MAY 2007
Faculty News
Dan Rudolph, MBA '80, and associate dean of the Business School, John
Hennessy, University president, and James Plummer, Stanford School of engineering dean, at a discussion panel in Mumbai.
Photo by Mamen Saura
Stanford Brings Executive Program to India
Business and Engineering faculty teamed up in January to offer Stanford’s first multidisciplinary executive program to nearly 200 business and policy leaders in India. “Innovative Strategies for a Dynamic Economy” was the over-arching topic of the two-day program in Mumbai, which featured sessions on strategies, management concepts, and technologies that will shape the future of Indian industry.
Stanford faculty members also did interviews with Indian news media on the trip. Hayagreeva “Huggy” Rao, for instance, spoke about customer relations in a session with the executives, some of them Stanford alumni, and then gave an interview to the Times of India. He discussed how India’s hypergrowth in telecommunications and retail sectors can lead companies to “rob Peter to pay Paul” as they take on too many customers too fast without making more strategic choices. Rao is the Atholl McBean Professor of Organizational Behavior and Human Resources at the Business School. Narayana Murthy, chairman and chief mentor of Infosys Technologies, and Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries Limited, also spoke during the program, which included panel discussions.
Achieving breakthrough business success in India requires overcoming a host of challenges—infrastructure, recruitment, bureaucracy—by deploying proven management strategies and leveraging the latest technological innovations in enterprising ways. “No single university and no single company are going to be able to solve these grand technological, business, and societal challenges by themselves. What is key for this century are the partnerships that can be built,” said James D. Plummer, dean of the Stanford School of Engineering, who participated in the program, as did University President John Hennessy.
Other faculty who participated included:
Garth Saloner, the Jeffrey S. Skoll Professor of Electronic Commerce, Strategic Management, and Economics at the Business School, who is widely known for his expertise in business strategy, the effect of industry organization on competition and profitability, demand for and effective adoption of information technology by business end-users, and strategy and competition in the computer industry;
The program was a return trip to India for the Business School, which offered one-day executive education forums in New Delhi, Bangalore, and Mumbai in January 2005. The collaborative program this time reflects Stanford’s multidisciplinary approach to education in which faculty and students from disciplines that are often isolated jointly explore solutions to complex, pressing problems. Meanwhile, the Business School has also launched an exchange program for its MBA students with the Indian Institute of Management at Bangalore.
Learn more about the exchange program.
Dutch Adopt Enthoven’s Managed Care Plan
The Netherlands has become the first nation to inaugurate a system of universal health insurance based on regulated competition in the private sector. Its program, adopted in January 2006, draws extensively on a plan first proposed in 1978 by Professor Alain Enthoven, who coined the term “managed competition.”
The new Dutch system requires each citizen to buy individual health insurance from an insurance company of their choice at a flat rate minimum premium cost of about 1,200 euros a year.
Each individual pays an additional income-related tax contribution to the government to help subsidize the premiums for low-income groups so that everyone is covered by health insurance. The tax monies also help support coverage plans that tend to attract a greater percentage of chronically ill people, whose treatment is generally more expensive. The system keeps risk and costs spread evenly among various insurance plans so that their premiums can stay competitive.
“What the Dutch are now doing is very different from what we have in the United States, where most people are insured through their employers and thus do not have a choice of insurers,” explains Enthoven, the Marriner S. Eccles Professor of Public and Private Management, Emeritus. He was asked to give the keynote speech to the Dutch/Flemish Association of Health Economists last November in Rotterdam.
More recently, Enthoven has been advising the Wisconsin Health Plan to implement a system similar to that of the Dutch. Wisconsin is aiming to enact a payroll tax in lieu of employer contributions to health insurance. The state will translate this tax into a fixed premium contribution that covers the lowest priced health plan in a given district. Those who want a more costly plan will pay the difference. Insurance plans will contract with a private corporation that will manage competition and market insurance to individuals.
