Coffee Chats with Professors | CBS Edition featuring Bruce Kogut

Coffee Chats with Professors is a newsletter series focused on pulling back the curtain on the ivory tower and getting to know the people that make it up: professors. What did they think they would be when they grew up? How did they make it to such exclusive places? Is it lonely? Are there perks? What do they hope their work will accomplish?

About the author: I’m currently an MBA Candidate at Columbia Business School, and as a first-generation American, a first-generation college student (all the firsts!), I couldn’t help but wonder about the seemingly mysterious, yet omniscient lives professors live. Join me on my coffee chats as I speak with renowned, world-class professors and unravel their (extra)ordinary lives.

Featuring Bruce Kogut

Bruce Kogut is the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Professor of Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School. He is the author of The Small Worlds of Corporate Governance and Knowledge, Options, and Institutions. He is currently writing a book on Power and Governance in Revolutionary Times.

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You grew up in the San Fernando Valley in California. Describe to me what a typical day in your childhood was like. What did your parents do?

My parents were Brooklyn-born people - both first-generation American. My mom was the youngest of eight children and she was the one that got to go to college. She worked at Revlon and got an accounting degree from Hunter College. This was a big deal for her family.

My dad was also born into a working-class family. After the war he was accepted into an accelerated program at Columbia and after three years he started at NYU’s medical school. He later worked at Mount Sinai Hospital for an internship. Two years later, we moved to California where he worked at Kaiser Permanente.

The Valley was mostly farmland, a mostly lower-middle class and middle class area - lots of GI -scholarship families. A typical day was, you got up (it was always sunny), went to school, played a sport and occasionally soccer, a very exotic sport then. I went to a big industrial high school and it was economically diverse more than racially diverse. Vacations were spent around California, fishing, camping, and seeing the sights by driving somewhere.

What did you think you would be when you were growing up?

Like all boys of that generation I was thinking about sports. I read a lot and other than my parents I had no one in the family who went on to higher education at that time, so I didn't have any models. They wanted me to be a doctor, but I didn't want to be a doctor.

My mom wanted me to have a skill like economics or accounting - she pushed math. I would eventually get my PhD and to this day there's no other PhD in my family of 80 people.

As a kid, as a teenager, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. My siblings and I were all active in school politics and also engaged in political events that marked the time. By chance, I was chosen to be the representative of all Los Angeles city high schools to the board of education. I learned a lot about the wide diversity of opportunities across the public schools.

Did you consider yourself a leader?

My mom really wanted our family to succeed. She pushed education. She was very engaged in civic things. We would have big discussions at home during the Vietnam War and that affected me in terms of my eventual interest in political science.

You studied at fancy schools: Berkeley, Columbia, and MIT and have become a subject matter expert on corporate governance, leadership and social capital markets. Was it hard to land your first role as a professor? Or do you see everything as bringing you here?

[Chuckles] I really wanted to get out of the Valley. I wanted to see places. I hitchhiked around the U.S. when I was 17. I went to Berkeley and then I dropped out of Berkeley in my third year and went to Europe.

I left because I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I didn't have many experiences. I had only worked manual jobs in the summers. Eventually I graduated from Berkeley and thought maybe I’ll do political science, maybe law, journalism - this was post-Watergate. I tried multiple jobs, paralegal, community organizer, waiter, and paid my way back to Europe.

When I did come back I started at the Columbia School of International Affairs (SIA). This was the only public policy school that I remember to have applied to. I knew what I wanted at this point. At SIA I was exposed to economics. And it was also a bit of a culture shock - people had very different life experiences than I had, very international. One fellow student became the head of the CIA. Others went into banking, or their diplomatic corps, or lawyers or journalists. It was interesting.

I loved my experience. I worked at UNESCO in Paris and Geneva during the summer and felt ready to start a PhD. I knew I wanted to learn more with an emphasis on development, so I applied to business schools and picked Sloan which relied on the doctoral courses in the economic department for teaching economics. MIT had the best quantitative finance faculty at that time. It was hard. I learned a lot and it gave me the education I wanted and then I came to Wharton. I felt excited about being a professor.

I was young at that time but eventually I learned the ropes and things just got going from that point on.

You’ve also taught at fancy schools namely Penn, INSEAD, Columbia. Did you actively seek these roles or did they come to you?

Bit of both. I did a lot - got involved with policy and the World Bank. Met many influential leaders and had opportunities to do advisory work. I liked being at the business school. It combined research and impact.

You made yourself visible. Fast forward, you’ve been a professor for a very long time. Have you ever considered leaving? What would you be doing otherwise?

Consulting firms would often inquire, but I was cautious. It's harder to say no to most things as an employee, versus in academia you can say no and choose the topics that interest you. I like this. Academics provides flexibility.?My wife is also Swedish, and our family is bi-national, and we traveled a lot. We lived in Europe for 12 years. I liked this freedom.

You are a star professor. You meet and speak to dozens of world leaders every week and are in the process of writing your first single-authored book. Tell me a revolutionary concept that keeps you up at night and that you wish more people knew about.

It's centered around governance. I am passionate about this topic. It's intellectually stimulating and it does things. When you don’t have governance, bad things happen.

Is there a subtopic within governance that really gets you going?

Power. I do think power is critical. I don’t think it's given the careful analysis it deserves. Everything is viewed from the economic regime instead of governance. When I got here the areas of governance and other topics were reserved to the law and economics field.

In this field, it’s very much about the law because you ultimately focus on a specialized area of work.?Governance is broader, such as the different justifications for thinking about property. And it gives rise to questions like should the law, lawyers, only see shareholders as dominant because they are the people who have property? I don't think that property rights should be unquestioned. I think you have to give greater attention to the opportunities to teach governance as a behavioral design than as a compliance problem.

Rapid fire:

1. Who is your hero? Suzanne Berger, my teacher at MIT. She promoted thinking as an act of justification, and questioned common assumptions, such as “free” markets.? I did not meet Mandela, but I did work with the ANC after the fall of apartheid. Mandela was a remarkable leader of a revolution that is a model for change when change seems impossible. He is an easy choice as a hero, I would think, for many people.
2. What item is worth spending more money on? Education.
3. What time do you usually go to bed at night? 10:30pm - 11pm, week nights.
4. If a CEO asked for your advice, what would you say? “Do you really want to make a change?”
5. What is the coolest feature in your home? My wife Monika’s jewelry and interior design – besides her jewelry that she sells, she takes women’s vantage shirts and brassieres, makes them into forms, dips them in metal and turns them into gold-gilded sculptures.

Professor Kogut teaches Fundamentals of Governance and Business Strategies and Solving Social Problems and Advanced Strategy: Topics and Methods II for PhD candidates.