Stanford GSB: Stanford Business August 2000

Photographs by Stuart Brinin, Saul Bromberger/Sandra Hoover, Steve Castillo, Stacy H. Geiken, Mark Hundley

Some represented classes from 1929 to 1999; others wrote leading textbooks and seminal research papers; and in mid-May, they came to the Business School to celebrate 75 years of academic leadership.

FOR SOME, the highlight of the Business School's 75th anniversary celebration was the panel discussion on "Game Theory and Management" or the spirited debate over "An Ethic for the New Global Economy." For others, it was the chance to mingle with the School's four living deans or dozens of current and former faculty members. Along the way the participants were treated like guests at any festive party, with food that stretched from tacos and dolmas to vegetable feuilleté and marinated Selles-sur-Cher and music that ranged from the student a cappella singers to the funk band Pride & Joy.		Former and emeriti faculty and PhD alums joined current faculty for discussions of the School's academic legacy during its 75th anniversary celebration May 18-20. Members of the MBA classes of 1985, 1990, and 1995 attended special reunion events, and the School hosted a luncheon for current and former Advisory Council members.

Much of the event focused on the School's academic contributions during its first 75 years. "Scholarship is not a job, but a calling," said Jim March, professor emeritus. "Real scholars primarily respond to the desire to follow ideas wherever they go, to argue about those ideas, and to defend those ideas as essential to his or her being.... The role of a business school is to provide a setting that attracts and nurtures that kind of person, and this business school has been extraordinarily fortunate."

With 70 to 80 faculty engaged in research a year, strategic management and economics professor Garth Saloner estimated that he and his faculty colleagues devote about 20 person years to research every 12 months—a relatively small figure compared to many businesses' R&D investment. "We have had a remarkable impact with those resources," he said. "Our faculty and their graduate students have made major contributions to the capital asset pricing model, option pricing, principal agent model, auction theory, incentive theory more broadly, game theory, network effects, resource dependency, signaling, and organizational inertia," to name a few.




Some 20 panel discussions focused on landmark research at the Business School and probed issues such as resource allocation in health care markets, firms in the global economy, and venture capital and Internet investing.

One of the most important academic developments during the past 25 years has been the rise of game theory. And one of the central figures in the creation of that concept is Robert Wilson, the Atholl McBean Professor of Economics, whose specialty is designing ingenious new formats for auctions, such as the one used by California in 1998 to privatize utilities.

"I applaud Bob as one of the great research leaders here at Stanford over the last 30 years," said economics professor David Kreps during the game theory and management discussion. Noting Wilson's influence in making Stanford a major center of game theory development, Kreps said the words "game theory" could hardly be found in curricula two decades ago. By 1985, they were ubiquitous among not only academics but also economists, who adopted the concept as a powerful means of analyzing business situations that "price theory just couldn't touch."

The School's accounting faculty turned out to honor Chuck Horngren, considered to be the man who pioneered modern day management accounting. Horngren, the Edmund W. Littlefield Professor of Accounting, Emeritus, pioneered the use of accounting data for managerial decision making in the early 1960s, thus transforming the way accounting would thereafter be used and taught. Joel Demski, now a professor at the University of Florida, said that under Horngren's tutelage Stanford faculty and graduate students were encouraged to keep expanding the way accounting was perceived, used, and taught. "The clear pattern we learned from Chuck," he said, "was to be unrelenting champions of innovation, change, risk taking, and the pushing forward of the staunch foe called 'the status quo.'"





Guests at the Saturday night black-tie gala dined in a 40,000-square-foot tent decorated with real fountains and faux marble pillars and arches. Five trumpeters heralded the start of dinner, and a parade of 300 waiters bearing trays holding 1,700 candle-lit chocolate cakes signaled the arrival of dessert.


Dean Robert Joss summed up the effect of contributions like these in his closing remarks. "Stanford Business School education is largely a gift of one generation to another. We are celebrating those who have built what we are so proud of today."

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