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About This Issue

Explore Our Updated Online Magazine

The year before he joined the MBA Class of 2010, Tim Lee had a cool idea. YouTube had become both a meeting place and a showcase for individuals. Why not harness the power of YouTube to join people from all over the world into a symphony orchestra?

Lee did just that, and the orchestra he envisioned performed in Carnegie Hall on April 15. But you don't have to take our word for it. You can listen here to the orchestra. It turns out that one of the upsides of a down time economically is that it forces all of us to think more creatively. At your alumni magazine, we have tried to do just that by making Lee's brainchild part of our virtual presence in your life.

As part of the Business School’s budget tightening, Stanford Business magazine in its paper version is cutting back to three full issues and one class-notes-only issue in each of the next two years. The paper version of this, the summer issue, contains only the class notes section, this column, several program advertisements, and the dean’s column in order to save on printing and postage costs.

Our online content, however, including Lee’s 'mash-up' orchestra and other interactive features, such as a clickable world map where you can find out how many GSB alums live in a particular country. Coming up with ways to communicate interesting information through the online medium without spending bucketloads of money has been fun for those of us who are listed on the masthead. We hope you also will have some fun at BizOnline.Stanford.edu. Please bookmark this address for future visits. We plan to update the online magazine frequently with news for and about alumni, and we will try to track your usage as a group, so that we can improve our offerings in your eyes.

Some of you may wonder why we chose to give class notes preference over other sections in the paper version of the magazine we mailed in May. It’s true that many of the articles that we normally publish in the front half of the magazine have broad readership with many readers per page. Surveys, however, indicate that among alumni, class notes is the most popular section overall. Furthermore, the vast majority of you read the notes on paper, not online. Your class secretaries could send you their notes by email, but many of you read notes from more classes than your own, so it seemed wise to send you the section. We care about all our readers, but the most important objective of the magazine is to keep our far-flung alumni connected to the GSB community. We intend to return our print issue to its expanded range of content for autumn and winter. We plan to try another class-notes-only paper issue in the spring of 2010.

As we experiment with the online version, we invite you to tell us what you think. We will try to measure what features work best for you as a group, but we also welcome your individual comments and suggestions.

Have a good summer and stay in touch,

— Kathleen O'Toole, Editor, Stanford Business magazine