Spreadsheet One

Illustration By David Sheldon

SAM WOOD AND SUNIL Kumar have taken technology-as-teaching-aid to a new level. The two faculty members have developed a "virtual factory," which students manage 24 hours a day by computer. Like a real factory, the Internet version can experience equipment failure in the middle of a manufacturing run, get a burst of orders from Asia at 4 a.m., or suddenly run out of parts if students haven't lined up sufficient inventory to meet demand. Introduced last year as part of the MBA core course in operations management, the virtual factory is designed to teach several fundamental operations concepts, including capacity planning, scheduling, and inventory management.
       Called Littlefield Technologies, the factory is set up as a job shop that assembles digital satellite system receivers from kits of electronic components. Students may purchase additional machines to perform their tasks or sell machines at a relatively small retirement price. New orders cannot be accepted if more than 100 or-ders are awaiting assembly in the system. Student teams that quote shorter lead times make more money if they meet their quotes but pay stiffer penalties if they fail. The winning team is the one with the most cash at the end of the game. Interestingly, says Wood, the winners usually are not the teams that tap into the game most frequently and stay up all night checking for orders. The best scorers are usually the best planners--students who have carefully completed the class assignments that go along with the factory game.

Dollars for Docs

THE WORK OF 22 STUDENTS in the GSB's doctoral program won recognition during the past year, earning more than $400,000 in fellowships from outside the Business School. The awards do not include the more than $2 million in fellowships provided by the Business School from its own funds.
       "This may be the largest amount of outside fellowship money ever presented to our doctoral students," said Jonathan Bendor, director of the PhD program. "We don't have complete sets of earlier records. In any case, this is a clear recognition of the quality of work being done by doctoral candidates here. There is stiff national competition for these fellowships, with only a few presented in many disciplines."
       During the year, the five students in the field of operations, information, and tech- nology attracted more than $220,000 for their research. The most recent award was the 1998 Doctoral Fellowship in Accounting, granted to Philip Joos by the Deloitte & Touche Foundation during spring quarter.

A Career Cast in Concrete

Photograph by Mark Hundley

CEMENT AND CONCRETE may not strike most Americans as a product of "great humanitarian importance," conceded Lorenzo Zambrano, chairman and CEO of the giant Mexican cement manufacturer Cemex, which operates in more than 20 countries on four continents. "In Caracas, in Manila, and in the squatter cities of Peru, it means roads and hos-pitals, sewers, power plants, and water systems. For so many of our customers, cement is the stuff of dreams," said Zambrano, MBA '68, as he accepted the SBSAA's Ernest C. Arbuckle Award in March.
       "The tools you acquire at the Business School can im-prove, enrich, and fulfill the lives of millions of people who will never set foot on this campus. That is what Stanford has meant to me, my company, and the people we serve," he told the audience of more than 400, which included a large contingent of his classmates and more than 50 alumni/ae and current students who are Mexican nationals.
       Zambrano, who also serves as chairman of Monterrey Tech, Mexico's largest private university with 75,000 students, said he is following the example of the GSB's late dean Ernest Arbuckle to shape the university. "I am striving to build an institution that will provide all of Latin America with a new generation of professionals and business leaders. Like Stanford, we are fostering entrepreneurship among our best and brightest students."

Stormy Weather

Illustration by David Sheldon

BAD SCHOOLS? Poor public services? For the past 20 years, Californians have blamed their ills on Proposition 13, the tax-cutting voter initiative. Now they (and much of the rest of the world) have a new scapegoat--the weather. Nevertheless, there are still a few things you can't blame on El Niño. Among them: the dean's retirement (see page 10); MBA ap-plications (a record high, but not as high as the Dow); million-dollar fixer-uppers in Silicon Valley (cash only, please); Internet Explorer on your desktop (try to trash it); the Final Four (Kentucky 86, Stanford 85); a certain student in-tern's Wall Street flareout (no names, please); Burgum and McNealy's Washington visit (blame it on the evil empire); and the Asian economic meltdown (no, blame it on George Soros). One of the things we will blame on El Niño is what must have been the soggiest winter quarter in GSB history.

Leadership is a Performing Art

AT THE SAME TIME he was coteaching the GSB's two-quarter course, Learning to Lead, Jim Thompson, MBA '86, began a two-year stint as coach of the Fremont High School Women Warriors, a suburban California basketball team. "Leadership is a performing art and the best way to get better at it is to do it while learning about it," says Thompson. This is why each student in the MBA course was required to have a "leadership practice arena" to try out the ideas they would be ex-posed to in the course. The Fremont gym was Thompson's practice arena, and it and the GSB classroom form the background for his new book, Shooting in the Dark: Tales of Coaching and Leadership (Warde Publishers).
       The foreword is written by another coach: Phil Jackson of the Chicago Bulls. Jackson was introduced to Thompson's work by his NBA colleague Rich Kelley, MBA '89, a professional ballplayer for 11 pre-GSB years. "Ground has been broken in the 1990s with the creation of a new coaching model," writes Jackson, "one whose leadership is trusted because he shares it with his players." The coach concludes: "You will find Jim's tactics useful at many levels of leadership or teaching."

"Like travel agents, traders are the milkmen of the nineties. Let's face it, you wouldn't want your kids to grow up to be traders."

BECKY PATTON, MBA '79
Senior VP of the Internet brokerage E-Trade and panelist at the Entrepreneur Conference. She spoke following the founder of an Internet travel service.