Spreadsheet Three

Would Miss Manners Approve?

WHY CAN COFFEE bring a Brazilian business meeting to a standstill? Where can arguing loudly about politics be viewed as an enjoyable social activity?
       Business School students pondered questions like these in six lunch-hour sessions on "Doing Business in Other Cultures" that focused on Argen-tina, Japan, Brazil, India, Italy, and Mexico. Organized by students who are natives of these countries or who had worked and lived there, each program explored a country's background, cultural orientation, business practices, and social protocol.
       Participants learned, for instance, that if the coffee arrives in the middle of a presentation in Brazil, the presenter will probably be expected to start over again once everyone has been served. Indians can hold impassioned discussions about politics and still remain good friends.
       The programs were a partnership between student leaders of the Global Management Program and Barbara Kent of the Management Communication Program (MCP). "I wondered how we could capitalize on all the cultural resources we have among the students here," said Kent after an MCP cross-cultural workshop. Furio Ciacci, one of the codirectors of the GMP, found other students eager to help shape the programs. The first, focusing on life and business in Argen-tina, was offered a few weeks before a student study trip to that country. Other sessions, in some cases with film clips and other visual components, are now part of the Global Management Program's Web site.

Old School Ties

IF YOU'VE EVER WONDERED about the symbols that decorate your old school tie, your coffee mug, or even your diploma (and, hey, who hasn't?), here's a quick rundown.
       The tree frond is a symbol throughout the University. All Stanford schools feature on their crests a triple frond of the redwood tree, the palo alto. The Business School emblem adds a knot and a red lion.
       The knot symbolizes the unity of management. When the GSB was founded, business schools focused on functional business divisions. By contrast, from the beginning Stanford has attempted to emphasize management as a whole.
       The red lion, an alchemical symbol for gold, was borrowed from the coat of arms of the first dean of the School, Willard E. Hotchkiss. It representsfinance.
       And if red seems a strange color for gold, consider the color of the velvet trim on your academic gown that told the commencement crowd you were graduating from biz school. Drab. Not tan, not beige, but drab. Thanks to their other degree, JD/MBAs get to wear a purple-trimmed hood, but plain old MBAs and business school PhDs wear drab. Sorry.

Former Jackson Library Director Dies

MARION MCGILL SMITH, director emerita of the Jackson Library, died February 28. She was 84. Smith was head librarian for the National Labor Relations Board, Washington editor for the Research Institute of America, and circulation chief of all Stanford libraries before she became director of the Business School's library in 1957. During her tenure at Jackson, the collection grew from 24,000 books and documents housed in cramped quarters on the main quad to 250,000 volumes spread over three stories in the current GSB building.
       Smith recalled asking J. Hugh Jackson, the former Business School dean for whom the library is named, for a 15-cent desk blotter. She asked the next dean, Ernest Arbuckle, for $35,000 to computerize the periodicals collection. Dean Arjay Miller later provided $2.2 million to add a third floor to the library.
       Smith retired in 1979.

Natural Capital a Plus on the Balance Sheet

PAUL HAWKEN RECALLS reading a notice on the back of a Miami hotel room door: "If you see something of a suspicious nature, report it to management." Says Hawken, the founder of upscale gardening supply store Smith & Hawken: "That actually is what environmentalists have been trying to do for the last 30 years."
       Hawken made his report to management in the form of the 1998 Conradin von Gugelberg memorial speech on the environment, delivered at the GSB in February. While business has never been more successful, he says, every living system on earth is in decline. For all the attention paid to today's revolution in technology, what Hawken calls "natural capitalism" is the wave of the future. This calls for zero-pollution manufacturing, sustainable agriculture, and similar environmentally sensitive practices in business.
       "But how do you get natural capital on the balance sheet?" asked one member of the audience. "The first thing you do," Hawken said, "is to stop sub-sidizing its destruction. We subsidize the draining of the Everglades to put in sugar. We subsidize the price of sugar. We subsidize the water that the sugar grows in. We subsidize the cleaning up of the park-land from the growing of the sugar.... It just goes on and on."
       Hawken has demonstrated that natural capitalism works. An entrepreneur who has built two multimillion dollar businesses founded on sound environmental principles, he is currently a consultant on sustainable development to a number of Fortune 500 companies and the author of four books and the 17-part television series Growing a Business.

See How They Fly

Illustration by David Sheldon

FOUNDING AN INTERNET business may be the fastest way possible to go global, but sometimes the rest of the globe isn't quite up to speed. Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Internet bookseller Amazon. com, has customers in more than 160 countries. Shortly after the company launched in 1995, Amazon received a sizeable order from Bulgaria. The customer had no credit card, so he promised to mail his payment. Some weeks later, Bezos opened an envelope from Bulgaria containing a floppy disk with a message written on it: "The money is in the floppy disk. The customs officials steal the money. But they don't read English." Sure enough, there were two hundred-dollar bills tucked inside the floppy.
       Bezos included this startup tale in his keynote address at the high-tech-focused Conference on Entrepreneurship in March, a one-day meeting that attracted 350 high-tech entrepreneurs and wannabes to 23 workshops featuring more than 65 panelists, 22 of them GSB grads. Alums ranged from funders (venture capitalists Steve Baloff, MBA '82; Brook Byers, MBA '70; and Steve Jurvetson, MBA '95; investment banker David Blumberg, MBA '85; and grantmaker Cate Muther, MBA '78) to entrepreneurs of every stripe (Internet marketers Ken Hawk, MBA '95; Ariel Poler, MBA '94; and Tony Levitan, MBA '93; and biotechies Wes Sterman, MBA '87; and Roy Whitfield, MBA '79). If there was anything that all agreed on, it was that they are in at the start of a great adventure. "This is Kitty Hawk!" said one.