Stanford Business

NOVEMBER 2006


Dean's Column

A Record Gift: A Vote of Confidence


Stanford President John Hennessy, left, Nike founder Phil Knight, center, and Dean Robert Joss at the 10th anniversary in May of the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies.
Photo by Saul Bromberger/
Sandra Hoover Photography

When he was an MBA student, Phil Knight, MBA ’62, wrote a paper for management professor Frank Shallenberger, a pioneer in the teaching of small business at the School. It argued that low-priced, high-performance, well-merchandised exports from Japan could usurp Germany’s command of the U.S. athletic shoe industry. Within months of graduation, Knight found himself in Japan selling the concept to a Japanese manufacturer who pressed him for a company name. On the spot, he came up with Blue Ribbon Sports, which eventually became Nike. In 1984, when the explosive growth in athletic shoes was slowing, Phil invited legendary GSB marketing professor Bob Davis to take a leave and be his vice president of marketing.

Over four decades, Phil practically invented the business of sourcing and marketing sports apparel. His innovations have fueled an entire industry. Like Phil, many of our alumni learn the value of taking calculated risks while they are here. And they make the leap of faith it takes to innovate, design novel ways of delivering services, or invest in starting companies.

Recently, Phil made a big investment in our future. About three months ago, he committed to a $105 million gift—the largest gift ever to a business school—to help us build a campus and fund faculty to meet our teaching and learning needs of the 21st century. The planned eight buildings around three quadrangles, to be built across the street from the Schwab Residential Center, will be called the Knight Management Center. The campus is necessary, not only to support more varied space to implement the new curriculum vision adopted in May but also to create the kind of outstanding, innovative learning facility that people have come to expect from Stanford. And one that will compare favorably with educational facilities built by competitors over the past decade.

When Phil told me during a telephone call about his plans, I was thrilled, not only because it is the magnanimous down payment we needed for the $275 million it will take to build the new campus, but because it demonstrates his belief in the innovations we are now undertaking. I can tell you without reservation that right now the Stanford Graduate School of Business is at a special place in its history. It is analogous to the early 1960s, when the faculty and then-dean Ernie Arbuckle led the way in transforming MBA education into a more research-based study of organizational behavior, economics, and the functional disciplines that serve as the underpinnings that we now know encompass a solid foundation in management education.

How does this compare to today? First, our faculty are once more redefining management education—this time with a highly personalized curriculum for a 21st century that surely will be more globally integrated, more complex, and faster paced than the world Phil Knight entered in 1962 or that I encountered on leaving the GSB in 1968. Second, we are working more closely with the University than ever before to bring managerial insights to the solution of big social problems, and to bring management education to non-business graduate students. Third, we are building a completely different physical space to enable all this to be carried out over the next 75 years. Finally, the University has just undertaken the $4.3 billion Stanford Challenge, to better educate leaders and seek solutions to major social problems, to reinvent graduate education, and to chart a world-leading new path for Stanford. (See related story.)

As we turn this vision into reality, starting with the new curriculum in fall 2007 and the campus groundbreaking in 2008, we will need each of you to help in any way you can. I am grateful and also inspired by Phil’s vote of confidence in what we are doing. And I hope you will be too.

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