May 2004

Healthy Disagreements

Magazines are supposed to offer points of view, something to squeeze into your thinking cap or even occasionally steam up your collar. At Stanford Business, we make no claim to offer multiple sides to every question. You will find an unavoidable bias, for example, toward Stanford and higher education in these pages. You will also find many articles that spotlight one faculty member's research or one alum's point of view derived from experience. Some will make you say "hogwash," as Hank McKinnell did when he read Professor Jeremy Bulow's analysis of U.S. pharmaceutical company regulation in our November 2003 issue.

McKinnell, MBA/PhD '69, is the chairman and CEO of Pfizer, one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies. He fired off a rebuttal to Bulow. As a courtesy, I called Bulow to inform him a critique would be published. His response was what I would hope to get from any faculty member here. "If there is a little honest debate about something that reasonable people can disagree about," he said, "I think it spices things up and gets more attention."

Professors Margaret Neale and Deborah Gruenfeld make a related about the value of debate. Their separate research projects indicate we are better decision makers when our working environment includes a critical mass of people who disagree with us. A token dissenter can be too easily written off or coopted, but a sizeable minority forces those in the majority to think harder.

In a recent interview, David Kreps, senior associate dean, discussed the debate that must go on in our students' heads because they take courses at the School that sometimes offer conflicting guidance. The microeconomists' view of a management problem might not agree with the organizational behaviorist's or with the operations researcher's. A major reason Stanford MBAs earn good salaries, he says, is that they know how to "exercise honest skepticism, bringing [multiple] inputs to bear" when making business judgments.

We hope this magazine provides a few useful inputs as well, and we invite you to provide us with more reasoned views to pass on through these pages.

Kathleen O'Toole
Editor

From the Editor

Dean's Column

Kathleen O'Toole
Editor