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Waverly Deutsch

👤 Speaker
1050 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

Chief Change Officer
#123 From Curtain Calls to Business Cases: Waverly Deutsch’s Path from Theatre Historian to Chicago Booth Professor

And colleges were cutting theater programs. You had to maintain your acting program. That's what students came for. But you could shave down classes like theater history and allow the English department to teach Shakespeare. You could use the English department to cover some of the theater curriculum. There were no jobs.

Chief Change Officer
#123 From Curtain Calls to Business Cases: Waverly Deutsch’s Path from Theatre Historian to Chicago Booth Professor

And colleges were cutting theater programs. You had to maintain your acting program. That's what students came for. But you could shave down classes like theater history and allow the English department to teach Shakespeare. You could use the English department to cover some of the theater curriculum. There were no jobs.

Chief Change Officer
#123 From Curtain Calls to Business Cases: Waverly Deutsch’s Path from Theatre Historian to Chicago Booth Professor

Every job I was applying to was 200 to 400 applicants, many of whom had been tenure track faculty who had lost their jobs, right? And so they were applying for the few available jobs. At the same time, I was realizing that while I loved the teaching part and I had taught at Tufts University where I got my PhD. I had taught as a graduate student. I loved that part of my job.

Chief Change Officer
#123 From Curtain Calls to Business Cases: Waverly Deutsch’s Path from Theatre Historian to Chicago Booth Professor

Every job I was applying to was 200 to 400 applicants, many of whom had been tenure track faculty who had lost their jobs, right? And so they were applying for the few available jobs. At the same time, I was realizing that while I loved the teaching part and I had taught at Tufts University where I got my PhD. I had taught as a graduate student. I loved that part of my job.

Chief Change Officer
#123 From Curtain Calls to Business Cases: Waverly Deutsch’s Path from Theatre Historian to Chicago Booth Professor

I did not love the research requirements of the theater history discipline. In the humanities, you have to publish on things that nobody has ever written about before, and you end up getting very esoteric. My dissertation is on the career of a woman named Laura Key, who was a 19th century theater manager. She was the most successful woman to run a theater on Broadway in the 19th century.

Chief Change Officer
#123 From Curtain Calls to Business Cases: Waverly Deutsch’s Path from Theatre Historian to Chicago Booth Professor

I did not love the research requirements of the theater history discipline. In the humanities, you have to publish on things that nobody has ever written about before, and you end up getting very esoteric. My dissertation is on the career of a woman named Laura Key, who was a 19th century theater manager. She was the most successful woman to run a theater on Broadway in the 19th century.

Chief Change Officer
#123 From Curtain Calls to Business Cases: Waverly Deutsch’s Path from Theatre Historian to Chicago Booth Professor

She had her own troupe. It was, in fact, her trade that was played. Our American cousin in Ford's theater the night Lincoln was shot, she was the person who identified John Wilkes Booth, and no one has ever heard of her. And you get into these very esoteric topics. What does it mean to have been a woman theater manager in the 19th century?

Chief Change Officer
#123 From Curtain Calls to Business Cases: Waverly Deutsch’s Path from Theatre Historian to Chicago Booth Professor

She had her own troupe. It was, in fact, her trade that was played. Our American cousin in Ford's theater the night Lincoln was shot, she was the person who identified John Wilkes Booth, and no one has ever heard of her. And you get into these very esoteric topics. What does it mean to have been a woman theater manager in the 19th century?

Chief Change Officer
#123 From Curtain Calls to Business Cases: Waverly Deutsch’s Path from Theatre Historian to Chicago Booth Professor

And what happened to women theater managers as theater changed in the 19th century? And I started to realize these are not really impactful issues in... our day-to-day lives. I wanted something that was more current, more contemporary. But when I couldn't get a job as a junior faculty member in theater, I said, I am not going to stay in the world of academia.

Chief Change Officer
#123 From Curtain Calls to Business Cases: Waverly Deutsch’s Path from Theatre Historian to Chicago Booth Professor

And what happened to women theater managers as theater changed in the 19th century? And I started to realize these are not really impactful issues in... our day-to-day lives. I wanted something that was more current, more contemporary. But when I couldn't get a job as a junior faculty member in theater, I said, I am not going to stay in the world of academia.

Chief Change Officer
#123 From Curtain Calls to Business Cases: Waverly Deutsch’s Path from Theatre Historian to Chicago Booth Professor

I am going to return to the world of technology, which is much more I'm pressing more relevant now, again, beloved logic. I love the theater. I love teaching. And I don't love academia. I don't love a career as a humanities academic. I will go back to technology. Now, this is the early 90s. This is 1991, 1992. So technology is in a boom. It's in the very early stages of the Internet bubble.

Chief Change Officer
#123 From Curtain Calls to Business Cases: Waverly Deutsch’s Path from Theatre Historian to Chicago Booth Professor

I am going to return to the world of technology, which is much more I'm pressing more relevant now, again, beloved logic. I love the theater. I love teaching. And I don't love academia. I don't love a career as a humanities academic. I will go back to technology. Now, this is the early 90s. This is 1991, 1992. So technology is in a boom. It's in the very early stages of the Internet bubble.

Chief Change Officer
#123 From Curtain Calls to Business Cases: Waverly Deutsch’s Path from Theatre Historian to Chicago Booth Professor

In fact, it's a little bit pre-bubble. It's as the Internet is becoming part of our daily life, we're really using dial-up AOL or CompuServe. I'm having a conversation one night with a friend, and we're out to dinner with my partner and her husband, my friend's husband. We're having this conversation. And she turns to her husband. She said, she'd be perfect for Forrester Research.

Chief Change Officer
#123 From Curtain Calls to Business Cases: Waverly Deutsch’s Path from Theatre Historian to Chicago Booth Professor

In fact, it's a little bit pre-bubble. It's as the Internet is becoming part of our daily life, we're really using dial-up AOL or CompuServe. I'm having a conversation one night with a friend, and we're out to dinner with my partner and her husband, my friend's husband. We're having this conversation. And she turns to her husband. She said, she'd be perfect for Forrester Research.

Chief Change Officer
#123 From Curtain Calls to Business Cases: Waverly Deutsch’s Path from Theatre Historian to Chicago Booth Professor

And I said, I'll buy you. What's a Forrester Research? I had never been in the business world. I had never thought about careers in business. And it turns out he was an analyst for Forrester. They were a tiny little boutique market research company that looked at the impact of technology change on big business. Their tagline was helping companies thrive on technology change.

Chief Change Officer
#123 From Curtain Calls to Business Cases: Waverly Deutsch’s Path from Theatre Historian to Chicago Booth Professor

And I said, I'll buy you. What's a Forrester Research? I had never been in the business world. I had never thought about careers in business. And it turns out he was an analyst for Forrester. They were a tiny little boutique market research company that looked at the impact of technology change on big business. Their tagline was helping companies thrive on technology change.

Chief Change Officer
#123 From Curtain Calls to Business Cases: Waverly Deutsch’s Path from Theatre Historian to Chicago Booth Professor

So why was this an unbelievably opportunistic moment? I call it luck, karma, fate, the world, just throwing open a door when you need one. If there's one thing a PhD proves that you can do, it's research. That is the fundamental thing that you do, right, as a PhD student. And I had a technology background. I knew how computers worked. I knew how to talk that language.

Chief Change Officer
#123 From Curtain Calls to Business Cases: Waverly Deutsch’s Path from Theatre Historian to Chicago Booth Professor

So why was this an unbelievably opportunistic moment? I call it luck, karma, fate, the world, just throwing open a door when you need one. If there's one thing a PhD proves that you can do, it's research. That is the fundamental thing that you do, right, as a PhD student. And I had a technology background. I knew how computers worked. I knew how to talk that language.

Chief Change Officer
#123 From Curtain Calls to Business Cases: Waverly Deutsch’s Path from Theatre Historian to Chicago Booth Professor

I could very quickly learn the modern technologies. And I joined Forrester as the first research associate that they had. hired directly. The woman who preceded me had created the position. She had been an admin on the sales side. She created the position of research associate. I was the first person they hired into that job.

Chief Change Officer
#123 From Curtain Calls to Business Cases: Waverly Deutsch’s Path from Theatre Historian to Chicago Booth Professor

I could very quickly learn the modern technologies. And I joined Forrester as the first research associate that they had. hired directly. The woman who preceded me had created the position. She had been an admin on the sales side. She created the position of research associate. I was the first person they hired into that job.