Featuring scholarly and practitioner insights from HR and people leaders, industry experts, and researchers.

In this podcast episode, Dr. Jonathan H. Westover talks with Derrick Mains about returning to the fundamentals of leadership. Derrick Mains is an Emmy Award-winning content creator, four-time author, operations podcaster with more than 160,000 monthly listeners, and optimization consultant renowned for his pioneering work in process engineering, design, and transformation. Mains work spans more than 20 years and 150 companies across nearly every industry, from early-stage companies on through the Fortune 10. Mains approach melds essentialism with a keen focus on human-centric system design, emphasizing the need for regular audits, reflection, and reinvestment to achieve optimization. Mains believes that all organizational systems share a fundamental purpose: transforming the input of resources into value, through outputs. He highlights how, without active management, systems degrade, leading to inefficiency and value and margin fade. His philosophy underscores the criticality of understanding the interconnectedness of systems and their natural progression towards entropy. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this HCI Webinar, I talk with Sheri Jacobs about her book, The Unexpected Power of Boundaries. Sheri Jacobs is a keynote speaker, and innovation strategist who helps organizations unlock their creative potential by rethinking boundaries, risks, and leadership. As the founder of Avenue M Group, she has partnered with over three hundred organizations and surveyed over half a million people to uncover what drives real transformation and growth.

In this HCI Webinar, I talk with Tom Ulbrich about the intersection between for-profit and non-profit organizations and leadership. Tom Ulbrich is an entrepreneur, educator, speaker, author, social sector CEO at Goodwill of Western New York, a member of the Forbes Non-Profit Council and Executive in Residence for Entrepreneurship at the University at Buffalo School of Management. He is an entrepreneurial leader with broad-based management experience in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors. His passion for social innovation is focused on nurturing strong relationships and building consensus across diverse groups of stakeholders in the academic, for-profit, non-profit and government sectors.

In this podcast episode, Dr. Jonathan H. Westover talks with Sheri Jacobs about her book, The Unexpected Power of Boundaries. Sheri Jacobs is a keynote speaker, and innovation strategist who helps organizations unlock their creative potential by rethinking boundaries, risks, and leadership. As the founder of Avenue M Group, she has partnered with over three hundred organizations and surveyed over half a million people to uncover what drives real transformation and growth. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this HCI Webinar, I talk with Kyle Harkema about his new book, Strategic Clarity. Dr. Kyle Harkema, DBA, MBA, is a distinguished scholar-practitioner with a wealth of experience at the intersection of academia and industry. With an academic foundation built on rigorous study and research, combined with extensive practical experience in the business world, Dr. Harkema epitomizes the modern scholar-practitioner—a professional who not only understands theoretical frameworks but also knows how to apply them in real-world contexts.

In this HCI Webinar, I talk with Derrick Mains about returning to the fundamentals of leadership. Derrick Mains is an Emmy Award-winning content creator, four-time author, operations podcaster with more than 160,000 monthly listeners, and optimization consultant renowned for his pioneering work in process engineering, design, and transformation. Mains work spans more than 20 years and 150 companies across nearly every industry, from early-stage companies on through the Fortune 10. Mains approach melds essentialism with a keen focus on human-centric system design, emphasizing the need for regular audits, reflection, and reinvestment to achieve optimization. Mains believes that all organizational systems share a fundamental purpose: transforming the input of resources into value, through outputs. He highlights how, without active management, systems degrade, leading to inefficiency and value and margin fade. His philosophy underscores the criticality of understanding the interconnectedness of systems and their natural progression towards entropy.

For over a century, economists believed that larger companies paid higher wages—a principle known as the employer size wage effect. The prevailing assumption was that working for a large employer guaranteed better pay, job security, and greater career opportunities. However, recent research from Germany disrupts this notion by demonstrating that within large multi-establishment firms (MEFs), the size of an individual workplace or branch has no bearing on employees' wages. Whether an employee works in a sprawling factory or a small local office, their pay remains largely the same, defying previous expectations. Highlights 🏢 Large companies no longer tie wages to the size of individual workplaces within the firm. 📊 Multi-establishment firms standardize pay across locations, overriding local market wage differences. 💼 Corporate headquarters’ centralized decisions shape employee wages rather than local economic conditions. 🌍 This wage standardization benefits workers in low-wage regions but can disadvantage those in high-cost cities. 🎯 Large firms now rely on brand, benefits, and culture—not just pay—to attract and retain employees. 🔄 Standardized pay fosters fairness and simplifies management but also creates new workforce dynamics. 🚀 The labor market is shifting from local competition toward strategic corporate control of wages and opportunities. Key Insights 📈 Uneven Impact on Regional Economic Development: The expansion of MEFs into smaller, low-wage regions elevates local wage floors and may spur economic development by raising employer standards. However, in established high-wage cities, where pay is already high and competition fierce, the influence of MEFs on wage benchmarks is muted. Thus, MEFs serve as an instrument of regional wage leveling with asymmetric geographic effects. 🤝 Future of Worker Mobility and Corporate Policy Influence: The standardization trend can alter labor flows. Workers in low-cost areas gain wage premiums, which could attract local talent, while those in expensive cities might migrate seeking better pay, further shifting demographic and economic patterns. Companies, meanwhile, must balance wage uniformity with localized needs via creative human resource strategies, signaling a more complex future for employment policy and worker-company relationships.

This research examines a phenomenon where wages remain uniform across different locations of a single large company, despite traditional economic theories suggesting that larger sites should pay more. While independent businesses usually offer higher salaries as they grow, multi-establishment firms tend to prioritize internal equity and standardized pay scales over local market fluctuations. To compensate for these rigid wages, large organizations utilize non-wage recruitment strategies, such as enhanced employer branding, increased recruiting intensity, and better benefits. This approach helps maintain organizational consistency and simplifies administration, even if it occasionally results in longer hiring timelines or minor trade-offs in workforce quality. Ultimately, the research highlights how corporate policy and internal fairness often override external labor market pressures in major enterprises.