Rembrand Koning is an assistant professor of business administration in the Strategy unit. His research examines how business ecosystems depend on the distribution of knowledge, technology, and people across firms. Central to his work is the use of field experiments and representative within-firm data to test how companies and entrepreneurs can best leverage diversity, digital tools, and social learning to increase growth and innovation. He teaches the Strategy course in the first-year MBA curriculum.
His work has been published in Organization Science and the American Sociological Review. Professor Koning earned his PhD in business at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he received a Kauffman Dissertation Fellowship. Prior to his graduate studies, he was a research coordinator at Columbia Business School. He graduated from the University of Chicago with bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and statistics.
Racial segregation between American workplaces is greater today than it was a generation ago. This increase has happened alongside the declines in within-establishment occupational segregation on which most prior research has focused. We examine more than 40 years of longitudinal data on the racial employment composition of every large private-sector workplace in the United States to calculate between-area, between-establishment, and within-establishment trends in racial employment segregation over time. We demonstrate that the return of racial establishment segregation owes little to within-establishment processes but rather stems from differences in the turnover rates of more- and less-homogeneous workplaces. Present research on employment segregation focuses intently on within-firm processes. By doing so, we may be overstating what progress has been made on employment integration and ignoring other avenues of intervention that may give greater leverage for further integrating firms.
Why do some entrepreneurs thrive while others fail? We explore whether the advice entrepreneurs receive about people management influences their firm's performance. We conducted a randomized field experiment in India with 100 high-growth technology firms whose founders received in-person advice from other entrepreneurs who varied in their managerial style. We find that entrepreneurs who received advice from peers with an active approach to managing people–instituting regular meetings, setting goals consistently, and providing frequent feedback to employees–grew 28% larger and were 10 percentage points less likely to fail than those who got advice from peers with a passive people-management approach two years after our intervention. Entrepreneurs with MBAs or accelerator experience did not respond to this intervention, suggesting that formal training can limit the spread of peer advice.
