Stanford GSB Voices - Faculty
"Teaching Stanford MBAs has been one of the most surprisingly rewarding experiences of my life.
I say surprising, because as professors, we spend a lot of energy preparing a course—ensuring the topics are of interest to students, valuable to their educational development as future leaders, while ensuring that the content is delivered in stimulating ways.
The pleasant surprise comes when after all of this focus on what students can take away from the course, as professors we find ourselves taking back so much more by interacting with fantastic, brilliant students with an incomparable richness of experiences.
Renee Bowen
Assistant Professor of Economics
John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Faculty Scholar
"One of the big attractions of teaching at Stanford is the quality of our students.
I have been consistently impressed with their ability, their desire to learn, and most of all their willingness to work hard and to help each other.
The opportunity to teach such a high caliber group in such a collaborative environment is really unique to Stanford. We have definitely taken advantage of this culture with the design of the new curriculum, which allows students to quickly advance to the current state of the art in their domains of expertise, while at the same time providing them with the fundamentals needed to explore new areas."
Peter M. DeMarzo
Mizuho Financial Group Professor of Finance
"The best job in the world is being a faculty member at Stanford.
I get to work with bright, accomplished students who are committed to learning and becoming better leaders and managers, and with great colleagues.
I can take my research on negotiations and team performance and watch its impact on my students as they go out into the world. What could be better?"
Margaret A. Neale
John G. McCoy-Banc One Corporation Professor of Organizations and Dispute Resolution
"The great thing about being a faculty member at the Stanford GSB is the opportunity to get to know our extraordinary students personally.
Whether it is accompanying students on a global study trip, listening to new business ideas, or discussing career options more generally, the size of the GSB makes this kind of one-on-one relationship possible."
Garth Saloner, AM 1981, MS 1982, PhD 1982
Philip H. Knight Professor and Dean
"Since I moved to Stanford in 2005, I have been asked by so many about what is the essence of the GSB, that one thing which would aptly describe what the GSB is all about. For some time, my response was, “Well, innovation is at its core, and this is something that I like so much.” I then began to ask myself, what is innovation? Is it just about creating the next disruptive business model? Is it about discovering new ways of doing things? The answer came one balmy afternoon when I was having lunch with a group of MBA 08s. One of them put it this way, “the essence of the GSB, nay Stanford, is that to fail is not shameful.” That was a transformational statement for me. Innovation is all about NOT being shameful of failure. Innovation is about learning from failures and moving on to make a difference in people’s lives.
How has this perspective affected me as a faculty? Well, I have never been shy of trying out new concepts, new ideas in the classroom, but what the GSB has allowed me to do is to experiment in big ways. I taught a week-long course titled, “The Frinky Science of the Human Mind” a year ago, essentially highlighting cutting-edge research that is now going on in the area of brain research (which happens to be my area of interest). To me it was an experiment—if it fails, well, at least I tried. If it succeeded, then I would have in my own way touched the future. Thankfully, it was received well, but that is not the point. The point is that if I had not been at the GSB, I would not have made such a bold move. Audacity, optimism, and not being afraid to innovate (to fail, at times), well that is how I see myself at the GSB and how I see GSB students and GSB alums."
Baba Shiv
Professor of Marketing
Nobel Laureates
A. Michael Spence, the Philip H. Knight Professor, Emeritus and Dean Emeritus
Spence shared the 2001 prize with George A. Akerlof of University of California, Berkeley, and Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University. The three were honored for their work on signaling theory and credited by the Swedish Academy with creating the field of information economics.
Myron S. Scholes, the Frank E. Buck Professor of Finance, Emeritus
Scholes shared the 1997 Prize with Robert C. Merton of Harvard Business School. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honored the pair along with the late Fischer Black for "a new method to determine the value of derivatives."
William F. Sharpe, the STANCO 25 Professor of Finance, Emeritus
The 1990 prize was shared by Sharpe, Harry Markowitz, of City University of New York, and Merton Miller, University of Chicago, for their pioneering work in the theory of financial economics.