May 2005

Our International Perspective

by Dean Robert Joss

When our faculty-staff team returned from the Business School’s first-ever executive forum in India in mid-January, they were energized. Some 250 people attended the briefings we held in New Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore. Senior Associate Dean Dan Rudolph and Associate Dean for Executive Education Gale Bitter met directly with senior executives from India’s largest conglomerates. Professors Robert Burgelman and Seenu Srinivasan kept enthusiastic audiences attentive with lectures on strategy and marketing. As Dan Rudolph told one of India’s national financial papers, “We want to be at the vanguard of India’s exciting economic growth, not only in terms of attracting the best candidates for our programs but also learning about what challenges Indian business leaders are facing.”

In the future, expect to hear more about Stanford Business School abroad because we hope to carefully but surely expand our international activities and profile. Why now? We already were moving in this direction a year ago with the launch of our new Center for Global Business and the Economy aimed at creating a critical mass of cases, course content, and programming around international topics. Last summer, the Business School also embarked on its accreditation review, a sort of rigorous “360” evaluation by our peers, which was last undertaken 10 years ago.

The three-person committee of examiners included Harvard Business School Dean Kim Clark, MIT Sloan School of Management Dean Richard Schmalensee, and former University of Chicago President Hugo Sonnenschein. It is no surprise that the accrediting body, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, renewed our credentials in the fall. The team was generous in its summary of us as “an extraordinary institution, one of the very best business schools in the world by any standard.” However, as we all know, the point of any review is to find areas that can be enhanced to achieve the full potential of an individual or an institution. One area the team flagged was the need for the School to focus on the international business community.

The committee was correct. Does this mean we are about to launch a quarter-abroad exchange program such as those at some other schools? No. Our small size, which makes the experience here so personal, makes that difficult because we do not have enough faculty members to adequately staff an operation overseas. And our general management curriculum is already brimming with content that we believe our students should experience. Moreover, the nearly 30 percent of our students coming from outside the United States bring consistent international perspective to discussions inside and outside the classroom.

That said, 2005 has so far been a year in which we are executing and planning more things internationally than ever before. The goal: to better prepare our students and ourselves for global challenges by developing faculty ties and increasing the international content of our programs, exploring ways to deliver more executive education abroad, and bolstering our international visibility to ensure a steady flow of high-quality applicants from around the world to our Summer Institute, MBA, Sloan Master’s, PhD, and Executive Education programs.

In addition to the School’s efforts in India, I spent time in Mexico with alumni and corporate friends in January. El Norte newspaper published an article about management around a discussion arranged for me with one of its reporters. In March, I was scheduled to be in London for the Stanford International Alumni Conference featuring Business School economist John Roberts and organizational behavior professor Rod Kramer, among other luminaries from the University. This conference is another important doorway through which we can engage people abroad.

In April I also visited Australia and am scheduled to be in Hong Kong this spring. Already on the drawing board are plans for events in Argentina and Brazil (Fall 2005), Australia and New Zealand (Winter 2006), Japan (Spring 2006), as well as return visits to Europe. Our Stanford Global Supply Chain Management Forum is planning a conference in China (Spring 2006) in conjunction with the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Our faculty also are engaging in new discussions with professors abroad. In China, we developed a faculty exchange program with professors in the entrepreneurship field at Tsinghua University. And to cite just a few examples of new international content, senior faculty members Hau Lee and Seungjin Whang, who codirect the Global Supply Chain Management Forum, are pursuing fresh cases on Esquel (China), Toyota (Japan), TSMC (Taiwan), Smart Car (France), POSCO (Korea), Cemex (Mexico), Woolworth (UK), Starbucks (South America), and Nokia (Finland).

Looking ahead, I hope those of you outside the United States will notice a measured but increasing international profile for the School.

From the Editor

Dean's Column

PHOTOGRAPH BY NEAL HAMBERG