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November 2005 A Milestone Gift for a Big IdeaI have already written about one “big idea” in management education under way at the Graduate School of Business—the Leadership Development Platform, a co-curricular program to develop student leadership skills (August 2003). Thanks to an extraordinary $30 million gift from Anne T. and Robert M. Bass, MBA ’74—the largest gift in the School’s history—we are able to go full speed in developing our next big idea: a third level of learning that takes us beyond core courses and traditional electives to what we will call the Bass Seminars. The defining characteristic of Bass Seminars is that students take on much more of the responsibility for course development. The seminars provide students a truly hands-on learning experience while the instructors set the agenda. For instance, Professor Robert Burgelman and lecturer Andy Grove, the former CEO and chairman of Intel, offer a Bass Seminar titled Strategy Making in the Information Technology Industry. Burgelman and Grove assign summer reading, and when the fall rolls around the students form teams and choose specific areas to research. One team might study developments in China; another might look at how information technology influences the music industry. The instructors present lectures early on, but the heart of the course involves the teams reporting back what they have learned and concluded, followed by discussion. Many electives employ team-based research projects, but Bass Seminars shift the emphasis. The students’ work product is the muscle and flesh, placed on the skeletal framework established by the instructor. A handful of courses already meet the criteria for being Bass Seminars. Subjects include macroeconomic analysis, corporate social responsibility in the developing world, entrepreneurial design to alleviate poverty, and the human resource management of “talent.” The enrollments in these seminars are capped at 20 or 30, instead of the usual 60 to 72 for electives. Many are multidisciplinary. A seminar on bioengineering innovation mixes MBA students with graduate students from the schools of Engineering and Medicine. Both students and instructors describe these courses as being their best classroom experiences. The seminars are hard work but they provide a level of student–faculty engagement that more than compensates. Stanford Business School is better positioned than any of our peers to offer this third level of learning. Bass Seminars leverage both the small and intimate nature of the Stanford MBA Program and the tremendous resources provided by Stanford University. They fit well the culture of cross-school interaction being fostered by University President John Hennessy. Our ambition is to expand the number of Bass Seminars, so that every one of our 750 MBA students has the opportunity to take at least one. Courses of such small size and individualized curriculum require a tremendous investment. To ensure that each student is able to take at least one Bass Seminar, we will need the equivalent of at least eight more full-time faculty. Fortunately, our vision is shared by the Basses, whose $30 million commitment, in addition to supporting seminars, also will enlarge our faculty endowment and create a challenge fund for the Business School Fund, which supports annual operations. I am grateful to them and to our students and faculty members—their combined efforts make Bass Seminars a success. |
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Dean's Column
