoption
by Fabian Tingelhoff, Sebastian Klug, and Edona Elshan
This article describes the opinions of users who influence the metaverse’s mass adoption, clarifying their perception of what already works well, holds high potential, and presents challenges.
Exploring the Metaverse from a Legacy Company Perspective: A Capabilities-Based View
by Mario Benassi and Riccardo Rialti
This article examines how and why legacy companies explore the metaverse—a process that is both purpose-driven and largely incremental.
The Metaverse Flywheel: Creating Value across Physical and Virtual Worlds
by Paavo Ritala, Mika Ruokonen, and Angelos Kostis
This study presents a metaverse flywheel model providing insights into how the emerging layered modular architecture of the metaverse can enable new types of value-creation opportunities for organizations.
Exploring the Potential of Virtual Immersive Workspaces: Benefits, Limitations, and Implications
by Mahdieh Darvish, Markus Bick, and Laura Keresztyen
This article examines the phenomenon of virtual immersive workspaces and their impacts on organizations.
Metaverse Management as Urban Planning: Lessons from Paradise (Nevada)
by David Clough and Andy WuThis article presents an analogy between the metaverse and the Las Vegas Strip in the unincorporated town of Paradise, NV, which arose in the mid-twentieth century as a focal destination for immersive entertainment.
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Learn more about California Management Review.
Why economic forecasts are so often wrong
Forecasts about inflation, growth, and unemployment by senior economists at big banks drive critical decisions by businesses, investors, and the Federal Reserve. The stakes are high, and sometimes those forecasts turn out to be overly rosy—or too pessimistic.
Perhaps a bigger pitfall, according to new Berkeley Haas research that examined the longest-running survey of professional forecasters, is that these predictions tend to be overly precise. Forecasters reported 53% confidence in the accuracy of their forecasts, but were correct only 23% of the time, the researchers found.
“This is an elite set of forecasters—well-informed, with lots of practice, and clear standards for performance,” says Professor Don Moore of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, who studies overconfidence and decision making. “We were interested in understanding the degree to which they were vulnerable—like the rest of us—to being too sure of themselves. The answer, unfortunately, is quite a bit.”
Co-written with former doctoral student Sandy Campbell, PhD 24—now a post-doc at UCLA—the study explores lesser-considered aspects of forecasting: over-certainty and over-precision.
To examine the phenomenon, Moore and Campbell examined the quarterly Survey of Professional Forecasters, conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia since 1968. Given to senior economists at big banks and corporations, it asks them to predict key economic indicators for the upcoming quarter. The data are used by organizations such as Federal Reserve in economic policies like decisions on interest rates. “It really matters whether they get this stuff right,” Moore says.
The survey asks the economists to rate the probability that an indicator will land in a certain “bucket”—for example, whether GDP will grow or fall by 1% to 2%, 2% to 3%, etc.—with the total probability adding up to 100%. Moore and Campbell analyzed 16,559 forecasts; comparing them to actual indicators, they found the forecasters got it right less than a quarter of the time. Yet on average, they were 53% sure that they picked the right answer.
The problem wasn’t over-optimism: In fact, there was no consistent direction in which the economists were wrong—some thought the economic indicators would be higher, while others thought they would be lower. The problem was that they were over-precise.
The researchers did find that the more experience a forecaster had, the more likely they were to get the right answer. But at the same time, experienced forecasters were also more over-precise in their certainty, which canceled out the increased accuracy of their forecasts.
“This tells me that all of us are fallible,” Moore says. “The Fed should really be considering monetary policies that allow for some wiggle room and hedging, given the uncertainty about what the future holds.”
The good news, Moore says, is that even if any particular prediction is over-precise on its own, forecasts tend to be more accurate in the aggregate. Since there isn’t a bias towards an overly rosy or dark future, the average of the predictions tends to fall in the correct range. Disagreement between forecasters improves the confidence calibration of the aggregate, Moore says.
The findings offer broader lessons for more accurate decision making. Whether we realize it or not, every decision we make requires a forecast or thinking about probable outcomes, says Moore, who is the Lorraine Tyson Mitchell Chair of Leadership and Communication.
“It’s common to talk about overconfidence as being overly optimistic—you think the future will be brighter than it is, or you think you are better than you are,” Moore explains. Yet being overly certain you have the right answer is just as big of a problem: fixating too closely on a specific outcome can create problems in how you allocate resources or take advantage of opportunities. “You can be both overly pessimistic and too certain of yourself.”
Most of us don’t have the benefit of consulting a wide survey of experts in making decisions in business or in our personal lives, however, so we might do well to call upon some humility when it comes to making predictions, Moore says:
- Ask yourself where you might be wrong.
- Think about the relative costs and benefits of erring on one side or another.
- Be open to criticism.
“Reflecting on your vulnerability to error will increase the probability that you are well-calibrated in the confidence of your judgment, and improve your chances of making a good decision,” he says.