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February 2005 Inside the Classroomby Dean Robert Joss It is a Friday afternoon and the end of another jam-packed week. I am in the classroom with Jim Ellis, who coteaches Managing Growing Enterprises with me. This is an elective. Pioneered by our outstanding MBA Class of 1980 Consulting Professor of Management Irv Grousbeck as a seminar in 1993, the course has become so popular that we expanded it last year from three to four sections, and this year we added a fifth section. I have enjoyed teaching one of those with Ellis, MBA ’93, who cofounded Asurion, a wireless services company, and is now a lecturer at the School. Students read and engage in group study on a score of cases, but we don’t neatly dissect and hand them answers. We try to get them to own as many of the issues as possible—for them to experience the general management role personally. We role play. The wooden chairs squeak as students shift their weight and gesture with their arms and hands as they try to demonstrate how they would manage in a tight spot. There are no slam-dunk answers here. “They engage with it,” says Ellis. “There’s a hunger for it. They don’t get it right the first time.” We talk about the founder of a company who had to seek the resignation of two of his board members. They were people who had believed in him early, invested personal funds, and brought important people to the startup. But they were distracted by issues at their own firms, skipped meetings, and were no longer measuring up as directors on a board that needed badly to be reconstituted. How would you get them to leave? What would you say? we ask. Especially if one director is a personal friend of the family. One student, trying to be diplomatic, suggests to the board member that he resign, but Ellis, playing the director, resists. Another student tries to fire the director, who happens to be an attorney, outright. More resistance. A third suggests offering more shares to get him off the board. I ask: How will that make the other board members feel? Near the end of a 90-minute exercise, our guest, venture capitalist Geoff Yang, MBA ’85, gives his seasoned, practical advice about how venture-backed CEOs should build and manage a board. Then at the start of the next class session, Ellis and I offer our own summary of the key learning from this case in chief executive–board relations. Every class session raises tough situations that managers face at one time or another. They are circumstances for which books don’t prepare you completely. What would you say if you had to fire someone? What would you do if your manager, the boss’s son, had mishandled a personnel situation? What do you do if an employee walks into your office with a sexual harassment complaint? In one case, we covered an ethical situation in which a beer company manager had to confront some sleazy practices around concession kickbacks at ballparks. At Stanford, we expose students to important basic knowledge about economics, organizational behavior, accounting, and other key business functions in our core curriculum. We push people to think in the required courses and to examine what both the collected and latest research tells us—about what constitutes a good strategy or what we know is likely to happen when you criticize people, for example. Electives vary, of course. Some focus more deeply on a narrow area of knowledge. Others center on project-based learning; in Evaluating Entrepreneurial Opportunities, for example, students create business plans. Others, like the one I’ve described here, force students to think about what they would do and then act in a specific situation. There is an important step beyond intellectualizing. It’s learning by doing. Yet, students tell us these are among our most challenging offerings in the context of the larger program. We continue to keep our curriculum flexible and varied, giving students fundamental knowledge and analytical skills as well as the opportunity to apply their core learning to deal with real situations. |
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Dean's Column
