Wharton’s Zeke Hernandez hopes to bend the immigration debate toward a question rooted in his own research on capital investment and business formation: What do natives stand to gain?
Exequiel Hernandez doesn’t literally teach his MBA students how to tie their shoes, but he does like to suggest that they’ve been doing it all wrong. The Max and Bernice Garchik Family Presidential Associate Professor, who goes by Zeke, has been teaching in Wharton’s management department since 2013. He often begins class sessions by offering “nuggets of wisdom for our consideration,” as one student put it. These “Zekrets” tend to aim a little broader than Hernandez’s course readings in global strategy and managing emerging enterprises—more Tuesdays with Morrie than Harvard Business Review. And though most are drawn from the 43-year-old professor’s varied life experiences, he also deploys a three-minute TED Talk revealing that the trick to a lasting shoelace knot is looping the bow in the opposite direction from the way virtually everyone has been taught.
Hernandez uses the clip to get at a more important phenomenon. “There’s a whole lot of things in life that matter more than tying our shoes—but we approach them the same way we did when we learned to tie our shoes,” he says. “We kind of think we have them mastered, and we move on. And so we plateau in our performance.” That begs the question he then puts to his class: “Why do some people and some organizations seem to continue toward excellence—and why do others stagnate in mediocrity?”
Students may land on various answers. Hernandez has his own. “I suggest that the root of it is our pride,” he says, “which can blind us to the fact that we even need to know anything.”
“And the conclusion,” he adds, “is that humility is the antidote to pride. Because humility grounds us. Humility never leads us to believe we have nothing to learn.”
Hernandez allows that this is not the brand of insight that attracts most MBA candidates to Wharton. That’s why he starts with it. “The point of talking about that with business students,” he says, “is that in the business world we kind of look down on humility as being weak. And I don’t like that. I think that’s something that’s wrong with the culture of business. And so the idea is to encourage these MBA students to be a little more humble and to go about the world not thinking that they already know it all.”
In June, he came out with a new book that he hopes readers will approach in a similar fashion. It’s called The Truth About Immigration: Why Successful Societies Welcome Newcomers (St. Martin’s Press), and it aims to shake up a debate that’s been stuck in a rut.
