Interview: Nadine de Gannes
The Ivey Business Review is a student publication conceived, designed and managed by Honors Business Administration students at the Ivey Business School.
IBR: You started early on as a 2257 lecturer, then you traveled internationally for both your Masters and PhD before you started as an early-career academic here at Ivey. We would love if you could tell us a bit more about this journey and what drove you to go into the world of academia.
Nadine: So, the pull for a role like the 2257 lecturership was a love for teaching. A career in academia came later, and it came serendipitously through my Masters in Accounting Organizations and Institutions at the London School of Economics (LSE).
The first paper I read in that Masters program, and one I’ve read multiple times since, was Ruth Hine’s 1998 paper In Communicating Reality, We Construct Reality (everybody that’s taken my MAC class knows this). I’d only known of accounting from a financial and managerial perspective and never understood it as a social and institutional practice. When it came time for my PhD in 2012, the topic of bankers’ bonuses and executive compensation in the wake of the global financial crisis entered the spotlight. I was fascinated by this sociological phenomenon. All this interest expanded to become a far richer historical study of the evolution of executive pay in business, along with the social, political, and economic intricacies that have come to form the way I look at businesses and our financial system.
That was the basis by which I came to academia: the idea that I could study something deeply and richly, over long periods of time, and it could then mean something for what I taught in the classroom and how I situated business in a social context for students.
IBR: As a very brief follow up to that, I’m curious to hear about your transition into the actual teaching: any key learnings that may have come out of the teaching itself, anything you may not have expected coming out of the PhD and any key learnings in general?
Nadine: I think having done an HBA, we have this idea that because we are drawing on business case studies, we have that lens into real-world practice. And while I appreciate that some of that is true, it’s incomplete. It is often a single company and it’s at one particular point in time when they’re facing a particular problem or opportunity. But we know that it’s not just one moment in one particular period of time, not one decision that’s disconnected from everything else. What my academic career has meant for my return to Ivey is how we can connect these case decision points to a very contextualized world where geopolitics or socio-historical factors are also brought to bear on the decision. It’s imperative to be connected to bigger concepts and theories, and then equally importantly, have them mean something for us. We have to experience the learning, the tensions, and the friction more viscerally, for them to leave a print on us.
IBR: So switching gears a little bit, a lot of Ivey students today are faced with an ever-growing variety of career opportunities, between consulting, finance, accounting, sustainability, marketing and many more emerging fields. What would be your advice at a high level to Ivey students who are not sure about their next steps?
Nadine: It’s a tough question, it’s a very good question. Sometimes the early decisions can feel a little functional, like they’re clashing against passions and ideas that students may have about their career. We might feel like everything’s moving so quickly and we’re up against time, perhaps because we’re so inundated with information. I think we all need help to slow things down and give that uncertainty some space. Uncertainty can be very productive, so we have to give it a more positive lens rather than a pejorative one.
To help with that, mentorship is incredibly important. I benefit from mentors at very different stages in their lives. Something that I’ve experienced from my own students is that there is conviction that comes with inexperience. I joke about you all being social justice warriors, but only to the extent that I’m deeply appreciative of that kind of conviction. Just as well, you’ll have those who have extraordinary lived experience--tracking ahead of you 2, 5, 10 and 15 years--who can say to you, “take a breath, sit in the discomfort in the uncertainty, and allow yourself to experiment,” because it’s these years of your lives that are extraordinary for just that. I’d like to believe that everyone can leave a trace on our lives, and some of those traces are quite big and some are small, but there is always that ability. The beauty of human connection is that we can always learn something from each other.
IBR: As HBA students, uncertainty also often brings with it a lot of anxiety, and I’m sure that’s something you may have experienced or seen amongst your friends and classmates when you were in the HBA program. So, curious to hear your thoughts on how you balanced embracing uncertainty with the anxiety that can sometimes arise in the HBA community.
Nadine: Reflecting on the younger version of myself, I cannot emphasize enough how essential a disciplined approach to life is for managing anxiety and uncertainty. I now find myself 10 years later saying the same thing that my father said: “live a life of moderation, eat well, exercise.” When I was in the last year of my PhD, I also had a 3-year-old son and a marriage that was ending. I quite openly share this extraordinarily challenging time in my life. It was the haziest part of my life that I probably ever lived. I leaned into what was to be core to me—the guiding principles by which I was going to see through this very difficult period. For me, that was grace and tenacity. The tenacity came because I knew I had to see through the PhD--my entire career hinged on it. Linking back to what I said earlier, not all parts of our lives are uncertain. Some things are actually quite clear, and there’s a whole lot of uncertainty that feels like it’s trying to infiltrate the few bastions of certainty that we have.
Often, the facade of feeling like we have it all together is our greatest enemy, that holds us back from sharing when extraordinary humans all around us have lived through these different kinds of challenges and have pearls of wisdom. And I’ve benefited from sharing what was happening for me and hearing back from others—and not having to take it all. The idea that you are making a decision with as much information as you can access seems a much better path than sitting down and closing yourself off from the excellent advice out there.
Uncertainty passes. The one thing you should know about uncertainty is that it does end.
IBR: That lends itself quite nicely to our next question--many students nowadays aim to address critical issues with the conviction and tenacity you’re talking about. They often struggle with both having gainful employment and accessing opportunities to tackle these issues. So, how would you reconcile this deep passion for critical issues with students’ finite resources?
Nadine: I feel this one strongly, and I feel for students in the early stages of their career where they have student debt and are facing expectations around what is seen to be a successful career path. You know, rocking up post-graduation and saying you’re going to be a climate activist is probably not what some parents were expecting to hear. There’s a practical and idealistic view on this topic, and an earlier version of me might have been more idealistic. It would be hypocritical of me to be idealistic now because I went through the credentialed, academic path, and that’s what some students will be doing in the career path they choose. When I walked into a room, I had my Ivey HBA and my Masters and PhD from the LSE as part of a suit of armour, if you will, in a world that values these credentials so much. The greatest risk for me was that I would never stop clamouring for that.
I had this beautiful conversation with my therapist years ago. I was going on about “what am I going to do next after my PhD?,” and he responded, “you can always clamour for the next rung on the ladder,” and he paused and said, “what is it all for?” All of a sudden I projected out 5, 10, and 25 years and realized that I would always be coming back to that same question.
I know that I am extremely fortunate that I’m in a profession that creates the space for all my passions, and so in some ways I’m poorly placed to really say how one should act when their work is in conflict with their convictions. Perhaps what I will say in the context of being in such a profession, is that it’s not that it fell in my lap, but I sought it out. Once I decided that I was going to weave together my teaching and my research and my service, I was very deliberate about how I did that. I was very deliberate about the conversations that I would pursue and the content that I would create and the teaching I would engage in, so that the sociological perspectives that now sit in my accounting class aren’t accidental.
Life truly isn’t that long. And we can spend our entire lives chasing something and finding ourselves deeply unfulfilled. There are enough books that capture that lesson that are available for us to read to remind ourselves of just that lesson.
IBR: That resonates quite deeply. How, then, do you then drive impact with that realization that we’re not here that long?
Nadine: I read somewhere along the way about the fact that we are living in the least risky time in history, and yet we act as if we are living in the riskiest of times. To think about all of the kinds of geopolitical crises, the climate crisis, yet at the same time, we are at the safest we have ever been in history. I think of that sort of in the same way as progress with gender issues—there is much more to do, absolutely. Our work lasts for a moment in time before being passed onto the next person. I won’t see the gender pay gap close in my lifetime. But I did benefit from the suffrage movement. So, we should be cognizant that we are all taking micro steps towards these goals. At the same time, we are in a pivotal moment in history. The adjustment and dignification of the labour market, for example, and social equality and income equality and all of those pieces as well.
IBR: I like the idea of also contextualizing amidst the bigger picture. As slightly arrogant undergrads, we want to solve all the world’s problems at once, when in reality, we are part of a very long lineage of academics, philosophers, and scientists. We’re not going to be the ones who fix everything, but we are going to do what we can, then pass on the baton.
We now know that the four pillars of Ivey’s new strategic plan are the future of work, global citizenship, competitiveness and innovation, and sustainability. At a high level, how do you see these issues shaping the HBA program going forward?
Nadine: What is critically important in any of the strategic pillars is pulling the threads of commonality between them and communicating that every member of our community should be able to relate to these issues, and can. For example, in the Canadian context, there are 600,000 people who are linked to oil and gas—what is the future of their work as we transition? The pillars are applicable to everybody, and we need to choose our language to reflect that.
So then, what does that mean for pedagogy and cases? This is where it gets really tricky. Even though the pillars are designed to be fully inclusive, we have to make choices given the limited number of sessions in any HBA course. And that is where engagement at every level is critical for the choices that we make in the classroom. What’s neat about the coming year is that we’re up for Western’s review of our program quality. In that process there will be focus groups, interviews, and conversations with faculty and students about what we believe the curriculum should be engaging. We appreciate that just as much as we have wonderful researchers that are doing extraordinary work, we also have students who are very close to a lot of the conversations that are happening. So, we cannot set the curriculum as faculty alone without engaging the students. We’ve started the process of mapping the HBA1 core curriculum so that we can identify where our strategy sits and where EDI fits in.
IBR: Zeroing in on one of those topics more specifically, sustainability has been seen as a fluffier concept among HBA1s--maybe a bit too broad, a bit too high level. How is Ivey looking to fold sustainability into programming, pedagogy, and the case method?
Nadine: This links a little back to our cases’ single-decision, single-protagonist nature, and how that protagonist can sometimes feel many iterations away from our reality. One of the really important parts of making sustainability tangible is making it personal. When we think of our climate goals and net zero commitments, here and in many countries around the world, there’s this inertia of “it’s too big,” “too unworldly.” It’s the government’s problem for some people, it’s the corporations’ problem for other people, it’s both of those two for another set of people. And then there are others who say: “me, I’m responsible for doing my part.”
So in terms of concrete steps to take in higher education: more needs to be experiential. We have to push the boundaries of the case method for it to be felt more viscerally. There is something to be said for gamification--there is enough research that indicates its power. We must try all the different vehicles by which we make something first resonant, and then accessible. That way, the choices of an individual feel like they matter, otherwise you just don’t get people on board.
Ryan: So, speaking of experiential learning, emerging ways to teach, gamification, what has your experience been with organizational resistance, whether it be with Ivey as an institution, the administration, or perhaps even with individual professors?
Nadine: I haven’t actually come up against too many roadblocks thus far, and part of the reason is we have momentum. Whereas we would’ve had resistance two or three years ago, what has happened to our society in the last few years has given us a window of opportunity. Do I need to go knocking on doors and telling people they’re de-colonizing the business school? Sure, I’ll have some colleagues who are up for a conversation like that, but a whole lot who are not. So I am very comfortable with a “meet people where they’re at” philosophy, because I don’t see it as an enduring or meaningful pathway to shame people into change.
The dominant discourse (for many good reasons) is situated heavily on gender and race, and those are just two parts of the dimension of the human. Well, that loses me a lot of ground if someone doesn’t feel like they have commonality with me, if they feel the conversation is entirely based on factors they don’t identify with.
When we put in our strategy, it’ll say somewhere that we want to be positive. Well, positive to me isn’t a comfortable conversation; positive is productive. And productivity can come from the uncomfortable. So we’re going to define these things differently. We cannot allow ourselves to sit down in echo chambers and not have the difficult dialogue. And so that’s really what’s coming for these next few years as we feel the politicization of EDI.
I worry about it in the way that I worried about affirmative action when I read about it and the ways that it’s been vilified and politicized and lost momentum in different ways. That’s possible with discourse around EDI, and we’re seeing that in the discourse on Critical Race Theory in America. Well, I don’t need to talk about Critical Race Theory to still talk about the essence of advancing equity or access. If that terminology has been entirely co-opted by other agendas, that doesn’t mean we need to lose the whole plot.
If we can make the conversation accessible; that in itself is a positive experience. And that’s what I’m focusing my energy on. We can have these conversations, and the ground is not going to open and swallow us.
