Stanford Business

AUGUST 2006


Developing Leadership in Ambiguous Environs

When Ute Breden and five other first-year MBA students were assigned to help Avni Jamdar develop a fair-trade clothing business, neither their role nor the expected result was spelled out for them. “I was really surprised by how paralyzed I felt without an explicit, pre-defined goal,” Breden said.

Learning to thrive in an ambiguous environment is not easy for business students—or for anyone else. The project was just one part of the two-quarter Leadership Development Platform, a program designed to help students develop their leadership skills through a combination of coursework, application labs, and discussions with leaders. This year, the program’s capstone experience partnered each team of MBA students with a fellow from Stanford’s Reuters Digital Vision Program, a mid-career sabbatical program that brings social entrepreneurs like Jamdar to the University to pursue projects that apply information and communication technologies to problems faced by underserved communities.

As the MBA students worked to define their roles, they learned the importance of building strong relationships while simultaneously managing performance. The students analyzed their projects using management frameworks introduced in their core courses. In the process, they gained not only analytic experience but practice in establishing goals, managing expectations, and influencing others. Jamdar’s team helped her define her company’s competitive advantage: The clothing she sells will come with life stories of the women who make it. Ultimately, each team had to convincingly present its ideas to independent reviewers.

“The projects gave students an opportunity to struggle with some very real leadership challenges and illustrated how important managing relationships and communicating effectively is to developing and executing sound strategies,” said Beth Benjamin, director of the Business School’s Center for Leadership Development and Research, which runs the Leadership Development Platform.