The World’s Best Managers with Emily Oster

Emily Oster My parents were both economists, and one of their economist friends was married to a woman named Katherine Nelson. She studied child language. They were at a cocktail party, and my mother was explaining that I talked to myself in the crib all the time. So this was a little bit before two, and then Katherine said, well, do you think you'd be up for recording her? So my mom put a recorder under my bed, and, then, it became a series of which Katherine and a bunch of other people studied and used to think about basically patterns of child language development.

Michael Feigelson And what did you say?

Emily Oster I talk a lot about my brother and what we're gonna do. I was very into what are we gonna do tomorrow? What's gonna happen in the future? Reviewing my day, planning for the future. That's the central feature.

Michael Feigelson And do you still?

Emily Oster Yeah, yeah, it's interesting to sort of read that and be like, ah, I can kind of see, I can see vestiges of the way that I think about the world still.

Michael Feigelson Imagine that, just two years old, talking to herself in the crib, reviewing the day and planning for the future. The earliest available evidence that Emily Oster has always been running operations.

This podcast begins with a simple idea: when a baby is born, a parent is also born. And in that transition, just like their babies, parents' brains and bodies team up to help them learn and adapt at high velocity, developing a set of skills and perspectives valuable for their kids and for society as a whole.

This is Birth of a Parent. Today's guest is Emily Oster, economist, data expert, bestselling author, and one of the most influential voices in American parenting.

In our conversation, I ask Emily what she means when she says “she runs her family like a firm”, and whether she agrees with my thesis that parents just might be the best managers in the world.

Emily Oster I mean, my parents were economists, so I think it's worth saying, I had a lot of economics professors around, and I have always found the approach that economists take to the world to be a very compelling one. And I always loved data. My space inside economics is really data-oriented, and so I've always loved that piece of it.

Michael Feigelson Do you remember the specific moment where you realize, oh, I can use my economics training for parents?

Emily Oster Yeah, it was when I got pregnant, or maybe even a little bit before I got pregnant. It was not so much the economics training, but the data training. There was a moment in the space of, okay, we want to, you know, try to start a family that all of a sudden it was like, well, I, you know, I love data and I want the data on this too. And then the first book, Expecting Better, really came out of that, that experience.

Michael Feigelson Emily treated pregnancy and later parenting the way economists treat any complicated question. She went looking for the data. What she found was that for many long-standing pregnancy do's and don'ts, the evidence was thinner than the advice.

For example, when it came to coffee, expecting moms were warned, don't drink any, coffee increases risk of miscarriage. But what Emily found was that healthy pregnancies come with nausea, and women with nauseas were more likely to avoid coffee. After controlling for nausea, the negative effects of coffee shrank dramatically or disappeared altogether.

Her point wasn't to drink lots of coffee or to ignore medical advice, but that women were left to feel like they were making high stakes decisions at every turn when in reality, the evidence was much weaker than the rules suggested.

Emily's first two books helped millions of mothers navigate pregnancy and early childhood with a more analytical, judgment-free lens. But the idea that interests me the most for this show is the one she introduced in her third book.

Michael Feigelson Is there kind of a moment where you realize I'm running my family like a firm?

Emily Oster Not exactly, you know, my husband is also an economist. And so I think when I wrote The Family Firm, which is the third book, which is about kind of organizing your family, so much of what's in that book is just like, this is how we're doing it. And I don't think it ever occurred to either my husband or I that like there was some other way to do it.

Michael Feigelson Here I was searching for the epiphany that led Emily to this counterintuitive take on the business of parenting, but this economist couple couldn't even grasp that there was another way.

In fact, the real surprise came when Emily discovered that most parents were not thinking about family decisions in terms of incentives, trade-offs, and long-term strategy. For her, this was the epiphany.

That gap between how economists think and how families actually operate became the starting point for her book.

Emily Oster The Family Firm is really a book about how to run your family. I would say the overarching idea is that we should be deliberate in our planning for our family, and that will save us conflict later. So when I talk about organizing your family like a firm, it's taking some of the tools, some of ideas of sort of how we make good decisions in businesses and putting them into our family, whether those are conceptual ideas like. We should think carefully about decisions and structure our decision-making, or whether they are practical things like you should send emails after meetings to make sure that everybody understands what happened at the meeting.

Michael Feigelson But you sort of assume that people are already good at this in business and so they can do it at home.

Emily Oster That point has been made before, that some businesses would benefit from doing a better job on this. Yeah, but I mean, I think where this comes from is the idea of like, this is what business school would tell you to do. When there's a meeting, you follow up with an email, like, this is how businesses should structure things. Whether that's how businesses actually work, maybe not. But it's to take what is the ideal of structuring your business and take that into your house.

Michael Feigelson At this point, I started to wonder why this was Emily's third book. While my memories of the first couple years are indeed a bit hazy, I'm pretty sure some structured decision making would have been helpful. Why did Emily wait until her kids were older to treat her family like a firm?

Michael Feigelson You talk about how like the first period was about survival and then the decisions were less complex and then you get to this period where they're more complex and maybe you've already survived. But don't you think that the sort of family firm analogy works for the first five years?

Emily Oster I actually think so much of the value in structuring your life in this way comes at the beginning. And so I actually think there's a bunch of lessons from that book that are probably relevant, you know, not so much the data stuff in there, which is more about kindergarten and so on, but the pieces about decision making, I think I could have incorporated in the earlier books.

Michael Feigelson Why do you think you came to it later? Like, why was this not the insight that struck you over the head at the beginning?

Emily Oster I think part of it is it took us some time to get there, like even as people who were sort of coming in pretty structured and aligned with this idea, having a kid is so overwhelming at the beginning that I don't think we did the kind of pre-work that maybe I would tell other people to do to kind of structure life like this in the beginning, and it was over time that we had kind of developed more of these tools.

Michael Feigelson Even the economist who's been running operations since back in her crib days didn't start with a system. Like most new parents, Emily and her husband began in survival mode. The structure came later. And the reason they built it wasn't to guarantee the right decisions, because in parenting, that's impossible. Whether about coffee, childcare, breastfeeding, school or bath time, the real goal was to make decisions in the right way.

Emily Oster Yeah, so in many of our decisions in parenting, our families, anything, we cannot be sure we made the right decision, we're never going to be sure. Our goal should be to come out of the decision feeling like we made it in the right way. And so many of the tools I talk about in the book are really intended to get people to feel like I made this decision thoughtfully, like I sat down, I thought about what my choices were, I collected the information I needed, I made the decision. I made a plan to follow up on the decision, like I did the steps of the decision, so I can come out of it feeling like I made this decision in the right way. The reason that's so useful is that then when people come and they say, you know, why'd you make that decision? Like, you're much more confident to be like, well, I thought about it. And it was the right decision for my family. And I think it protects us a little bit against the feeling of kind of ex post failure because of course not every decision that you make will be right and that's just part of being a person.

Michael Feigelson Does it offer, in your opinion, relief from guilt?

Emily Oster Guilt is a core part of being a parent. I think it offers the potential for a little bit less regret, in kind of two ways. So one is the ability to say look I made the best choice with the information I had at the time and you know that maybe that wasn't the right choice in the end but there was nothing I could have done differently before this. Which doesn't save you from feeling bad if it wasn't the right choice, but it does sort of save you from saying, I made a mistake. Which is a different thing from saying I wish that things had turned out differently. And those are subtly different, but I think can be quite different in your brain. The other thing that I sort of try to offer to people in the book is a combination of sort of pushing to make a decision and to not sit on decisions forever, and structured opportunities to rethink them. I really try to be explicit with people that when you make a decision to do something or not do something, you should plan a time that you can follow up on that decision and that there should be an opportunity to say, hey, we made this decision the best way we could with the information we have the time, but we plan to revisit it and then it turned out more information came in and now we want to do somebody different and that's okay. That's part of the process, not a mistake, and it can protect us from a little bit of cognitive dissonance.

Michael Feigelson So other than a little bit of relief from regret, how would you characterize the way taking this approach changes the emotional experience of becoming a parent?

Emily Oster I think the biggest thing is to try to avoid conflict with your partner. So I think so much of what's tough in parenting, particularly if you're parenting with another person, is you are going to have things you don't agree about, things that are differentially important to one or both of you, and we tend to fight about those things in the moment that they come up. So in the minute when you've made a different decision than I would have made, that is the moment that we're arguing. And in a lot of these cases, people have the same argument over and over and over again and it's a kind of simmering underlying constant hot state conflict.

Michael Feigelson Never happened to me. Never happened. No, no.

Emily Oster My feeling is if you pulled some of that conflict on purpose to a cold state, it's not that you wouldn't have the conflict, like you're not avoiding disagreeing about whether baths are important, but there's an opportunity to be like, “hey, I think baths are important. Like right now we're not fighting about whether the kid's in the bath. We're sitting somewhere, we're having a discussion, I’m telling you, I think baths are important and here's why, like people don't take baths, they smell, you know. Here's some other reasons.” And then your partner can be like, “I don't think it's a big deal for kids to take baths.” And you can sort of like talk that out and decide what's gonna be the policy. It is not, again, it’s so hard for people because pulling forward, like purposely disagreeing is something we do not wanna do with anyone, especially not the people that we love. But by sort of purposely disagreeing about some of these things ex-ante, then you're in a better position to not fight about them in the moment.

Michael Feigelson If you've ever argued about bedtime or vegetables or why one piece of candy really is more than enough, well, then you know this moment. In most families, the argument happens live, right there in the kitchen or the bathroom or the car. One parent makes a call, the other parent objects, and suddenly you're litigating your parenting philosophy while holding a wet toddler.

Emily's advice is basically this, don't fight about the decision while making it. Schedule the disagreement and have it earlier, have it calmly, and have when no one is naked and slippery. In economist terms, she calls this moving conflict from a ‘hot state’ to a ‘cold state’. In normal human terms, it means running your household a little more like a business. Which brings us to the idea I'm really eager to test with Emily.

Michael Feigelson Would it be fair to sort of consider those first three or four years like business school and then you could start teaching?

Emily Oster It’s like business school, maybe. Yeah, maybe business school. It's a special kind of business school

Michael Feigelson So we like this idea of parenthood as training and decision-making. And I wanted to ask you what you think is cognitively different about early parenthood than other domains of life where things are complex in terms of decision-making.

Emily Oster So I think there's a couple of things that are quite different about early parenthood. So one is that you care more about it than most other things, and so the stakes feel very high. Stakes are often high, but they feel maybe higher than many other cases. I think the second thing is that there's much more uncertainty. It's much different. The decisions are much more different than almost anything else you do, and you're I'm very tired.

Michael Feigelson What about the speed, the speed of decision making?

Emily Oster Yeah, the speed, the frequency with which decisions come in, I think is unexpected. Yeah, so maybe speed, uncertainty, newness, exhaustion.

Michael Feigelson What about efficiency? Like you hear a lot of people say, I became much more efficient at my job afterwards. Is this something you think is a reasonable hypothesis?

Emily Oster Definitely.

Michael Feigelson For you? Cause you seem like you're pretty efficient going in.

Emily Oster I have gotten far more efficient. I mean, partly I think I cut a lot of other things I was doing, like I just don't do less stuff now. Now I do more stuff because my kids are older, but when they were little, it was sort of like, okay, you like narrow down to the stuff you just need to do. But yeah, I think people get more efficient in multitasking. I think it's efficiency and it's multitasking, people are far more effective multitaskers. And I think women in particular sort of get much better at like tasks, sort of fast task switching as a result of parenting. And that would be an interesting thing to study because I think you could study that much more directly.

Michael Feigelson Remember Susana Carmona from our episode on the maternal brain? Well, her colleague, Elselina Hoeksema from the University of Amsterdam recently published a paper about how a second pregnancy changes the brain even further. One of the differences in the second pregnancy was that there were more changes to the neural networks responsible for directing attention and responding to stimuli.

When I asked Elselena for her interpretation, she said that this could be a way of helping the mother manage the demands of multiple kids. In other words, the brain was getting better at monitoring and responding to the needs of multiple people with different needs all at the same time. Whether these changes can be used for something or someone else when the kids get older and don't need as much help, that's a great question for any neuroscientist out there listening.

Emily Oster Yeah, I think the biggest piece of that is parents becoming really, really good at kind of like multitasking, you know, schedule planning that sort of like fit all of the different sports practices on top of each other at the end of the day is like a very, very high level organizational problem.

Michael Feigelson What are other examples of organizational skills or management skills that one's forced to develop?

Emily Oster Yeah, so I think the the organizational skills like sort of early on, there's a ton of supply chain logistics, you know, I'm gonna send my kid to daycare, they need this amount of diapers, they needed this amount of milk, you know, we need to like optimize in the following ways. So there's like a core supply chain problem. I think there's just like a schedule problem that gets more extreme as kids get older sometimes. And then there's a personnel management problem. I'm surprised at how frequently in a faculty meeting, I will think, I'm going to use a tool that I develop with my children to manage this situation. Managing kids and kind of helping them develop into better people and just figuring out how to manage conflict is actually not so dissimilar in parenting as it is in your life with other adults.

Michael Feigelson So, according to Emily, parenting turns you into an expert in time management, supply chain logistics, and human resources. And it's this last job, head of HR, where we often experience the most growth.

Emily Oster So I think one thing I have really taken from parenting to the world is the understanding that people really like to be listened to, even if nothing happens out of it. Something you develop as a parent is the idea that particularly with an older kid, like sometimes they just want to have an understanding conversation, not a problem solving conversation. So sometimes your kid comes and they're just like, they want to just download, like here's all the stuff that happened and your job is just to be like. Okay, like I hear you and that sounds really hard. Like I'm sorry, you know, that kind of conversation is really, really valuable with a kid. It's also really valuable in your job because often people just wanna be heard. They just wanna say, they wanna sit the faculty meeting and they wanna say “here are all the things I think, here's all the ways in which I feel wronged, here's the way in which feel disrespected,” and they just want people to listen and the best thing is just listen and be like, okay, thank you so much for sharing that.

Michael Feigelson So, pre-Emily as a mom, was it harder to sort of notice when that was what was required?

Emily Oster Yes. I have gotten much better at the distinction between the understanding conversation and the problem solving conversation in my house with my partner, like sort of starting with my kids, moving to my partner and then moving to my job. Like that distinction, I think we could use all the time. And I did not think about it much until I had kids.

Michael Feigelson Of course, as director of HR, listening is a critical skill. But sometimes we also need to say what we think to set some boundaries.

Michael Feigelson How about negotiation? What do babies teach us about negotiation?

Emily Oster I mean. That you're always going to lose. It's like 100% of the time you will lose. I am not a great negotiator with my children or in general. I think you do develop some skills of looking at the implications of one negotiation for another. With our kids there's often a point at which you say basically I'm going to draw a boundary here and that's going to be really costly in this moment but is gonna buy me something later. It's always easier to give in in the moment and then you give in and you give in and give in. And the point of negotiation is sometimes you have to hold the line, so then when you've like maintained a reputation for being that asshole and that that's useful.

Michael Feigelson This reminded me of a seminal text from the Harvard negotiation project, Getting to Yes, Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In. This text, used to help negotiate peace agreements and nuclear treaties, makes a similar point to Emily.

Negotiation inside of a long-term relationship is a repeated game. And in a repeated gain, we need to think about our future position, not just the negotiation at hand. Negotiation with a toddler is definitely a repeated game. Many times, every day, and every time they will take it to the brink.

Michael Feigelson Yeah, so I'm gonna keep going with this sort of early parenthood as business school analogy for a sec. And in this analogy, as one does, they're executive coaches, and in this case, they're babies. In your life, if your kids were executive coaches when they were babies and toddlers and they were training you, like, what did they teach you to do?

Emily Oster Oh my goodness. I think you have less control than you think you do. Like the most important message, this thing that was most different from what I expected is just that this is not really something that you have that much control over. And that starts like day one. You know, we had, I mean, husband and I, we love data. We had this like spreadsheet with like when the baby's pooping and like how much they're nursing from each side. It was sort of this idea that like, We're gonna get this on lockdown, you know, like there's going to be a graph, there's gonna be it's like, but you know totally unpredictable. It's a baby, it's completely unpredictable. You definitely don't have any control. It doesn't matter. This is not something you can, you can like data your way out of. And that is a continual feature of parenting is the feeling of you could do everything the same. You could do everything quote unquote right, you could, but ultimately a lot of what's happening with your kids is going to be in their control and the control of their peers and things that you really cannot control. And that's a very hard, that's a very hard lesson.

Michael Feigelson So you're sort of recognizing and being comfortable with the limits. Yeah.

Emily Oster Yeah, limits of your control.

Michael Feigelson Is that something you think you can bring into the work environment?

Emily Oster Totally. I think it is a hard lesson at work, too. But it is true that there are a lot of things that are out of your control.

Michael Feigelson Emily argues that one of the deepest lessons of parenthood is learning how little control you actually have, which, as it happened, turned out to be the theme of the next phone call with my mom.

Michael Feigelson Hello?
Mom Hi, hi, Mike. Hi.
Michael Feigelson Hi, where are you?
Mom I'm on my way to the body shop. I had a fender bender. I hit a mailbox.
Michael Feigelson What did the mailbox do to you?
Mom There was a guy who did a U-turn across the road in front of me with no warning. I had to swerve. Beatrice was in the car with me.
Michael Feigelson Yeah, is she okay?
Mom Yeah, yeah, she's fine. She said I was brilliant. She doesn't stop telling me how brilliant I was.
Michael Feigelson Why were you brilliant?
Mom Well, my reflexes are sharp.
Michael Feigelson Okay, glad everyone's okay. Time for a quick question?
Mom Shoot.
Michael Feigelson Okay, so I'm talking to an economist who says parents, mostly moms, are the best managers in the world.
Mom Well, you know, it is a big job. There's lots of scheduling involved, etc, etc.
Michael Feigelson And how about negotiation? What did motherhood teach you about negotiation?
Mom I learned to let you think that you won.
Michael Feigelson To let me think I won?
Mom Yeah.
Michael Feigelson You learned that from motherhood?
Mom No, I knew it before, I just got better at it.
Michael Feigelson So where did you learn it from initially?
Mom In my marriage with my husband, it was basic training for women of my generation to let the men think they want.

Michael Feigelson My mom was joking, mostly anyway, but the joke does point to something real. Parents spend years developing skills that companies pay consultants to teach. We just don't tend to recognize them when they're learned at home.

Michael Feigelson So we talked about a bunch of different skills that one would develop in this process and you agree with the premise that this stuff is transferable on some level. So we pay consultants a lot of money for all these things and when we look at a CV or a person who's had this training, it's not thought of in this way. So why do you think that is?

Emily Oster I mean, the patriarchy, I guess, you know, I think these skills get developed much more strongly in moms than dads just because of like, who tends to be the default parent, at least in the US. And I'm not sure that businesses really absorb how transferable those skills might be. I mean some people do. I think that like, my view is like, there's an opportunity there, like I hire a lot of moms. I think that that generates people who really know how to structure stuff, but I'm not sure that everybody out in the world sees it quite that way.

Michael Feigelson In other words, Emily Oster has taken one look at the labor market and decided the most underrated management training program in America is motherhood. This points to a blind spot. We have developed large bodies of scientific research that help us to understand and track every developmental leap a child takes in their first five years. But hardly anyone studies what all this is developing in the parent.

Michael Feigelson Why so much obsession with the baby's development and so little with the parent's development?

Emily Oster This, to me, reflects so much of what it is, like the experience that people have as new parents, but particularly new moms, is this idea of like, before you have the baby, we're very focused on you because you're holding the baby gestationally. And then afterwards, it's kind of like everything is about optimizing for the baby. Everything is about like, you know, any amount of suffering for the parent would be worth it if there were even a suggestion that it might be good for your kid. And so if it's not something that we can know would directly benefit the baby, then we don't care about it. We don't care about it at all, and I think that's a big feature of this.

Michael Feigelson This is sort of the second or third time where you make the point like, especially moms. So are you saying that us dads were not as good managers?

Emily Oster No, dad's a great manager. I think what is true in the empirical data is that the logistics of the household more frequently fall on mom. And I don't think that's great. And I think it actually generates some real problematic conflict, because if one person is sort of doing all the planning and all of the decision making then you can get into these situations where like the other parent is like, well, I don't agree with that. And it's like, okay, but you're not doing any, you're like, you're doing it. And I think ultimately we're gonna be better as a family unit if we have both shared the work but also shared the kind of planning ex ante.

Michael Feigelson So no, Emily is not saying fathers are worse managers. She's pointing to the fact that management is a skill that comes from practice and that empirically speaking, moms get a lot more practice.

She's also pointing out that in many families, one person ends up running operations while the other still gets to weigh in on strategy. And this unsurprisingly causes a lot of conflict because the real burden isn't just doing more. It's holding the system in your head, the schedules, the decisions, the follow-ups, all the small invisible choices that keep a family from falling apart.

Holding this is itself a very intense form of training and it's exhausting. So I ask Emily, how can we best nourish the parental mind?

Emily Oster I'm going to go back to my favorite thing, which is sleep. I actually think that there's like one of the things that happens is that people when they are parenting, start thinking about sleep as like, like a nice to have, like a pedicure, you know, and stop sort of thinking about it like a biological necessity. And it's so much of what we see in depression and sort of overwhelm, is reflective of just like if you are not adequately rested, it is very, very difficult to make good decisions and it affects our working memory and our cognitive functioning in a pretty explicit way. So I think a lot about the different things we could be doing to help parents sleep more.

Michael Feigelson Think about what parents do every day. They run supply chains. They manage people. They negotiate constantly. They make high-stakes decisions with incomplete information, all while sleep deprived.

Sounds a little bit like a startup, except in this startup, the founder, AKA the baby, is changing so fast that every day brings with it a new set of unfamiliar decisions. Plus, in this startup, the founder wakes up at 3 a.m. and demands yogurt.

If it wasn't called parenting, we would probably be celebrating it on LinkedIn or listing it on our c.v. as an advanced degree. But since it is called parenting we do it for free and we call it Tuesday.

Maybe instead we should call parents, more often moms if we're being honest, what they are. The best managers in the world.

Parenthood doesn't just change how we make decisions, it changes what we notice too. Next time on Birth of a Parent, Nadina Galle on why becoming a parent can make streets, trees, sidewalks, and tiny patches of nature matter in entirely new ways.

Nadina Galle There's hundreds of other studies that show the impact between the urban forest, urban green spaces, and public health, but this is the only one that we have where we can say, when trees die, people die.

Michael Feigelson If you'd like to support this series, the best way is simply to follow Birth of a Parent on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. It really helps more people discover the show. Thanks for listening.