NACS Women’s Leadership Program at Yale

The NACS Master of Convenience designation acknowledges the hard work and investment NACS members have made in their personal leadership development. It is awarded to convenience retailers who have attended 3 or more of the 5 NACS Executive Education programs. For questions, contact Brandi Mauro, NACS Education Program Manager: bmauro@convenience.org or (703) 518-4223.

Professor Baron’s research interests include human resources; organizational design and behavior; social stratification and inequality; work, labor markets, and careers; economic sociology; and entrepreneurial companies. Before coming to SOM in 2006, he taught at Stanford's Graduate School of Business from 1982-2006. At Stanford, he taught the MBA core course, Human Resource Management. He was co-director of the Stanford Project on Emerging Companies (SPEC), a large-scale longitudinal study of the organizational design, human resource management practices, and financial and non-financial performance measures of entrepreneurial firms in Silicon Valley. Papers based on the project appeared in leading disciplinary journals, and an overview of the project in California Management Review won the 2003 Accenture Award for making “the most important contribution to improving the practice of management.”

He is the author, with Stanford economist David M. Kreps, of a textbook, Strategic Human Resources: Frameworks for General Managers (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.). Baron is also a regular contributor to leading sociology and organization journals, such as the American Sociological Review and Administrative Science Quarterly. His research has also been published in influential journals in economics and social psychology.

Heidi Brooks, Senior Lecturer in Organizational Behavior, teaches and advises on the subject of everyday leadership: the everyday micro-moments of impact that shape our lived experiences. Creating more courageous communities—especially within organizations—is a particular passion of hers. Dr. Brooks specializes in large-scale culture change projects focused on individual and collective leadership effectiveness in organizations. Interpersonal Dynamics, the MBA elective she has taught for 15 years, is one of the courses most in demand at Yale School of Management. Recently, Dr. Brooks pioneered the Everyday Leadership course at SOM, where she first taught the Principles of Everyday Leadership. She has also taught Emotional Intelligence, Power & Politics, Managing Teams and Groups, and Coaching Skills for Managers. Dr. Brooks received her doctorate in psychology from the University of California at Berkeley and a bachelor’s degree from Brown University. A life-long experiential learner, you can find her as a student in classrooms as far-ranging as improvisational theater and immersion language lessons.

Zoë Chance loves helping kind, smart people become more influential. She researches and teaches interpersonal influence here at Yale, publishes in academic journals and trade pubs like Harvard Business Review and Psychology Today, and speaks on influence around the world and on TV. Google uses Zoë’s behavioral economics framework as the basis for their global food policy, and Zoë has been named one of the top 50 management thinkers to watch. Prior to Yale, Zoë managed a 200-million-dollar segment of the Barbie brand at Mattel, and earned a doctorate from Harvard. Currently, she’s finishing up a book on influence to be published by Random House as one of their lead titles for next year.

Professor Kovács studies how socially structured information such as categories, awards, online reviews, and social networks shape audiences’ perceptions and evaluations in creative domains such as music, literature, dining, or technology. Focusing on audiences is important because in creative domains quality and relevance are often elusive, making social evaluations particularly important. Quality here is constructed in part through categorization and the interaction of heterogenous audience segments and networks. His research takes a sociological approach, in which actors, objects, organizations, and markets are located in a relational space, and heterogeneity, positioning, and networks are studied by exploring the locations and movements in this relational space.

Professor Kovács typically uses large-scale, “big data” approaches to study these questions, analyzing online reviews and social networks. His research appears in journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, American Sociological Review, Organization Science, Management Science, Nature Biotechnology, Psychological Science, Research Policy, Social Networks, and Strategic Management Journal.

Professor Kovács received his PhD from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. Prior to joining the Yale School of Management, he was an assistant professor at the University of Lugano, Switzerland.

Professor Taly Reich's research interests fall at the intersection of behavioral decision theory and social psychology. Within these general domains, a great deal of her work explores issues related to the value of unintentionality in consumer choice and the unorthodox choices that people make in the face of threats to their personal identity. In exploring these issues, she strives to answer both theoretical and practical questions, with a fundamental goal of advancing basic insight in consumer psychology and shedding light on strategic actions that can subsequently be generated. Taly Reich has published articles in leading journals such as Nature, Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the Journal of Consumer Research. Taly Reich holds a PhD in Marketing from Stanford Graduate School of Business and an M.Sc. in Industrial Psychology from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.

Emma Seppälä, Ph.D, is Science Director of Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education and author of The Happiness Track (HarperOne, 2016). She is Co-Director of the Yale College Emotional Intelligence Project at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, and Faculty Director of the Yale School of Management’s Women’s Leadership Program.

She regularly consults with and speaks at companies around the world on positive organizations, happiness at work and social connection. She has addressed companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Bain & Co, and Ernst & Young. She was an invited speaker at a United States Congressional Hearing and has also spoken at TedX Sacramento and TEDx Hayward.

She writes for Harvard Business Review, The Washington Post, TIME, QUARTZ, Business Insider, Stanford Medicine, Psychology Today, Fast Company, Forbes, Huffington Post, MindBodyGreen, Greater Good Science Center, Scientific American Mind and Spirituality & Health.

Her work and research have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, VOGUE, ELLE, CBSNews, Oprah Magazine, Fast Company, U.S. World and News Report, Forbes, Cosmopolitan, Inc, Huffington Post, ABC News, Business Insider, SELF, GLAMOUR, and the World Economic Forum.

She is a repeat guest on Good Morning America and has also been featured in ABC News, Fox News, Huffington Post Live and TIME/MONEY and is featured in the documentary film The Altruism Revolution and What You Do Matters.

Her research focuses on well-being, compassion, social connection, complementary and alternative practices, and trauma resilience. Her research on yoga-based breathing for military veterans returning from war in Iraq and Afghanistan was highlighted in the documentary Free the Mind.

She is the recipient of a number of research grants and service awards including the James W. Lyons Award from Stanford University for founding Stanford’s first academic class on the psychology of happiness and teaching well-being programs for Stanford students.

She graduated from Yale (BA), Columbia (MA), and Stanford (PhD). Originally from Paris, France, she is a native speaker of French, English, and German and conversant in Spanish and Mandarin Chinese.

David C. Tate is a licensed clinical psychologist and an Assistant Clinical Professor in Psychiatry at Yale University. His areas of practice in organizational consulting include coaching and leadership development, conflict resolution, team-building, succession planning and promoting healthy organizational development. In his clinical practice, he sees individuals, families and groups around issues concerning health, relationships, and dealing effectively with life transitions.

Dr. Tate is a co-author of Sink or Swim: How Lessons from the Titanic Can Save Your Family Business. He earned a certificate in family business advising from the Family Firm Institute, and serves as the facilitator for the National Association of Corporate Directors Connecticut Chapter’s Family Business Roundtable. He also is the co-founder of the Connecticut Consulting Psychology Group.

Dr. Tate received his B.S. at Cornell University and his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of Virginia. He completed pre- and post-doctoral fellowships at Yale University before joining the faculty.