Spreadsheet Three

A Gala Night for Jack McDonald
NEARLY 130 PEOPLE gathered in October to honor finance professor Jack McDonald, MBA '62, PhD '67, for 30 years of teaching at the Business School. Bill Oberndorf and Tim Bliss, both MBA '78, and Bob Kirby, who has been a guest lecturer in McDonald's classes over the years, hosted the event. Financier Warren Buffett, legendary chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway and a foe of stock splits, is another regular visitor to McDonald's class Investment Management and Entrepreneurial Finance. Buffett couldn't attend but sent a banner saying he hoped McDonald would teach his course at least until Berkshire stock split.

Fruit Flies of Industry

Illustration by A.J. Graces

WHAT DO FRUIT FLIES have to do with business? Ask Charles Fine, PhD '83.
       "Biologists study fruit flies because their rapid rates of evolution permit rapid learning that can then be applied to slower-clockspeed species--like humans," says Fine, who is now a professor of management at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Fine's new book, Clockspeed: Winning Industry Control in the Age of Temporary Advantage (Perseus Books), "shows how to study 'industrial fruit flies,' those fast-clockspeed industries, such as Internet services, personal computers, and multimedia entertainment, that evolve through new generations at breakneck speed. It demonstrates how to draw inferences from what we observe and implement these ideas throughout an organization."
       Slowly evolving entities like nations and universities, too, may benefit from benchmarking Drosophila. And, Fine suggests, while business schools may be the fruit flies of the university, they would do well to look to high-clockspeed industries for a model.

Virtual Registration
THE FOLLOWING IS A TRUE story: Fall 1998 registration involved no lines. No waits. No kidding.
       Beginning September 23, the GSB's new intranet registration system replaced the hard copy system of yore. Second-year MBA students, who had already preregistered the old way in the spring, and first-years, who had been assigned classes, were able to drop, add, and switch courses from their desktops. In the middle of the night, if they so chose. Requests were processed each morning beginning at 5, in plenty of time for students to get to their new 8 o'clock classes--or to sleep peacefully through the ones they had dropped. Virtual preregistration is next on the agenda. The registrar hopes to have it in place winter quarter.

Directors Hired for PMP, GMP Programs

Photo by Robert Holmgren

IN WHAT LOOKS TO BE AN especially active year for the two certificate programs, both the Public Management Program (PMP) and the Global Management Program (GMP) began it with new directors.
       Julie Juergens brings a wealth of nonprofit experience to the PMP, which celebrates its 25th anniversary reunion in the spring. Juergens, a former student-body president at UC-Davis who holds a master's degree from Stanford's School of Education, was until recently a staffer at the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford. Juergens also worked with GSB senior lecturer Kirk Hanson on the 1997 Corporate Community Involvement Study of companies in Silicon Valley and coauthored the report.
       Margaret Rightmire, an MBA from Dartmouth's Amos Tuck School of Business Administration, brings administrative know-how to the multidimensional Global Management Program. Her most recent position was with CSC Healthcare Inc., where she managed a variety of strategic and operational projects for nonprofit hospital systems and health plans. The GMP is not only an academic program, but it also serves as an umbrella over the activities of a range of international and regional student clubs. Rightmire had barely settled into her office when the GMP put on the GSB Goodwill Games (see story).

Lookin' Good
IT MAY NOT HAVE BEEN a trip to Mardi Gras, but the March 1998 issue of Stanford Business made it to New Orleans in September. The occasion was the 1998 conference of the University and College Designers Association, a national organization supporting designers who promote education, where the issue was displayed along with other winners of the association's annual design competition. Of 1,100 entrants in 59 categories, there were 65 winners in all. Stanford Business, designed by the magazine's art director Steven Powell, placed third in its category, "single issue/magazine," winning a commendation of excellence.