Where it came from
The OLE Lab grew up alongside CSUDH's George Marsh Applied Cognition Lab, founded in 2008 by Mark Carrier, Larry Rosen, and Nancy Cheever to turn undergraduates into researchers. Their work on what phones and social media do to attention and anxiety brought 60 Minutes and National Geographic to our campus.
My part was to bring business and management students into that lab, then to co-lead its Tuesday and Thursday sessions for six years. Our projects measured what witnessing workplace aggression does to the body, tested Google Glass in job interviews, and asked students how they wanted their classes scheduled. More than 35 students have come through this work, and 11 went on to graduate programs, two of them to Ph.D.s.
60 Minutes · 2017
"Brain Hacking"
Anderson Cooper sat in the lab while Larry Rosen and Nancy Cheever measured his anxiety as texts arrived on a phone he couldn't reach.
National Geographic · 2018
"Your Brain on Tech"
Katie Couric and Steve Aoki came to the lab for America Inside Out, Season 1, Episode 3.
That research belongs to Drs. Carrier, Rosen, and Cheever. I was a mentor and collaborator in their lab, and I carry their model forward here.
What the lab does now
Developing leaders and organizations, with students doing real work.
Practice
Management coaching and training
Students helped deliver a multi-day training program for every manager in CSUDH Administration and Finance.
Research
Survey and field studies
Workplace aggression, student parents and persistence, salary negotiation and anxiety, digital access for veterans, study abroad for public-university students.
Service
Mock interviews at SoCal ROC
About 100 CSUDH students give roughly 1,000 mock interviews a year to high school and vocational students in Torrance.
Students who came through
- Natalie Liberman: Student Research Day winner, Chancellor's Doctoral Incentive Program mentee, Ph.D. at Washington State, now on the faculty at Cal State LA.
- Eugene Cox: fNIRS studies of workplace aggression and augmented reality in interviews; entered the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Ph.D. program in 2019. He passed away in 2025, before his defense. This page is dedicated to him.
- José Franco and Brandon Craw: among the first OLE Lab students, both on to the CSUDH clinical psychology master's; the Workplace Aggression study went to the Western Psychological Association in 2019.
- Presentations at the Western Psychological Association, Western Decision Sciences Institute, the Labor and Employment Relations Association, and Industry Studies Association.
What the lab publishes
Every other Wednesday
The OLE Lab Notebook
Long-form essays from a scholar-practitioner on compensation, leadership, and civic life, plus the interview series Off the Talking Points.
Mondays
Dr. Norman's Management Memes
One idea per issue, short and quotable, drawn chapter by chapter from the textbooks.