Spreadsheet Two

The Way We Were
TIMES HAVE CHANGED. After pondering the results of the most recent alumni/ae career survey, we looked back in the pages of our grandparent journal, the Alumni Bulletin, and found that in 1939 Professor of Industrial Management Paul Holden attempted to canvas all 346 graduates of the first 10 MBA classes and succeeded in coming up with employment data on no fewer than 314 of them.
       It seems that back in the thirties, smokestack industry was ascendant and globalization was a concept whose time had yet to come. As reported in the Bulletin, more than one-quarter of the first alums went into manufacturing. Finance, retailing and wholesaling, and the oil industry were next in popularity, and the top employers were Standard Oil of California, Columbia Steel, and Shell Oil.
       Average starting salaries ranged from a high of $155 a month for the first graduating class in 1928 to a low of $100 in 1934 at the nadir of the Depression. And as for geographical distribution, while 66 percent of MBA students originally came from California, 76 percent stayed on after graduation. Only 4 percent of alums left the country--this at a time when "out of the country" included Hawaii.

New PhD and Sloan Students Arrive
SOMEWHAT LOST IN THE wake of the fabulous MBA Class of 2000 (see "For the Record," left) are students entering the Business School's two smaller but no less distinguished degree programs: the doctoral program and the one-year Sloan program.
       The 19 new PhD students, selected from 513 applicants, are younger by a year than their MBA counterparts, having a median age of 25. They also have had a year's less work experience--3 years as opposed to 4.1. Women and international students each make up slightly more than half the class; 3 of the Americans are minority students. The 19 doctoral students graduated from as many institutions--9 in the United States and 10 outside. More than half (58 percent) majored in one of the social sciences, and 10 of the 19 already have earned advanced degrees.
       The 48 Sloan students are, as usual, the oldest of the Business School's graduate students. Ranging in age from 32 to 48, with a median age of 36.5, the Sloans are mid-level executives who are sponsored by their companies for the one-year master of science program. This year, 15 percent are women and 10 percent are from public-sector organizations. Over the years, the Sloan program has become increasingly global in outlook. As in the doctoral program, more than half of the Sloan students come from outside the United States. The Sloan program's 27 international students are divided equally among Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Additionally, nearly all the Sloan students have worked at one time or another outside their native countries.

Garman Heads SBSAA in 1999
ANDREW GARMAN, MBA '87, will take over as president of the Stanford Business School Alumni Association (SBSAA) in January after serving five years on the organization's board. Before he joined the board, Garman was president of the SBSAA's Peninsula chapter. His two-year chapter presidency marked a particularly active time for the group; there were about 40 events a year, ranging from seminars and venture forums to lunches and skiing and rafting trips.
       Garman sees the SBSAA leadership as a sounding board for alums--open to their concerns and to learning what activities and events appeal to them. He also sees it as a vehicle to help them better connect with the School and with each other. This year, he feels, it is important for the SBSAA officers to bring the voice of the alumni/ae body to the new dean.
       Garman recently moved from Palo Alto to the New York area to join Bankers Trust as managing director of BT Strategic Ventures, where he is responsible for the development of financial services and electronic commerce ventures. His long professional involvement with high tech makes him especially interested in developing an Internet program that will help facilitate communication among alums.

On Your Mark, Get Set, Go Crazy

Illustration by A.J. Graces

TAKE AN OLD-FASHIONED American outdoor barbecue, mix liberally with a traditional Japanese field day (undookai), and add 500 or so Business School students, faculty, staff, and their families. What you have is the first GSB Goodwill Games.
       Held on campus on a sunny autumn Saturday, the day featured team warfare of the friendliest sort, wacky games (a centipede race, a no-hands eating relay, a cavalry duel complete with human horsies), and a decidedly international ambiance. Participants were divided into teams representing regions of the world (Europe/ Africa, the Americas, Asia/ Australia, and Southeast Asia) and of the United States. Dean Spence flew in from Tokyo especially for the occasion. Billed as a community-building event by its student organizers (its motto: unity through diversity), the GSB Goodwill Games lived up to its name.

Spreading the Word
ONE OF THE MAJOR GOALS of the Business School is "to affect the practice of management," either directly or through dissemination of its research to the wider educational community. High-sounding words, but not empty ones. Over the past summer 50 otherwise "vacationing" faculty directly influenced working managers by teaching in the Executive Education Program. One of them, Edward Lazear, also instructed a group of 50 faculty members from other business schools on how to teach the material from his innovative textbook, Personnel Economics for Managers.
       Farther afield, in July John Roberts cochaired an international workshop, "Corporate Governance, Contracts, and Managerial Incentives," at Humboldt University in Berlin (Lazear was a keynote speaker), and Associate Professor of Accounting Mary Barth traveled to China, where she was one of only eight professors worldwide invited to address the annual conference of the Chinese Accounting Professors Association.
       As vice president of the American Accounting Association (AAA), Barth found that her counterparts at the Chinese association, which was formed just a few years ago, were hungry for information on how the AAA is organized, how it manages its journals, and how the review process works to ensure quality. Barth was invited to join the editorial board of one of the country's accounting journals, and during the conference, she interviewed the top five PhD students in China and had the "excruciating" duty of selecting only one to be sent to the AAA's Doctoral Consortium.