The Rawhouser's

I am currently working on a PhD at the Strategic Management and Organization Department of the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. Below I’d like to attempt to paint a picture of who I am, and what my professional life means to me. I think that I will revise it (partly because I can always improve my own writing) over time.

The journey to this career path has been winding. I was born in a small town in Wyoming, and spent my early years in Sundance, WY. My Dad had been a teacher and school counselor and continued to own cattle at my grandma’s ranch near Four Corner’s. In 1978 (when I was 2), my parents bought a 42-unit motel. Shortly after this purchase, the local coal industry declined, severely reducing the number of customers who came in the winter. Our family continued to run the struggling motel for 12 years before we finally lost it, letting it go back to the original owner.  Despite the burden of having a failing business that left our family chronically without money, I had great memories of working every summer, starting by collecting glasses from the rooms in my little red wagon. I think that even though the business failed, it was here that my interest in small businesses was fostered.

We lived two years near Mt. Rushmore, where my parents had purchased a small nine-unit motel, and then moved to Las Vegas. My parents continued to have severe financial difficulties so we never had enough money, yet they focused on helping us to succeed in life.  Knowing that our parents were not able to help us financially helped my sister and I to excel in high school and later attend UNLV on scholarship. I was always good in math, so I enrolled in Engineering. In retrospect, I had no clue about any other major. At the time, I thought those who majored in business did so because they did not know what to study, or they just wanted to make money. I had the idea that I wanted to do something for society besides just make money.

After my first year of college, I served an LDS mission in Nicaragua. I thought I had known poverty in my own life, but quickly realized the difference between relative and absolute poverty. I came back emboldened to try to do something good for the world. I really liked engineering and did research with some professors. I thought about getting a PhD in engineering, but I wasn’t sure, so I decided on working for a few years. Then, in my senior design project, I decided I wanted to do something that would actually have some impact on the world, so I designed and then later built (with contacts of my former mission president, and some awesome friends who went with me through a difficult experience) a pair of houses for families who lost their homes in Hurricane Mitch.

It was at that point that I decided that I wanted to be involved with projects like that. From my engineering experience, I realized that the “owners” or “managers” decide what projects to do, so I decided I wanted to learn about business. Then after a few years working in bridge design and then land development, I had an epiphany while sitting in my condo. I realized that I could work and save (I’m pretty good at that because I don’t believe in buying things I don’t really need) for 30 years, and then I would be in a position to help others, just as I had seen others do. Yet I realized that I wanted to be personally involved in the helping, and that really helping others is really difficult. And working in engineering wouldn’t really get me closer to that goal.

So I decided to change careers. I applied to business school, thinking that I would work in international development. I attended my first year of Thunderbird near Geneva, Switzerland. I quickly realized that I would probably play a better role as an academic. My interest was not in studying poverty, but in how business might help reduce poverty and other social problems. My life experiences have led me to believe that studying entrepreneurship is a promising direction to achieve that goal.

My research and teaching has thus focused on entrepreneurship.  I have been particularly interested in social entrepreneurship, or the formation of organizations to address social problems. For my dissertation, I am focusing on how industry rules influence entrepreneurial entry into new industries. I study this question in the context of the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism.