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Stanford GSB News

 

Scholars, Practitioners Team Up to Teach Entrepreneurial Topics

September 2006

STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—One of the founding directors (with Irving Grousbeck) of the Business School's Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, Professor Emeritus Charles Holloway has been bringing together scholars and business practitioners for 10 years. "A CEO of a major company who comes in and says, 'This is the way we did it,' brings the kind of credibility in this field to the classroom that an academic alone sometimes cannot," he says. "The combination of scholarly rigor and firsthand experience Stanford offers in its courses on entrepreneurship has been a powerful one. Students and faculty alike gain from it a tremendous depth of knowledge."

One of the executives Holloway has worked with to develop courses and areas of research is Mark Leslie. Leslie has experienced both the agony and ecstasy of creating startups—having founded a computer systems firm that eventually failed, as well as the enormously successful Veritas Software, which became the 10th-largest independent software company with a revenue base of $1.5 billion. He has drawn on those experiences to help design two courses, Formation of New Ventures (with venture capitalist Andy Rachleff) and Building and Managing Professional Sales Organizations (with marketing Professor Jim Lattin). "They're both popular and important classes at the GSB," says Holloway.

Although he's been in the trenches, Leslie says that for him, "teaching is about more than telling war stories. Stories just punctuate and embellish the larger lessons you're imparting to students," he says. "Your instruction has to be rigorous and systematic."

For Leslie, teaching has led to new ways of thinking about business problems, which, in turn, have led this former CEO into the areas of writing and research. "There's nothing quite like having an intellectual epiphany and getting it out there in the larger academic community," he says.

"Mark's and my recent article in Harvard Business Review ["The Sales Learning Curve," July–August 2006] could not have been written without his insight into the problems facing startups and the ways in which practitioners go about trying to solve them," says Holloway. "In the field of entrepreneurship, the scholar-practitioner approach has really been a key to bringing new ideas into the university in a way that stimulates research."

— Marguerite Rigoglioso