February 2006

Faculty News

Creator of ‘‘Touchy-Feely’’ Honored by Alums

“The idea that you get educated once and then apply it forever might have worked one or two generations ago,” says David Bradford, senior lecturer in organizational behavior, “but it is not going to work today. Knowledge is generated at too rapid a pace, and conditions change too rapidly.”

Bradford is the latest faculty member to be honored by the School’s alumni association with the Jaedicke Silver Apple award for service to the School’s graduates. He was recognized in October during a ceremony on Reunion Weekend for leading seminars and workshops for alumni chapters and for teaching continuing education courses through the School’s Lifelong Learning program for alumni.

Celebrated by many alums for his long-running MBA class on Interpersonal Dynamics—best known as “Touchy-Feely”—and also for an MBA class on High-Performance Leadership, Bradford in recent years also has been teaching a four-day seminar for alums called Interpersonal Dynamics for High-Performance Leaders, which combines content from the two courses. It has been well received but he says he sees the need for lifelong learning forms other than short courses: “We need to fundamentally rethink what people need throughout all the stages of their professional lives.”

What is the difference between teaching MBA students and MBA alumni? “If you live long enough, you realize that you can fall off the horse and get back on again,” Bradford says. “I think many of our MBAs are very much afraid of failure. But those of us who have been around awhile realize that failure is inevitable, and what’s important is how you handle it, not how you avoid it.”

Alumni also appreciate more the “softer” managerial issues. “MBAs are primarily focused on the technical courses, such as finance and accounting—which, of course, are very important,” he says. But with experience comes the realization that although mastery of those functions are challenging, the more difficult problems tend to be human problems. “There’s often the attitude that if it weren’t for people, organizations would be great places to work. Alumni tend to have had a great deal of experience with the complexity of human interactions. The discussions tend to be more sophisticated and nuanced as a result, and very personally rewarding.”

Institutes Honor Plambeck

Business scholars generally have not taught or published work on the social and environmental stewardship issues that many companies now face in the global economy. That is changing, however, according to two organizations who biennially survey MBA programs in the United States and elsewhere. The Aspen Institute and the World Resources Institute rated Stanford Graduate School of Business first among 91 MBA-granting institutions that participated in the survey, and they named the School’s Erica Plambeck, associate professor of operations, information, and technology, as the 2005 “rising star” in this field.

Plambeck, who earned her doctorate in engineering at Stanford, has some interesting research projects and case studies. She is studying innovation and supply chain coordination by addressing challenges confronting FedEx with its multi-tier suppliers for hybrid-fueled trucks. She also looks at emerging regulation of electronics waste and its implication for innovation, pricing, profit, and environmental impact. One of her case studies, now used in several leading business schools, traces the greening of Hayward Lumber Co. and demonstrates how environmental product differentiation can be a source of competitive advantage. Her earlier research involved integrating the economic and scientific impacts of global warming in modeling.

Plambeck is part of the University-wide Institute for the Environment, and she teaches the core MBA course in operations, which includes sessions on waste reduction and pollution prevention in specific manufacturing situations; the benefits of environmental management systems certification; methods for internalizing otherwise external costs such as pollution in optimization models; environmental impacts of different agricultural harvesting methods; and the ethical, ergonomic, and safety concerns in machine-paced assembly lines.

In their report to encourage business schools to “move beyond grey pinstripes,” the Aspen and World Resources institutes said more schools are preparing students to navigate social and environmental issues. Among those surveyed, 54 percent require one or more courses in ethics, corporate social responsibility, or business and society—an increase of almost 60 percent since 2001. However, only about 4 percent of faculty in the programs publish on these subjects in peer-reviewed journals.

Alumni to Know

Faculty News

Newsmakers

Lazear Takes National Stage on Tax Reform

Since President Reagan and Congress agreed to simplify the federal tax code two decades ago, about 15,000 pages—or roughly two pages a day—of complexity have been added. The tax law once again is riddled with illogical inequities and even conflicts between provisions, according to the panel of former politicians, government officials, and academics who make up President Bush’s Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform.

“Although many see simplification as the primary goal of tax reform, promoting economic growth is a more important objective,” wrote Business School Professor Edward Lazear and fellow economist James Poterba of MIT in a recent Wall Street Journal essay. Both are part of the nine-member panel that in November proposed two alternative but similar tax reform plans. The one favored by Lazear and Poterba would allow businesses immediately to expense investments and would, they wrote, “encourage new investment and significantly increase productivity and wage growth.”

Tax reform proposals tend to attract critics and initial press coverage focused on politically unpopular recommendations to reduce tax breaks for homeowners with large mortgages, limit deductions for employers and employees with generous health insurance coverage, and abolish write-offs for state and local taxes. But Lazear and Poterba focused on reforms that affect business investment.

“A substantial body of economic research suggests that tax wedges between the before-tax and after-tax return on saving and investment are particularly detrimental to long-term economic growth,” they wrote. One goal, they argued, should be to equalize the taxes paid on investments so taxes did not distort economic decision-making.

Both economists have been mentioned in press reports as candidates for leading the president’s Council of Economic Advisors, should the current chairman, Ben Bernanke, be confirmed as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Bernanke was a member of the Business School faculty from 1979 to 1983.