About This Issue

“I GOT BACK FROM EGYPT ON SUNDAY NIGHT. My car battery was dead. I had to frantically unpack, and all my clothes smelled like mothballs. I couldn’t sleep. Jet-lagged, I was expecting the worst from a Monday morning class.” Jenna Wana was not the only second-year student to at first regret her decision to start back to classes a week early last fall. After the September 11 terrorist attacks led to a shutdown of U.S. airspace, she and other second-years had to scramble to keep their commitment to attend week-long seminars that faculty had set up for them on an experimental basis.

By the end of the week, however, Wana was pleased. Her seminar with Dean Bob Joss on leadership was a “comfortable, intimate setting that had a completely different feel from the normal classroom,” she said. “I took this class because even though I had some management experience, I was unsure of what it meant to be a leader. This seminar taught me the skills and values successful leaders have and helped prepare me for such a role.”

In this magazine, we offer you a look inside that leadership seminar as well as two others: one offered by Professor Darrell Duffie on lesser known aspects of finance and another by Professor Chip Heath that explored what makes some ideas stick in the marketplace more easily than others.

The students who took these seminars and a handful of others rated them highly for subject matter as well as teaching style. The faculty who participated reported that they enjoyed the opportunity to discuss some of their research in a more intimate setting, with students drawn from wide-ranging backgrounds. A magazine cannot reproduce those give-and-take environments, but we can offer you a glimpse at some of the ideas that were discussed. You won’t earn school credit, but you also won’t have to take a test!

Cherian George, who translated Duffie’s finance seminar into a feature story for this issue, is a PHD candidate in Stanford’s communication department. For George, the assignment was a convenient way to sample the GSB classroom: “I enjoy taking courses in departments other than my own, but it’s usually quite difficult for non-GSB Stanford students to get into Business School classes.” Formerly a journalist with the Singapore Straits Times, George regularly writes for Stanford Business. As a rule we include stories by a number of different freelance writers in each issue, but coincidentally, George’s byline is all over this particular magazine. Read the two features, the leadership story, and the faculty research section, and you will understand why he is a valued contributor.

SELF PORTRAIT BY TIM BOWER

The cover and inside illustrations for the finance feature were created for us by Brooklyn artist Tim Bower. Although Bower’s client list includes business periodical heavyweights Forbes, Fortune, and Kiplinger’s, he admits that illustrating finance concepts often presents a challenge for his right-brain modus operandi. Luckily for Bower—and for Stanford Business—Bower’s girlfriend, a former Salomon Smith Barney broker, jumped in to help him demystify the specialty investment strategies described in the story.

Kathleen O'Toole
Editor