Research reports and how-to guides are useful for a specific kind of information: what's established, what's contested, what a framework says should happen. They're a poor format for something else that matters just as much - what it actually felt like to have the hard conversation, what a leadership scholar changed their mind about, where a practitioner thinks the tidy version of a framework breaks down in practice. MBA Lab is building a series of interviews with leadership faculty and practitioners to cover that gap. This page is the editorial framework for it, published deliberately before the first interview goes live - the standard should exist before there's any pressure to bend it for a specific conversation.
Why an interview series, and why now
Every guide on this site is written by MBA Lab, informed by public research and program materials. That's useful for establishing what's known and cited, but it's inherently a single editorial voice. An interview series adds something a guide can't: a named person's actual reasoning, including the parts that don't reduce cleanly to a framework - and space for that person to disagree with MBA Lab's own content when they have good reason to.
Editorial standards
Relationships get disclosed, not implied. If MBA Lab has any financial, professional, or personal relationship with an interviewee, that's stated plainly in the published piece - not buried, not omitted because it's inconvenient.
Specific factual claims get checked. When an interviewee cites a study, a statistic, or a specific claim about an organization, MBA Lab verifies what's checkable before publishing, and notes where a claim reflects the interviewee's professional judgment or experience rather than a citable source.
The series seeks disagreement, not just validation. An interview program that only ever features people confirming what MBA Lab already publishes isn't adding information - it's laundering existing opinions through a new voice. Real editorial value requires actively seeking practitioners and scholars who see things differently, including where they'd push back on frameworks used elsewhere on this site.
Interviews are not advertisements. No interview will be run as, or edited to read as, a promotional placement for a person's book, company, or consulting practice, even when the conversation touches on their work. Where an interviewee has something relevant to promote, that's noted transparently rather than woven into the piece as if it were neutral content.
Editing preserves meaning, not just polish. Interviews are lightly edited for length and clarity. Edits that would change what someone actually meant - removing a hedge, sharpening a claim they left deliberately uncertain - don't happen without checking back with the interviewee first.
What this series is not
It's not a venue for VCU-specific reporting beyond what's already publicly documented elsewhere on this site - an interview about transformative leadership concepts generally doesn't imply VCU participation, endorsement, or comment unless a piece explicitly says otherwise. And it's not a substitute for the source-transparency standard the rest of this site's research content follows: an interviewee's opinion is clearly that - an opinion, attributed to them by name - not repackaged as MBA Lab's own factual claim.
What's next
The first interviews are in progress. When they publish, they'll follow the standards on this page and link back to it.