Stanford GSB: Stanford Business June 1997

Spreadsheet One SRO Down Under First Entrepreneur Conference at GSB The Forgiven Here We Grow Again! Intellectual Game of Investment Boeing Chief wins Arbuckle Award	Spreadsheet Two Great Leap Forward Student Job Hunting Goes Global *Calculating the Eco-cost	Spreadsheet Three The GSB Goes to War PhDs Fare Well in Job Market "Sorry, Mr. Rainwater is in a Meeting." New Porras Award
A Closer Look: Bernard Beal	A Closer Look: Mike Golub	A Closer Look: Reid Dennis
For The Record: Who We Are

A Closer Look: Bernard Beal, MBA 1979

With this issue, Bernard Beal played hooky from work on April 10, but he had a good excuse. Beal was back at his alma mater, Paul Lawrence Dunbar Junior High School, where he served as principal for the day.

This wasn't the first time Beal made the trip between the South Bronx campus of JHS 120 and his Fifth Avenue office at M. R. Beal & Co. Last year, Beal, founder and head of one of the largest minority-owned investment firms in the country, inaugurated a program he calls "Street Smarts" for a dozen ninth graders.

The street his kids are learning to be smart about is Wall Street. Beal figures if you don't know how the economy works, you're not going to be able to work within it. Street Smarts gives the kids on-site lessons in the world of business and finance. Since school began last fall, they've gone on field trips to the New York Stock Exchange, to the Federal Reserve Bank, and, of course, to M. R. Beal & Co. They've also visited Black Enterprise magazine (the editor offered to pass along news of summer internships) and the Albany office of New York State Comptroller H. Carl McCall, the state's highest elected African American official.

So what about that field trip to a Yankees game? Believe it or not, that was educational too. The kids had to identify and write an essay about five different moneymaking enterprises they observed at Yankee Stadium---and playing ball and selling hot dogs didn't count. You think that's easy? Try it. Thanks to Beal's efforts, baseball isn't the only game on the teenagers' minds. He also purchased modems for the school's computers so they can play the Stock Market Game, an interactive simulation of Wall Street trading on the World Wide Web. And he's hired a tutor to make sure the kids get a head start on high school next year.

Graduation doesn't mean the end of the Street Smarts program. Another group of nearly-ninth graders is already preparing applications and gearing up for interviews. As for Beal, he's left the administration of JHS 120 to its official principal, Mr. Rabinowitz, and he's back at his regular job as principal of M. R. Beal, ready to meet his new kids.

Bernard Beal has Wall Street Smarts, and he wants to see that the kids from his old junior high have them, too.

PHOTOGRAPH BY AL FRENI