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The GSB and The Stanford Challenge

 
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Cultivating a Community of Innovation:
Faculty Excellence

A fall 2008 letter from Dean Joss

Make a Gift NowAs we begin a new academic year at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, I am
particularly proud of the progress we are making toward our goal of building our faculty. We just finished a banner year in recruiting with the addition of 13 new tenure-line faculty members, including eight men and five women — all top scholars, in the fields of finance, operations, economics, political economy, accounting, organizational behavior, and marketing.

We must grow our faculty to sustain the redesigned MBA curriculum we launched a year ago. Their work involves a considerable increase in new course and case development, personalized student advising, faculty-led service learning and global study trips, and direction of our four centers—and that is in addition to the rigorous and creative research that has always distinguished our faculty. With faculty at the heart of the school, we continue to invest in their pursuit of new ideas, strengthen
resources and mentoring for junior faculty, and celebrate and reward teaching and research excellence.

Among the many accolades our faculty members have recently received, two grants toward university-wide initiatives demonstrate collaboration undertaken by the directors of our Center for Global Business and the Economy. Stanford’s Presidential Fund for Innovation in International Studies recently made an award to John Roberts, the John H. Scully Professor of Economics, Strategic Management, and International Business and the BP Faculty Fellow in Global Management for 2007-08.
Designed to support teams of faculty who do not typically work together, the fund advances collaborative research and teaching. Roberts’ team, which includes colleagues from the law school and the economics department, is examining why poor business management practices persist in India; the relative importance of informational, legal, and development barriers; and the implications for poverty reduction. Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment awarded an Environmental Venture Project grant to a research team that includes William Barnett, the Thomas M. Siebel Professor of Business Leadership, Strategy, and Organizations, along with colleagues in anthropology, law,
and biology. The grant will support their project on the impact of ecotourism on Costa Rica’s coastal parks and build a model framework for sustainable tourism development.

In other news about excellence in teaching, we were gratified to hear that more than 40 professors were nominated for one of the three awards that recognize not only outstanding work in the classroom but also advising and working with students in related settings. Professors Garth Saloner, William Barnett, and Robert J. Flanagan were honored by students who presented them with the 2008 distinguished teaching awards.

Saloner, the Jeffrey S. Skoll Professor of Electronic Commerce,
Strategic Management, and Economics, and the Dhirubhai Ambani Faculty Fellow in Entrepreneurship for 2007-08, headed the committee that created the new MBA curriculum and is a director of the school’s Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. He has accompanied students on global study trips to countries including South Africa and Ghana, and was honored with the 2008 MBA Distinguished Teacher Award by MBA students who said he “demonstrated an uncanny command of the classroom: tough, rigorous, serious, attentive, and fun.” Barnett, the
recipient of the PhD Distinguished Service Award, was honored by the doctoral students he advises, and Flanagan, the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of International Labor Economics and Policy Analysis, Emeritus, was presented with the Sloan Distinguished Teaching Award.

We are blessed with such great faculty. We also are very fortunate to have alumni and friends whose investments underpin our efforts, both for faculty support and our other campaign priorities: annual giving, student financial aid, our four centers, and the Knight Management Center. Every gift to the GSB matters, and every gift counts toward The Stanford Challenge. Your collective generosity of time and resources takes many forms, and you are an integral part of the transformation under way at the GSB.

Robert L. Joss
Philip H. Knight Professor and Dean
Sloan ’66, MBA ’67, PhD ’70