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Korean Study Trip

Epicurean Edibles at Stanford Dorm

Stanford EdiblesLet’s make it clear. There are reasons to choose an executive program other than the excellence of its dining. Great faculty, top-notch participants, innovative curriculum, collegial atmosphere—Stanford Executive Education has it all. But let’s not forget the food!

When the Financial Times rated executive programs, Stanford Business School ranked number one in the world in “food and accommodation.” Why? Here’s a hint: roasted chateaubriand with bordelaise sauce and sauce béarnaise, whole spring lamb on a spit, whole roasted pig with hoisin sauce. These are just three of the entrees that came out of the kitchen of Raul Lacara, general manager and executive chef of Schwab Executive Services, in the course of the Stanford Executive Program last summer.

Only 40 Years of Oil Left

Gilbert MastersIf the world had to rely on the United States for all its oil, the supply wouldn’t last very long—one year to be exact. According to calculations by Gilbert Masters, professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering, current oil supplies in all nations combined will last about 41 years. Masters painted the sobering picture of the world’s looming energy dilemma during a three-day January conference sponsored by the Stanford Business School Alumni Association and the University’s Woods Institute for the Environment.

Emotional Ideas Stick — In Politics, Too

Thinking back to the beginning of this interminable year of presidential election campaigning, a moment breaks through the mist of political fatigue: when Hillary Clinton seemed to be caught off guard and spoke through misty eyes of the personal toll her campaign had taken. Many pundits credited that atypical display of vulnerability as the turning point in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, which she won.

Woz’s Apple Recipe: Mix Oil and Water

Steve Wozniak has a recipe for a great high-tech startup: Begin with two young guys, one a computer nerd and the other a marketer, add money, and maybe you’ll wind up with a company as successful as the one he and his buddy Steve Jobs built.

She’s a Hottie Now

The moment of truth arrived for Heidi Roizen, MBA ’83, one morning last May, when she stepped on the scale and discovered she weighed more than her husband. “That’s one of those times when you say, ‘I’ve got to do something about this,’” Roizen told lifestyle show host Martha Stewart.

Roizen had tried diet and exercise to little avail. The music she worked out to was OK, but the words were either violent or vapid. Then it hit her: “There ought to be music to psych you up, music that when you’re driving to the gym, it makes sure you actually go in.”

Consumer Choices Can Reform Sweatshops

Giving the back of his hand to Adam Smith’s notion that an “invisible hand” guides markets, the Business School’s Hayagreeva “Huggy” Rao argued that it is instead the “visible joint hands of activists that shape markets and can exert a profound effect” on sweatshop operations overseas.

Rao, an expert on cultural causes of organizational change, said consumers can wield influence over the working conditions at manufacturers. “By educating, by moralizing consumers, movements can create natural incentives for firms to differentiate themselves,” he said.

Business Basics Taught with Goats, Soybeans

Barefoot MBAIt was one of those aha moments. In January 2007, Business School students Scott Raymond and Katherine Boas visited Thailand on a Service Learning Program study trip. There they met social entrepreneur Mechai Viravaidya, founder of the Population and Community Development Association, which extends microloans to entrepreneurs in Thailand’s rural villages. “Mechai said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we had a basic business curriculum that everybody could learn so that people who receive the loans could use them wisely?’” Boas recalls. “Scott and I looked at each other and said, ‘Well, we could do that.’”

Boas and Raymond, both MBA ’07, returned to Stanford to research and write the “Barefoot MBA Curriculum,” a teaching guide for development professionals. The curriculum presents basic concepts of business that are applicable everywhere, but are told as stories that appeal to people in a certain area. In the first version, written in English and adapted to rural Thailand, the lesson about interest involves the loan of a goat to a neighboring farmer, cost benefit is demonstrated by the sale of pigs, and the concept of competition is a tale of two soybean vendors.

Strauss Challenges Peace Corps’ Legend

Imagine an Iowa farmer confronted by a freshly minted college grad from Cameroon armed with a three-month crash course in agriculture and the certainty she can teach the Midwesterner how to raise pigs.

“I’m pretty sure the American farmer would see it as a publicity stunt and a bunch of hooey,” says Robert Strauss, MBA ’84, who witnessed the reverse of this scenario when he was Peace Corps country director in Cameroon from 2002 to 2007. Strauss was also a Peace Corps volunteer from 1978-1980 and a recruiter in 1982.

Don’t Eat the Spoon that Feeds You

They say green is the new black, but to the Business School green means more than one fashion layer—it extends from the construction plans for the School’s future campus down to the environmentally sustainable practices of its current cafeteria.

Over the past year, the Arbuckle Cafe in the basement of the old GSB building has led the University in composting and recycling. In January 2007 it was the first food campus to switch to bio-degradable “spudware” made of potato starch and food containers of sugar cane and polyacetic acid. Currently the only items in Arbuckle that are not compostable are hot coffee lids and the wraps on pre-packaged grab-and-go items, like chips and snack bars.

They’re Playing Our Song

Music has been a part of his life since he started piano lessons at age 6 in Spokane, Wash. These days Business School Dean Robert Joss is known to sit down at the keyboard with family and friends for a sing-along of Broadway tunes or Christmas carols, so it was not surprising that Bob Asadorian, MBA ’72, who helps find guest deejays for the campus radio station, asked Joss to do Lunch Special duty one day in February.

Among the songs on Joss’s KZSU playlist was “You Can’t Stop the Beat” from the musical Hairspray, a song his grandkids sing, and “Only You” by the Platters, “a very popular 1950s group when my wife and I were in high school,” Joss said, “and over the years, this has become ‘our’ song.”