|
|
 |
 |
August 2005 Leadership Winner Touts Soft SkillsHerb Allison, MBA ’71, was a naval officer when he applied to business school from his post in Vietnam. When he entered Stanford in the fall of 1969, he says, “The School became a sanctuary for me, or better yet, a halfway house for reentering a society that had changed dramatically since I had joined the military.” In remarks accepting the Business School’s 2005 Excellence in Leadership Award, Allison, now chairman, president, and CEO of TIAA-CREF, reminisced about his years at Stanford and his long career in finance. “We spent more time than most MBA students studying so-called ‘soft learning’ like organizational behavior,” he said. “As my career progressed, I came to see that the soft skills were far more important in terms of business success. “To understand why, you need look no further than the scandals that have engulfed one company after another in recent years. Virtually all of them can be traced to breakdowns in the organization’s culture—to widespread violations of ethical principles and cultural norms. In almost every instance, dozens of people knew about the wrongdoing, but no one stepped forward—in part because the culture supported unethical behavior.” Now, after passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, corporate boards anxiously focus on financials, he said. “But as we learned long ago at Stanford, financials are not as precise or informative as they may seem. In truth, the real predictor of success or failure is culture, and I believe that companies must focus more on building strong and ethical cultures—and that their boards must take responsibility for assessing culture in the same way they assess financials.” Allison spent 28 years at Merrill Lynch, where he became president and CEO. After stepping down in 1999, he served as national finance chairman for U.S. Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign. Allison is currently on the board of directors of the New York Stock Exchange and, until recently, was chair of the Vietnam Education Foundation (a federal agency) and a board member of the United Negro College Fund. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Previous Spreadsheet
