Stanford GSB: Stanford Business May 2000

ASSOCIATE DEAN Joan Karlin, MBA '77, came back to her alma mater as a staff member in 1987. As assistant dean for academic affairs, Karlin worked with the academic associate deans on appointments and planning. Then, as associate dean for finance and administration, she oversaw finance and budgets, human resources, faculty and facilities support, and information resources. Now she has been named to the newly created post of associate dean for academic and financial administration.

Karlin will assist Dean Robert Joss and the academic associate deans in recruiting and retaining faculty in a very competitive market and in ensuring that the financial and other resources needed for them are available.

FORMER MARKETING professor Harper Boyd died November 15, and former assistant dean William Lowe, MBA '39, died January 28.

Boyd, 82, was chairman of the marketing department at Northwestern and director of its business school graduate division when he was recruited to Stanford Business School in 1963. Here, he was director of the International Center for the Advancement of Management Education (ICAME), which trained professors of management from emerging countries. Boyd left Stanford in 1974 and eventually capped a distinguished career at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock, but he remained a friend and mentor to many at the Business School. Professor Michael Ray recalled Boyd's "disconcerting combination of demanding and caring. He wanted you to be your best, to live up to your potential. Only a few months before his death, he was urging me on as a 'young man with potential.'"

Lowe, 84, joined Stanford Business School in 1958, serving as director of business and technical placement. In his 22-year association with the School, he headed both placement and alumni relations. "He was a man of principle, loyalty, and honor, who spent much of his life dedicated to Stanford and its Business School students and graduates," said his classmate and close friend Samuel "Pete" Pond, MBA '39, former acting dean of the School.

Mike Spence Honored

Arbuckle Award winner Mike Spence and his wife, Monica.

Photo by Anne Knudsen

MIKE SPENCE ARRIVED at Stanford at an awful time. Just before he took over the deanship in 1990, the Business School withstood $7.4 million in self-insured earthquake damages. The library was closed for repairs and wouldn't open for almost two years. Shortly after his arrival, the University was subjected to the loss of a widely respected president and untold millions of dollars in real and public relations damage, both due to unfounded charges of mismanagement of research-related funding. Meanwhile, management education came under widespread attack. Oh, and California led the rest of the country in a recession.

Survival alone would merit the Arbuckle Award for the former dean, but Spence did far more than help the School survive-he put it back on its feet physically, financially, and academically.

During his nine years, Spence oversaw the funding and construction of the Schwab Residential Center and the Knight Building, led a development effort that saw record fundraising totals, turned the gaze of the School outward to embrace partnerships with industry in this country and internationally, and firmly reasserted Stanford's goal to be the leading academic institution of management in the world.

On January 25, Spence was named the 30th recipient of Stanford Business School's highest honor, the Ernest C. Arbuckle Award, named for another great dean who had a lasting effect upon the School.

Oops!

APOLOGIES TO THE 14,000 (yes, 14,000!) MBA alums inadvertently overlooked in the 75th Anniversary Gala ad on the back cover of the February 2000 issue. The number of MBA degrees granted to date should have been listed as 14,896—not 896. A second number was also incorrect. There have been 5,884 Stanford Executive Program certificates awarded to date, not 551.

And who was the first to notice our mistakes? None other than stat-man and former math camp leader, professor emeritus Chuck Bonini. Bonini should know. A faculty member from 1959 to 1999, he probably knew most of those alums!

Good Things Start Small

ONE OF THE SCHOOL'S oldest and most popular programs for working managers is the two-week Executive Program for Growing (nee Small) Companies (EPGC), a general management course aimed at executives who want to "grow" their companies from under 1,000 employees to, well, however many they can. Thus we noticed with some interest that one former EPGC participant who had a particularly good harvest this year came to the Business School as the CEO of a then-dinky little company called America Online. My, Stephen Case, EPGC '90, how you've grown!

Manager's Toolbox

LIANABEL OLIVER'S new book comes with some mighty fine recommendations. The Cost Management Toolbox, a plain-spoken "guide to controlling costs and boosting profits," is hailed by, among others, the king of cost management himself, accounting professor emeritus Charles T. Horngren.

Oliver, MBA '78, is president of Pathways, a training and consulting service that specializes in cost management and accounting practices. Her book (published by Amacom Books, an imprint of the American Management Association's AMA Publications) may be aimed at managers who don't have an academic background in business, but she doesn't talk down to them.

"My goal is to explain the basic financial concepts and show how you can apply these to manage your business more effectively," she says. "I mesh theory with practice, drawing on my experience as an accounting manager, a controller, and a business consultant."

Spreadsheet Three