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Goals of Maintaining Strength, Expanding Reach

The GSB is blessed with a set of extraordinary strategic assets: world-class faculty and staff, students of exceptional potential, a leading management education curriculum, state-of-the-art academic and residential facilities to house our programs, and a highly engaged and committed alumni base. At Stanford, we have access to leading schools of medicine, law, education, engineering, earth sciences, and humanities and sciences, all within walking distance of the GSB.

Our strategy with respect to those assets must be two-pronged. On the one hand we must ensure that we maintain that strength. For example, we must ensure that we hire the best faculty and create around them a vibrant intellectual atmosphere; and we must ensure that we continue to innovate in our programs so that they continuously improve. We are committed to maintaining the intimate strategic scale of our flagship MBA program. We believe that the program size is crucial to facilitating the process of personal transformation that I wrote about in my previous dean's column and the 2010 State of the School letter.

But, on the other hand, if we truly are to advance our mission we must also use our strategic assets as a springboard for ever greater impact: We must take the knowledge we create and what we know about how best to impart that knowledge and enable as many high-potential current and future leaders of managed organizations as we can to lead those organizations more effectively.

We must change more lives, so that they can change more organizations that change the world in positive ways. We must do this both because it is our mission and because doing so will strengthen the GSB's position as a leader in management education. Internally we refer to this strategy as "strengthen our core, expand our reach."

We will look for new and different ways to expand our reach ranging from new programs to experiments with distance learning.
A great example of this is the Program in Innovation and Entrepre-neurship (PRIE) that we launched in January. A certificate program running in the evening over 20 weeks, it provides the opportunity
for a mix of students from Stanford's six other schools and working scientists, engineers, and other professionals to gain exposure to
business and entrepreneurship fundamentals.

This program builds on the successful Summer Institute for Entrepreneurship, an intensive four-week summer program for non-business graduate students. The new program's format is distinctive: It combines graduate students and working professionals, enabling them to learn from one another; and, crucially, it will enable collaboration with our MBA and Sloan students, providing cross-pollination between business students and those from other disciplines.

PRIE will add to the intellectual activity that takes place in the Knight Management Center in the evenings. Activities such as this, together with extended food service hours, will draw our students from the Schwab Residential Center and other students in graduate housing across Serra Street, ensuring a vibrant atmosphere in Knight at night.

Another example of efforts to expand our reach is our investigation into educational technologies that will enhance our global connections. For instance, last autumn quarter, Haim Mendelson, professor of electronic commerce, business, and management, and lecturer Steve Ciesinski experimented with the online environment Second Life in a one-week MBA class on how to prepare a business plan. Students met online in a virtual classroom — using computer-generated avatars as facsimiles of themselves — to hammer out a business plan and present it to a group of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. [See related story.] We plan to try other technologies this year.

We also are seeking new ways to take the GSB to the world. For instance, during winter break we had a coordinated effort to take the GSB to India with two student study trips, a student service learning trip, one faculty study trip, and Executive Education's Executive Circle Summit. During the latter, marketing professors Jennifer Aaker and Baba Shiv and I hosted a day-long symposium on innovations in branding.

The knowledge and relationships that we build from such inter-actions will further strengthen our core programs. Moreover, from efforts such as these, we hope that the GSB will reach even more
leaders, equipping them with the knowledge, capabilities, and inspiration to change the world. l