About This Issue

THIS MAGAZINE MIGHT APPEAR to some as having “globalized” since the last issue. We have followed alums, faculty, and students to a variety of locales including Bangkok, Hong Kong, London, and East San Jose. We also report on the “Winning Globally” conference that researchers from the School’s GLOBE Initiative and from McKinsey hosted in January. If you attended the conference, you heard that devising a product that will satisfy customers around the world is a huge challenge. That is no less true for a magazine than for an automobile or a wine, but at least Stanford Business has the advantage of knowing that the bulk of its readers have been exposed to the Business School’s culture and hopefully return physically for a new exposure now and then.

Since we are located on the Stanford campus, we naturally hear more about those of you who live and work in the Silicon Valley. While we must guard against becoming a Silicon Valley-only magazine, some alums who live elsewhere have said they read this magazine precisely because it keeps them posted on and attached to an interesting and innovative group of people whose network hub is the GSB and San Francisco Bay Area.

But business these days requires a global perch as well as a local one, and it is that global perch that the GLOBE Initiative folks are trying to better define through research on global companies with wide-ranging styles of operation and products. What percentage of alumni/ae would say they work with a global concern? The definitions of global companies need to be firmed up before we can answer this question definitively, but I am certain the number grows nearly every quarter. The researchers would love to hear about your global challenges (email benjamin_beth@gsb.stanford.edu) and so would the magazine editors (email otoole_kathy@gsb.stanford.edu). Whether you’re just down El Camino or half a world away, you are part of an innovative GSB network.

A member of that network, Robert L. Strauss, MBA/MA ’84, interviewed Jonathan Hayssen, MBA ’81, in Bangkok last year while on the way home from working on a CARE project in Sri Lanka. Strauss has known Hayssen since going to Thailand in 1984 on a development assignment. Now, 22 years after serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Liberia, Strauss is returning to the Corps as country director in Cameroon, where he will manage 135 volunteers working in education, health, agro-forestry, and small business.

Closer to home, Bill Youstra, MBA ’92 and a former AOL VP, has been following the innovative community development efforts of his classmate Eric Weaver in Silicon Valley. Youstra was moved to submit a story after observing how Weaver’s work has helped attack the social hardships brought on by dot-com inflation in the late nineties.

Jillian Edelstein

Our May cover photograph of Howard Davies, Sloan ’80, was taken by one of Britain’s foremost portrait photographers, Jillian Edelstein. With a string of prestigious awards attached to her name, Edelstein used her considerable skill to give us a strong image of Britain’s financial regulatory services’ top gun.

Kathleen O'Toole
Editor

Letter to the editor:

Thank you for the story about Tom Ostenberg [Feb. 2002 issue]. Having changed directions dramatically myself two years ago, I take comfort in hearing how colleagues have done this and lived to tell about it! When corporate marketing and banking were no longer fun, I returned to my much earlier desire to write, and am now writing biographies and family histories for people who realize the value of preserving their family's stories. Instead of creating ad campaigns that last two months and mostly ad clutter, I am helping people leave legacies. It has been a profound and wonderful change.

Susan Ashby Sipple, MBA '76
Glendale, Arizona