Working Lunch with Olin webinar series
Working Lunch with Olin is a monthly webinar series from WashU Olin Business School delivering expert and actionable insight on timely business topics.
These webinars are designed for busy professionals and focus on practical guidance and real-world examples — across topics from leadership and strategy to workplace dynamics, technology, and team performance.
Led by Olin faculty and grounded in modern business challenges, the insightful conversations offer new thinking and clear takeaways, tools, and ideas you can use right away. Learn how organizations are changing, what effective leaders are doing differently, and how to apply proven ideas to your own career — without disrupting your day.
Olin faculty are recognized globally for their research and impact, ranking #5 worldwide in research productivity (Financial Times, 2024) and #11 in the U.S. for academic research (Financial Times, 2025). At Working Lunch with Olin, you’ll experience that expertise in a format built for today’s pace of work.
Upcoming Session
How to Tell If You Have a Winning Business Idea
2/20/26, presented by Professor Doug Villhard
Most great business ideas don’t start out looking like billion-dollar opportunities. In this session, Professor Doug Villhard—serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and Academic Director of Olin’s top-ranked entrepreneurship program—shares how experienced founders and investors evaluate ideas, identify real market signals, and decide what’s worth pursuing. Drawing on decades of startup and investing experience, Doug will offer practical frameworks for testing ideas, making progress when teams feel stuck, and using AI as a thinking partner in the early stages of innovation.
Prior Sessions
Designing Better Decisions: Behavioral Science and Real-World Impact
1/30/26, presented by Professor Elanor Williams
Why do smart strategies often fail at the point where decisions are made? In this webinar, Professor Elanor Williams at WashU Olin Business School showed how behavioral science can help leaders design choices that make better decisions easier – especially when turning goals into action. Focusing on the “last mile” of decision-making, the session explored how nudges and small design changes can influence behavior. Participants learned a clear, practical framework and real-world examples that can be immediately applied to improve decision-making for customers, teams, and organizations for the year ahead.
Working Across Generations: Practical Tools for Effective Collaboration
12/17/25, presented by Professor Gisele Marcus
Gisele Marcus, vice dean and professor at WashU Olin Business School, presented practical strategies for collaborating more effectively with colleagues across generations. She outlined approaches to navigating diverse communication styles, addressing generational misunderstandings, and leveraging the distinct strengths that each age group brings to the workplace.
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