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Stanford Business magazine

 

Faculty News

Cross-Collaborative Teaching at Stanford

RajanBasic accounting is important not only to people in the business world, but also to other professionals. So Business School accounting professor Madhav Rajan spends part of his time at Stanford Law School teaching a financial accounting course to law students. Increasingly, Stanford is drawing on the University’s joint resources to help prepare students for complex careers. Rajan is among more than two dozen Business School faculty members who teach courses either offered for students of other schools and departments on campus, or that are jointly listed for other graduate students.

This year two MBA electives, Interpersonal Dynamics and High-Performance Leadership, were used as the basis for a new elective course available to graduate students from Law, Engineering, Earth Sciences, Education, Humanities and Sciences, and Medicine.

Known as Interpersonal Influence and Leadership, the course was designed to help students learn how to build more open, effective, and rewarding relationships en route to becoming more effective leaders. Developed by Business School lecturer Carole Robin, the course was taught winter and spring quarters by lecturer Scott Bristol.

The original Interpersonal Dynamics class, known to generations of GSB students as Touchy Feely, was pioneered in the late 1960s by David Bradford, the Eugene D. O’Kelly II Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Emeritus, and Jerry Porras, the Lane Professor of Organizational Behavior and Change, Emeritus.

Another new course available fall quarter for the first time is Core Legal Concepts: Thinking Like a Lawyer, developed jointly by Stanford’s professional schools, including Business. The goal is to teach students how to deal effectively with both constraints and opportunities created by the law. It addresses the legal aspects of business agreements and relationships and is available to MBA, Sloan, and PhD students.

Accounting Leader Sprouse Dies

Robert T. Sprouse, a former Business School accounting professor whose work influenced the conceptual framework of the nation’s accounting standards, died Dec. 23 at Scripps Mercy Hospital in Chula Vista, Calif., from prostate cancer complications. He was 85.

At the GSB from 1962-1973, Sprouse was “a first-class faculty member in all ways. Students flocked to him,” recalled Robert Joss, dean of the Business School. Over his long career, Sprouse wrote two textbooks and more than 40 articles and was inducted into the Accounting Hall of Fame.

A San Diego County native, he earned a doctorate from the University of Minnesota and taught first at the University of California, Berkeley, where, with faculty mentor Maurice Moonitz, he coauthored a paper that argued for the use of replacement costs and net realizable values for the valuation of inventories and fixed assets. He then moved to the Harvard Business School where he worked with Robert Anthony on a project dealing with accounting for long-lived assets. He joined the Stanford Business School faculty in 1962 and left in 1973 to become a member of the newly created Financial Accounting Standards Board. His 1966 article, “Accounting for What-You-May-Call-Its,” in the Journal of Accountancy, had laid the groundwork for the board’s asset-liability approach.

Following his 1985 retirement from the board, Sprouse taught for three years at San Diego State University, provided litigation support in court proceedings, and bred and raced thoroughbred horses. He is survived by his wife, Fran, and a daughter and a son.

New Books on Competition, Medical Innovation

BarnettA book on medical innovation and another on organizational competition are the latest to be published by members of the Business School faculty.

The Red Queen Among Organizations: How Competitiveness Evolves by William Barnett was published in February by Princeton University Press. Barnett is the Thomas M. Siebel Professor of Business Leadership, Strategy, and Organizations. His book examines the effects—including the unforeseen perils—of competing and winning using examples from the computer manufacturing and commercial banking industries. Barnett uses the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland as a symbol that businesses have to run fast just to keep their place.

EatonInnovation in Medical Technology: Ethical Issues and Challenges is authored by Margaret Eaton, a lecturer in management at the GSB, and Donald Kennedy, a former Stanford University president, professor, and commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration who now is editor-in-chief of Science and co-chair of the National Academies’ of Science ProjectCommittee on Science, Technology, and Law. Eaton teaches an interdisciplinary course about the bioscience industry, a category that includes biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, genomics, vaccines, and medical diagnostics, and she has been a senior research scholar at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics.

Eaton and Kennedy examine the ethical, legal, and social problems that arise with cutting-edge medical technology by using examples of four powerful and largely unregulated technologies: off-label use of drugs, innovative surgery, assisted reproduction, and neuroimaging. Their book is published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Video Interview with Margaret Eaton and Donald Kennedy

Bill Miller Likened to David Packard

MillerWilliam Miller, who continues to impress the tycoons of Silicon Valley with his deep knowledge of the region and technical innovation, was honored Feb. 22 with the 2008 David Packard Award. Miller is the Herbert Hoover Professor of Public and Private Management, Emeritus, at the Business School, a frequent investor and cofounder of companies, and currently the cofounder and chair of a nanotechnology company that hopes to provide diesel automotive and stationary power industries with catalyst materials that reduce exhaust emissions. (Nanostellar, Inc., was one of four nanotech firms accepted in 2008 into the World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneer program.)

The David Packard Award is presented annually by Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network, to honor a person who “brings an entrepreneurial, cross-boundary, problem-solving approach” to the region’s challenges. “Recipients embody the spirit of David Packard, Silicon Valley’s legendary pioneer who set the highest standard for civic engagement,” the award sponsors say.

Miller’s multi-faceted contributions include his past leadership as a Stanford provost and professor, as president of the research institute SRI International, and his continuing involvement as a venture capitalist, entrepreneur, and inveterate institution builder.(He is also the coauthor of book on Asian technology development.)

The Packard Award was presented as part of a daylong “State of the Valley” conference in San Jose, at which Miller participated in a panel discussion of how the Valley can be a model for climate protection and economic growth. He is among those Valley industrialists who hope the area might become a major center for development of cleaner fuel technologies.

Homeland Security Research Cited

WeinThe Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, also known as INFORMS, presented its President’s Award in November to Lawrence Wein, the Business School’s Paul E. Holden Professor of Management Science. The award recognizes important contributions to the welfare of society by members of the operations research profession. Wein was chosen for “pioneering research that characterizes and improves homeland security operations and for communicating his results to government officials and the public at large.”