Delivered at the dinner honoring Dean Robert L. Joss

STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS —It is an honor, privilege, and pleasure to be able to speak for the faculty on this occasion, and to say Thank You to Bob Joss for his leadership over the past ten years.

Bob has always told me that the way to judge how you are doing as a manager and leader is to ask, Are the units or functions you are managing getting better and stronger, year over year? If that's the test, then Bob has been an extraordinarily successful manager and leader of the GSB. The best evidence of this is the Provost’s list of accomplishments of the past decade.

Since the Provost answered the question What has Bob accomplished?, I'd like to ask and then give my answer to the question, Why was Bob able to accomplish so much?

And to give my answer, I will digress: Perhaps four months ago, I was invited by the Provost and Prof. John Roberts to meet with the committee that is advising the President and Provost on Bob’s successor.

As I prepared for this meeting, I decided that the best assistance I could give them was to tell them the characteristics I thought are most important in a successful dean for the GSB. My list had three items.

First, to be successful, the dean must understand the mission and strategy of the GSB. In two words, he must get it.

That's harder than it sounds, because the GSB tries to do two things at once. It is one of the best professional schools of management in the world—I'd say the very best, but why quibble?

And it simultaneously tries to be a great research institution, focused on the problems and environment of managers and management, but extending to foundational work in the social sciences and in empirical and mathematical methods for the social sciences.

These two missions can, in the short run, come into conflict. To increase achievement along one line, you must make short-run compromises in the other.

But the strategy of the school is based on one premise above all others: In the long run, these two missions are complementary. What looks like a short-run compromise of one for the other is, when done right, a long-run investment in both.

The Dean has to understand this, first of all.

And then, second, he or she has to be able to communicate this to a wide variety of sometimes skeptical audiences. These range from the general business press and business community, which doesn't get the research part, to a stereotypical Professor of Comparative Literature, who doesn’t understand this foreign body in his or her university.

And between those two extremes are: students of many types; alumni; faculty members within the school and outside; and, very importantly, the leadership of the rest of this great university.

One-size-fits-all communication won’t work, and a successful dean has to be able to speak convincingly to all those groups.

And, third, having gotten it, and having communicated it, the Dean has to implement it. Or, more accurately, the Dean has to work through a variety of individuals—has to lead and manage—the implementation.

And this can be hard, because the people involved can sometimes be….to use a gendered term, for which I apologize…prima donnas. I will not assert before this audience that alumni can ever have prima donna-like characteristics, and of course it does not behoove me to say tonight that this has ever or could ever be true of the leaders of this university. But I think I can safely assert that students can sometimes be prima donnas. And my faculty colleagues certainly have shown those tendencies.

It takes a Dean with strong inner convictions, a strong political sense, great people skills, and a level of humility to make it work. It takes the ability to broker compromise that makes everyone feel good. It takes a sense of timing—knowing when to stick to one’s guns, and when to say: "You make this call, because this affects you the most or because you are the expert on this matter."

So what does this have to do with Bob Joss? As I'm sure most of you have understood, I'm describing the characteristics of Bob that have made him such a successful dean. He gets it. He can communicate it. And he can make it happen.

The best evidence is the list of accomplishments the Provost provided.

But let me add an illustrative vignette. About a year ago, Bob and I attended a conference at the Harvard Business School, on the topic "The Future of the MBA." The room held about 100 people, about one third HBS faculty and senior staff, about one third prominent practitioners (mostly HBS alumni), and about one third academics from schools from Darden to the University of Chicago.

With that diverse an audience, you can imagine: There was a lot of spirited disagreement. But I can report that Bob fulfilled the Dean-Witter rule: When Bob Joss spoke, everyone listened. And nodded in agreement. He kept us focused on the big issues, and time after time he made a compelling case for why the mission was the right one and why our strategy was the right way to achieve the mission. I'm sure, had you been there, you would have been proud. I'm certain, because they told me so, that a lot of folks from a lot of other places were jealous.

So, Bob: You fulfill your own criterion of leaving the GSB a hugely better place. It has indeed been a decade of accomplishment. On behalf of the faculty, Thank you.