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About the GSB

 

From the Dean

2004 State of the School

Dear Friends,

As another academic year begins at Stanford Business School, I’m delighted to tell you about some exciting advances. We have two new academic centers poised to develop a rich array of cases and programming around the areas of personal leadership and global business. We are offering more project-oriented courses and small seminars, often with a multidisciplinary theme. Our alumni have kept increasing their involvement with the School, while our graduating MBA and Sloan students have provided us with record-breaking gifts. And for the first time this fall, all of our incoming students will take part in an interactive two-day management simulation.

The Management Simulation

Last year we offered the simulation to 60 students as part of our new year-long cocurricular Leadership Development Platform. We liked it well enough to expand it to all 372 first-year students. Divided into five management groups, each representing a greeting card company, students actually make, market, and deliver a product. They design cards from scratch, wrestle with internal conflict, communicate with buyers and suppliers, and come to agreement on production strategies. The pre-term exercise is part of an effort to introduce more experiential learning into the opening curriculum. From there, the students delve into the core fundamental subjects with, we hope, a better understanding of how to integrate various business functions and how important and difficult is the actual work of strategy execution involving teams of people.

Like other schools of management, we generally have been better at helping students learn what to do as opposed to how to get it done. Faculty member Jeffrey Pfeffer calls this the "knowing–doing gap." Understanding this gap and preparing students to be better at closing it is one of the major challenges facing business schools. Thus, we are seeing increased emphasis on courses concerned with leadership and on courses that have students tackle open-ended projects that often take them out of the classroom. Several faculty members are teaching students to work together to solve tough problems. In one such class taught by Professor Jim Patell, students created a prototype product and plans for a company called Ignite Innovations that would make inexpensive solar-powered LED lamps for use in markets in developing countries where there is no electrical service. A year later, Ignite is working to bring light to India. This focus on experiential learning is an emphasis added to strengthen our traditional material, and it is a crucial part of ongoing efforts to improve our curriculum and to do a better job of preparing our students for management success.

Our Two Newest Centers

Our four academic centers support elements of the managerial mind-set that I believe are essential: global awareness, leadership responsibility, entrepreneurial initiative, and social impact. Cultivating this mind-set is important to our mission of creating ideas that advance and deepen our understanding of management and using those ideas to develop innovative, principled, and insightful leaders who change the world. Our two new centers, devoted to global issues and leadership, are off to exciting starts.

  • The Center for Global Business and the Economy launched in May with an international conference on global business and poverty. In addition to our own faculty, the event brought in speakers from India, South Africa, Bangladesh, and the United Kingdom. The Center, codirected by Professors John Roberts and John McMillan, will develop cases, course material, and symposia that will imbue our curriculum with an international perspective. It also will support our Global Management Program and summer global immersion internships. All management today is global and requires an awareness of international business practice and multicultural workplace issues.
  • The Center for Leadership Development and Research has scaled up its Leadership Development Platform (LDP), through which students experience teamwork and personal coaching to evaluate their communication and behavioral styles as well as clearly understand their personal values. Seventy-two of this year’s incoming students will participate in the LDP, up from 60 in the program’s first year, and a number of second-year students will be trained to serve as coaches. Our goal is to help students understand how they can take responsibility for playing a role in changing an organization for the better. It’s not enough to be smart about the business functions, such as accounting or finance. Leaders also must be smart about themselves and how to handle relations with other people to achieve things that are beyond their own individual abilities. Codirected by Professors Charles O’Reilly and Deborah Gruenfeld and Lecturer Beth Benjamin, the Center also supports multidisciplinary research that brings together the best of our scholars to examine the subject of leadership in depth.

Our other two centers continue to be productive.

  • The Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, founded in 1996 and a model for the other centers, continues to sponsor a large annual conference and a host of other activities. It now supports 21 courses, scores of cases, summer internships, and a variety of faculty research efforts. It is led by Codirectors Chuck Holloway and Irving Grousbeck.
  • The Center for Social Innovation, including our 33-year-old Public Management Program, continues to have a tremendous impact on all of our students by increasing their awareness of social issues and the role that both corporations and nonprofits can play in society. The Center has generated more than 60 cases related to the nonprofit sector, social issues, and the environment. Led by Professors Dale Miller and James Phills, it now supports five executive education courses for managers in the nonprofit world. The Stanford Social Innovation Review, produced by Center staff and faculty, has been well received and continues to foster communication to bring managerial and social accountability to both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors.

Multidisciplinary Learning

One of the hallmarks of Stanford Business School is its multidisciplinary approach to teaching and scholarship. The School and Stanford University are committed to exposing more graduate students to the wide array of intellectual resources across our world-class university. We have developed courses that put business students together with students from engineering, medicine, and education to create the sort of mixed teams students will someday encounter on the job. For example, this year Business School Professor Stefanos Zenios will team teach a course called Biodesign Innovation with faculty from across campus. MBAs will join teams of medical and engineering students to conceptualize new devices that address unmet medical needs and then develop business plans for them. We also are pleased to have Professor Anthony Bryk, a nationally known expert on education reform who has worked extensively with the Chicago school system, join the School in a joint appointment with the School of Education this year. He will teach an elective available to business and education students. Stanford has great advantages that allow us to execute multidisciplinary teaching better than anyone else. And we likely will do more of it in the future.

Growth in Lifelong Learning

We want you to continue to be a part of our future. The School offers opportunities for you to reconnect with old friends as you engage with the current faculty and discover the latest business ideas through our Lifelong Learning program—now in its third year. So far, more than 1,500 alumni have participated in faculty seminars, Web seminars, skill workshops, and more. Next year we expect to offer a special alumni-only “Back-to-School” residential update course. Just log on to https://alumni.gsb.stanford.edu/lifelonglearning for more information about all that is available through Lifelong Learning.

Looking Ahead to Our Biggest Financial Initiative Ever

You—our alumni—remain central to our success. Your intellectual and financial support is critical. I am tremendously impressed (as I think you will be) by the strong support we have received from our newest graduates. The last three MBA graduating classes each have made a class gift nearly double the size of those given by earlier classes. The MBA Class of 2004 set a record with a class gift of $336,780, with the highest average individual pledge in our history of graduating class gifts. Similarly, our 2004 Sloan graduates achieved an incredible 76 percent participation rate in the two-year-old Sloan Master’s Program Endowment Fund, an entirely student-driven initiative. Both of these efforts are strong testimonials to the value our graduates place on their experience here and to their understanding of how important it is for them to continue the legacy of making that experience possible for others.

This year we celebrate an important milestone—the 50th year of the Business School Fund, the fundraising vehicle through which alumni make their annual gifts. In 1955, the Fund’s first year, alumni contributed $6,500 ($46,000 in today’s dollars), with a 13.5 percent participation rate. Since then, the Fund has grown significantly to $8.8 million, with 40 percent participation. Building on that tradition, we are setting a bold challenge for the next five years. I would like to see 50 percent of alumni giving annually to the School. Give whatever you can within your means, but please be a part of what we are doing, and make giving back to the School a part of your annual contributions budget. Our goal over the next five years is to increase the Business School Fund to $10 million annually—to raise a total of $50 million over five years. This is crucial, as 20 percent of our operating budget comes from annual giving.

Even more important, the School will launch the largest fundraising initiative in its history next year. Those funds will cover some of the things I have talked about in this letter—the centers, leadership development, experiential learning, small seminars, multidisciplinary course development, Lifelong Learning, and, of course, resources to recruit the very best faculty to maintain the superior general management program we have always offered.

Your support allows us to be creative and drive important changes in management education that will provide students with what they need to learn in this challenging, complex world. The small size of the School’s student body—less than half that of Harvard or Wharton—makes experiential learning and multidisciplinary teaching that much more possible and effective. Our location, tight connection to our alumni, and strong connections to the rest of Stanford University and the surrounding business community are conducive to creating the best possible management education. We want the School to help you keep growing through Lifelong Learning and other alumni programs. And with your support, the School can achieve even more great things.

Sincerely,

Robert Joss
Philip H. Knight Professor and Dean
Sloan '66, MBA '67, PhD '70

If you would like to share your thoughts, email me at joss_robert@gsb.stanford.edu

If you would like to tap into the ideas and activities at the Business School, go to https://alumni.gsb.stanford.edu/lifelonglearning/