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About This Issue
Dynamic Leadership
By Kathleen O'Toole, Editor
As this magazine was about to go to our final proofreader, Dean Bob Joss announced that he intends to step down as School dean at the end of this academic year, which is next summer. He will be following a long tradition among Stanford Business School deans to take the reins for a decade and then "re-pot," as former Dean Ernie Arbuckle expressed it. That generally means staying active in the School, and Dean Joss will continue to teach and be involved in the Stanford Challenge campaign that aims to keep Stanford in the lead for this century. During his 9-year tenure as dean so far, the School has developed a new MBA curriculum and launched construction of a new campus aimed at supporting a program that will serve MBA, PhD, and Executive Education students as well as some graduates and undergraduates from the rest of Stanford. In his column on page 5, he summarizes only a small but important fraction of the academic transitions he has overseen-the steps to globalizing the curriculum and research.
On page 11, you can read a little about the "virtual" groundbreaking of the new campus held on Alumni Weekend. It will include eight buildings around three quadrangles, a campus which is expected to achieve the highest level LEED Platinum certification for environmental sustainability from the U.S. Green Building Council. If you want more detail, you can see architectural drawings or watch the construction proceed on webcams of the construction site by going to www.gsb.stanford.edu/knightcenter.
There is much more we could highlight from the dean's tenure, and we will most likely do that in future issues, but in the meantime, I draw your attention to other exciting leaders covered in this issue, including tours into the unconventional minds of Lorenzo Zambrano, MBA '68, and Douglas Stone, Sloan '92.
Zambrano turned a modest family business in Mexico into a successful global corporation. He told our writer Diane Lindquist, who covers Mexican business at Mexbiz.com, that he was helped by his time in Business School classrooms, where he learned that "you had to innovate to grow."
Marine Major Gen. Stone, who was tapped last year by U.S. Gen. David Petraeus to supervise post-Abu Ghraib detention facilities in Iraq, tells us about the similarities in top layers of military and high-tech leadership.
"Counterinsurgency demands that you engage with citizens," he told our writer Margaret Steen shortly after returning from Iraq. Similarly, high-tech leadership demands engaging with engineers in the company and customers, he said, so that "by the time [an idea] got produced, it was not my idea."
Leadership comes in many flavors among our alumni, students, and faculty. On page 14, we have tried to capture some of their ideas for addressing the impact of a greater worldwide demand for energy. The winds of change are all around us this autumn, which is why we need to keep learning how to lead organizations. Dean Joss has brought that lesson home to many in his time at the School's helm.