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Stanford Business magazine

 
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About This Issue

Connect.the.Dots

My predecessor in this job had one simple definition of it: "Put things together that go together."

That seems easy enough, but what happens when you have a story about a professor honored for service to alumni at the same ceremony as alumni/ae are honored for service to the School? Does the professor's honor get chronicled in the Faculty News section separately from the volunteers’ honors noted in their individual Class Notes sections? Or is it important for readers to see that the Business School Alumni Association honors faculty and alums together for an array of services to the GSB community?

We don't all value information the same way, so there is no perfect formula for go-together editing. This year we kept the Alumni Association’s awards together in one story in the Faculty News section. Perhaps next year we will parse it differently.

Digital technology promises to transfer much of the decision making about what goes together from me, an editor, to you, a consumer. Databases, search engines, and keywords are often better than the best paper indexes for helping people find information they seek. Using online tools, you might put together items from this magazine that would never occur to me. Perhaps you will find a new business partner or friend, or even an idea to apply to your dream project.

In the online version of this magazine there is a link to a search box. You could search for Professor George Foster's name and find out that he just received the Alumni Association’s Silver Apple award and also other information that we previously published about his work in accounting research and sports management. You could search for an alumnus’ name, Tom Friel, and find out that he also received a service award this year, and that he helped organize a GSB event in 2002. This will not be everything we have published about Friel because, to see the Class Notes for his class, you will need to be an alum with a password and willing to search separately in Class Notes. But if you used Google to search the entire Stanford website by typing in site:stanford.edu Tom Friel, you would find many more items about Friel, including an interesting video presentation he gave on campus about “Replacing Yourself as CEO.” It is posted as part of Stanford's " Entrepreneurship Corner," which, frankly, I did not know existed, until I searched for more information on Tom Friel.

Search engines—ours internally at the magazine and those the world uses—are very useful but, like editors, imperfect. They don't always put things together that go together, and sometimes they make big mistakes. On page 6, we take a look at some of the confusion, intentional and otherwise, that can develop around people’s identities as the result of online social networks and other data aggregation technology.

I hope reading this magazine is more than the sum of its data to you. When Barbara Buell writes about the leadership style of School Dean Bob Joss, when Pat Olsen writes about Alex Kummant in railroading, and when William Symonds writes about Greg Hawkins in a religious institution, I think you will find the articles more interesting than reading these leaders' resumes. At least we strive for that. Don't put this magazine down now, but when you have a spare minute, try an online search for nuggets in the gold mine of the Stanford University website. You might be amazed at what you didn't know about the wonderful people associated with this institution.

— Kathleen O'Toole, Editor, Stanford Business magazine