Stanford GSB: Stanford Business May 2001

May 2001, Volume 69, Number 3

Mary Barth, the only American academic on a new 14-member board, will help set international accounting standards. Photograph by Saul Bromberger/Sandra Hoover

Barth Named to New Accounting Board

MARY BARTH, THE ATHOLL McBEAN Professor of Accounting, has been appointed to the new International Accounting Standards Board, which has the responsibility of working toward a single set of high-quality global accounting standards. The only American academic on the 14-member board, Barth was selected by an international trustee body chaired by Paul Volcker, former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve.

Barth considers it an “honor and privilege” to serve on the board, where she will be one of two part-time members. “Crafting financial reporting standards is a substantial challenge, especially when they must serve global investors and countries with widely varying cultures and traditions,” she said. “I believe, however, that such standards are essential to the world’s capital markets.”

The board resulted from a new constitution and restructuring of the International Accounting Standards Committee, a nongovernmental international accounting standards-setting organization that has existed since 1973. Faced with globalization of businesses and capital markets, a committee of leading policymakers throughout the world last year nominated 19 trustees from six continents and 14 countries to serve as an oversight body for international accounting standards. These trustees, chaired by Volcker, were charged with devising and naming a board to develop the standards, partly by working toward a convergence of differing national accounting standards.

Barth has conducted research on a variety of financial reporting issues, particularly those relating to global capital markets and including how greater harmonization of accounting standards would affect the global economy and lower the cost of capital. She has won several national awards for her research and teaching and was a partner at Arthur Andersen & Co. before entering academia in the mid-eighties. Barth also has been active in standards setting for U.S. accounting, serving on the Accounting Standards Executive Committee of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and on the Financial Accounting Standards Advisory Council of the U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board.

THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION has awarded Peter Henry, assistant professor of economics, a five-year, $250,000 Young Researcher’s Career Award to support his study of emerging economies. Henry also was selected recently by the American Economic Association to serve a three-year term as a member of its Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession. The committee is concerned with how many African American and Hispanic students are receiving academia’s highest degree, the PhD, as well as how many of those doctoral graduates are going into academic positions rather than industry jobs.

A National Fellow at the Hoover Institution this academic year, Henry was also recognized in December with a nomination for the Smith Breeden Prize, which is conferred annually by the American Finance Association upon the best paper published in the Journal of Finance.

INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIST Gerald Meier gave the 2000 commencement address at South America’s first established graduate school of management, Escuela de Administración de Negocios para Graduado, in Lima, Peru, in December. The school named Meier an honorary professor. In his address, Meier noted that Stanford Business School had been instrumental in creating its Peruvian counterpart and that former dean Ernest Arbuckle spoke at the school’s dedication in 1964.

A NEW BOOK TITLED Strategic Management by three GSB faculty who teach courses in that area, is intended to offer MBA students and practicing managers pragmatic suggestions rooted in theory and case studies for devising overall business strategies.

Besides providing guidelines for intentional strategy-setting by a company’s top managers, the authors incorporate advice for dealing with the unintentional or “autonomous” strategy-changing that occurs when line managers try out new business strategies on their own. (Honda management, for example, planned to introduce large motorcycles into the American market but was forced to change its strategy when Honda’s U.S. employees observed customer interest in the employees’ mopeds. Honda began selling smaller bikes instead.)

The book, published by John Wiley & Sons, also provides frameworks managers can use to monitor their industry and adjust their strategy as consumer preferences and competition change. The authors are Garth Saloner, the Jeffrey S. Skoll Professor of Electronic Commerce, Strategic Management, and Economics; Andrea Shepard, associate professor of strategic management and economics; and Joel Podolny, the William R. Timken Professor of Organizational Behavior and Strategic Management.

JERRY PORRAS, who served the Business School as an associate dean for academic affairs from 1991 to 1994, has been honored with the 2001 Robert T. Davis Award, presented by the School’s faculty to recognize extraordinary contributions.

Porras, the Lane Professor of Organizational Behavior and Change, is widely recognized for his work on organizational vision. He coauthored the successful book Built to Last, tracing the attributes of a selected group of visionary companies with enduring core values—a purpose beyond profits—and a devoted workforce.

“If you know Jerry Porras, you know him as a man whose ideas, whose values, whose commitments, and whose friendships are built to last,” said colleague Rod Kramer, in introducing the Davis Award winner at a faculty dinner in February.

Porras has also served Stanford University as the faculty athletic representative to the NCAA and as president of the Pacific-10 Conference Council.

YOU DIDN'T SEE HIM ON STAGE AT THE Academy Awards, but George Parker, the Dean Witter Professor of Finance and Management, associate dean, and director of the MBA Program, starred in a movie that is a three-time award winner. “It’s sort of a mini soap opera about two people trying to decide which of two restaurants to buy and they have to read the financial statements. George Parker shows them how,” explains Catherine O’Brien of Stanford University Media Solutions, a new University organization that produces and markets video and Web courseware.

The video, titled The Stanford Video Guide to Financial Statements, was produced in Hollywood with professional actors plus Parker and is marketed to businesses. (Another video on negotiating stars Margaret Neale, the John G. McCoy–Banc One Corporation Professor of Organizations and Dispute Resolution.) Parker’s video received a New York Festivals award in 1999 for international nonbroadcast media, a Joey award in 2000 for corporate training/educational videos from the San Jose Film Commission, and the silver medal at the 2000 Houston Worldfest Video Training Expo.