Ahmed Rahman on Learning About Leadership from Military Academies

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In this episode of Lehigh University’s College of Business ilLUminate podcast, we are talking with Ahmed Rahman about his upcoming sabbatical, during which he plans to do a deep dive into one of his main research interests: the effects of peers and teachers on college student performance.

Rahman is an associate professor of economics in Lehigh's College of Business. He holds the Charlotte W. & Robert L. Brown III '78 Summer Research Fellowship and also is program director for the Lehigh Business PhD in Business and Economics program. In addition, Ahmed is a research fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics, a nonprofit research institute and research network headquartered in Bonn, Germany.

Prior to joining Lehigh’s Business School faculty in 2018, Rahman was an associate professor at the United States Naval Academy, and has continued to do research drawing on data from the academy.

He spoke with Jack Croft, host of the ilLUminate podcast. Listen to the podcast here and subscribe and download Lehigh Business on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Below is an edited excerpt from that conversation. Read the complete podcast transcript [PDF]. 

Jack Croft: I think it'd be helpful to start by explaining what a sabbatical is, and maybe what it isn't, and why it's important to not just faculty, but to universities and to research as a whole.

Ahmed Rahman: Absolutely. So sabbatical coming from the term Sabbath, day of rest, seventh day. And actually in early days, agricultural Hebrew societies thought that seven-year mark was a good time to take a rest, lay your land fallow, suspend debt payments, and just relax for that year and rejuvenate.

And so what's good for farmers, I think the academic community has glommed onto that and said, well, about seven years, a year of relax and reflection. Now, I have to push back a little bit and say it's not so much relaxation. And I have to remind many people, including my wife, regarding what it is that one does while on sabbatical. 

Really, the objective is to step away from the chaos and confusion of the real world in order to properly understand it. It's a hard sell for my wife and others, maybe, but I'm committed to this. And so I think it's a really important thing that universities support. I'm really happy and honored that Lehigh is willing to support this work that I will be doing in this coming upcoming academic year.

Croft: I understand that you plan to tackle an array of different research projects over the next year, and we'll talk about some of them in a few minutes. But what's the overarching theme that ties them all together?

Rahman: So the overall project is the digitization and quantification of the lives of tens of thousands of naval officers across three centuries. So it's a big project. I work in the business college, so some might ask, "For the love of God, why are you studying this?" The reason is we think there's a great deal of insight here in thinking about, I would call these X factors that shape human capital decisions. And the military is a great area to explore how these X factors shape human capital decisions. 

Let me explain a little bit more what I mean by X factors, because this is what a labor economist might think about. For a labor economist, there are two types of things that happen in your life. Things happen to you and you do things that affect your life. We're being bombarded by stimuli all the time, and we respond to those stimuli in the best ways that we can. 

The labor economist would really love to isolate a specific thing that happens to you in order to understand how that thing influences a choice that you make. And those choices can range from, should I go to college? What college should I choose? Should I get married? Should I live in an urban or a rural environment? Should I switch my career? Should I end my career? All these are questions that the labor economists are deeply interested in.

But the real challenge here is to try to understand and isolate those X factors and then figure out what the causal impact is going to be. Now, there are two options for the labor economist here in dealing with the messy world of cause and effect. One is to just run experiments. And indeed, Jack, we're sitting in this building [the Lehigh Business Innovation Building], we have a behavioral lab right next door that my colleagues are doing these experiments all the time, and they're producing amazing research.

There's another way to do it, and that is what we might call, instead of an experiment, it's a natural experiment. The natural experiment is simply something that is occurring in the real world. You don't control it, but it's random enough that you can study it and exploit it. And it turns out that the military, it's chock-full of these X factors, these natural experiments that are occurring all the time. And so their lives being … not simple in any sense, but certain elements are simple relative to the chaos of our civilian lives that we can really learn from this idea of a factor X causing a certain decision that relates to a person's human capital.

Croft: It'd be interesting to learn what some of the sources of information are that you're going to be digitizing and what they can tell us. And I'm also curious whether or how AI can help you gain more insight from the data, a tool that wasn't available when you first started looking at this.

Rahman: That is sadly correct. So going all the way back to 2006 and walking around Nimitz Library, I was blown away by the collections at Nimitz Library when it came to the personnel that goes all the way back to the inception of the Naval Academy in 1845. My colleagues and I started to do this by hand, and I think the technology now has caught up to our ambitions.

Our data really is going to come in three flavors here, that we are doing this massive merge. The first is that stuff that has already been digitized, and that includes the contemporary data that we have through the Naval Academy that we are going to link with census records to match, in fact, career outcomes and indeed post-Navy careers, which plenty of them have. 

But to connect that historically, then we need two other sources. One is the quantified sources that are in annual volumes, such as the Navy registers, Naval Academy registers, various log books, and so on, and it has lots of detailed numbers. The OCR [Optical Character Recognition] technology is now very strong, so that we can actually digitize much of this quite quickly.

And then there's the qualitative information, the writings, the ship logs, where the captain documents sort of day-to-day operations on the vessel, and other qualitative biographies and autobiographies written by the officers themselves. 

We are now in a position to quantify, digitize, and pull out sentiment from all the linguistic models that are currently available. So there is a lot of work to be done in that realm, but we are right at the cusp of sort of making this massive merge a reality so that we can actually ask these questions regarding these X factors. 

And the exciting part is we can look at these X factors in the 19th century context, 20th century context, and 21st century context, in all kinds of environments that we think is going to be very fruitful.

Croft: Finally, a year seems like a long time, but it goes fast. And what, at the end of the year on your sabbatical, do you hope to have accomplished? And how far do you hope you've kind of moved the needle on this topic?

Rahman: I guess the immediate objective — and I say immediate, although it will take a while — is peer-reviewed papers. I think that is the currency in which we live. This is the metric of success. And I think it's more or less a valid one. 

It can be frustrating at times, the peer review process. But this is really the immediate objective here of sabbaticals to produce these papers on issues of leadership, issues of education, and actually what is effective in terms of human capital accumulation. 

There is also a broader objective here of thinking about military history, but recasting it from a labor economist perspective. We have this wonderful opportunity as a country that has gone through massive ups and downs when it comes to, let's say, naval operations and what these men and women are doing in service for their country. So I think a book, at the very least, will be in order. That's not the immediate objective here for the sabbatical, but certainly something in the pipeline.

And then finally, bringing it to the students, making sure that what we learn in our natural experiment settings can be brought to the classroom to then teach the next generation of future leaders. This is what we're all here to do. 

And so I'm hoping to make a contribution there. And I hope the needle is moved. To what extent will just depend on lots of other X factors, I suppose, for us. But we are very hopeful.