Tune in with Professor Anita McGahan as she speaks with leading thinkers to understand and reinvent corporate social responsibility in service of the public good. Presented by Pi Squared, a project of the Burnes Center for Social Change at Northeastern University, this series explores new ways for companies, NGOs, and even government itself to collaborate and drive meaningful change.
127: Luiz Mesquita. Do big things that embolden you to grow
Professor Luiz Mesquita has done it all as a businessperson and a scholar. He’s a Brazilian who has lived all around the world, including now in Arizona, where he teaches a course on awakening your entrepreneurial mindset. In this fascinating conversation, he describes the successive deepening over the phases of his career of understanding of what makes businesses contribute to their communities. His landing point is that the strength of our emotional and social connections is right at the center of what makes an organization great. And that’s true of multinationals, family firms, governmental agencies, and entrepreneurial organizations around the world. You build these relationships by doing big things, like traveling the world and starting businesses and trusting people. Luiz sees greatness in bringing passion to the work you do with your closest friends.
15 Oct 2026
126: Trevor Young-Hyman. Stakeholder governance is initially costly but has a big long-term payoff
Professor Trevor Young-Hyman is a sociologist and professor of business administration who studies democracy within and about hierarchies. He is deeply interested in how the sharing of power across a field of stakeholders can benefit organizations despite the short-term coordination and power-sharing consequences. What he finds in his empirical studies is that organizations overcome the costs over time by learning and adapting, and that residual costs are offset by the benefits of stakeholder investments in the firm. In the end, decentralizing is not so fragile. Your stakeholderslearn and interact in ways that support distributed decisions that are remarkably value-creating.
8 Oct 2026
125: Carol Kulik. Workplace excellence comes from deep understandings of how both the employee and the employer flourish together
Professor Carol Kulik is renowned for her scholarly research on workplace excellence. She talks with Anita about how she began her career in thinking about employee-center topics such as job design, employee experience, and motivation. As her interests turned toward understanding the structures that employees create, and how they benefit the employer as wellas the employee, she began to appreciate just how baked-in structural problems could become. Her massive body of workon DEI, the gender pay gap, and mature-age workers have led her to a range of insights on the silver linings that arise as stakeholders demand change. She is now thinking about how AI can be deployed by line managers to reshape jobs to make them even more meaningful for employees and efficient for employers. But getting this right is not assured. We need to focus intently to make this happen.
Who has been a guest on Private Innovation in the Public Interest
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Sharique Hasan
Christina Lubinski
Michael Bikard
Aseem Kaul
Lori Rosenkopf
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Apple Podcasts (US)
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YouTube
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Engagement
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