“There Was a Revolution Here”: 100 Years of Business Education

When the first students arrived at Stanford Graduate School of Business in October 1925, the notion of a professional school for management training was still relatively new, as was the pedagogy surrounding it. Stanford GSB was the second school in the country, after Harvard Business School, to offer a master’s degree in business administration. Its founders hoped their school might stem the flow of bright Californians traveling east for a degree and never returning.

Willard Hotchkiss, its first dean, emphasized that he was not starting a “trade school” but building an institution of “higher learning” that would produce well-rounded leaders ready to take on various management roles. It was an audacious vision. Business had yet to be recognized as a discipline on the same level as law, medicine, or engineering. The new school was small and unproven, with just 16 students and two professors housed in a couple of cramped rooms next to the biology labs.

Case studies, a teaching method introduced at Harvard four years earlier, were taught, but classwork emphasized problem-solving skills that could be applied across a range of settings. “The specialized divisions of business,” the first course announcement explained, “will be regarded more as avenues through which to approach business as a whole than as ends in themselves.” Students took courses in accounting, economic analysis, industrial management, and “the psychology of business relations.” They were also required to get supervised experience in a field of their choosing and received additional insight from local executives who spoke at the Business School Club’s weekly 50-cent dinners.

This broad, balanced approach would set Stanford GSB on the path it would follow over the next century as it shed its image as a regional upstart and became recognized as an innovator. Its curriculum and approach would undergo several moments of transformation, evolving to meet the changing needs of business and society as well as the interests of an increasingly diverse student body. Today, MBA students are exposed to a blend of theory and practice, research-based lessons, and experiential learning, amplified by an ethos of curiosity and collaboration.

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With students from more than 70 countries and more than 120 professors teaching more than 400 courses on a 12.5-acre campus in the heart of Silicon Valley, the Stanford GSB of today would be unrecognizable to its first students. Yet their modern counterparts are also learning how to apply what they’ve learned in a complex world. “The school today is much more global in its outlook and its approach,” says Garth Saloner, the Botha-Chan Professor of Economics, who served as dean from 2009 to 2016 and helped design the current curriculum. “Over time, the MBA degree has matured.”

“Although the growth of the School has not been spectacular, it has been satisfactory,” the Alumni Bulletin observed in 1932. The 1930s and 1940s were not easy for Stanford GSB, but it continued to espouse its generalist ethos as it prepared students for jobs in the Depression-era industrial economy and wartime production. Some features of these decades would endure, such as the introduction of elective courses and the recruitment of nonacademic faculty who drew on their professional expertise to teach and advise students.

By the time it turned 25, Stanford GSB was experiencing growing pains. Soldiers returning home from World War II had sparked a massive demand for MBA degrees, stretching the school’s relatively small faculty. The departure of Dean Hugh Jackson in 1956, after a quarter century leading the school, presented an occasion for reinvigorating the program.

Two seminal reports on the state of business education provided a push. Published by the Ford Foundation in 1959, Higher Education for Business by economists James Howell (who had joined the faculty in 1958) and Robert Gordon found that “today’s business schools are not providing the kind of education tomorrow’s businessmen will need.” They concluded that business students needed a broader, more challenging curriculum that covered everything from managerial economics and accounting to human relations and the influence of government and society on business. Their recommendations were echoed in The Education of American Businessmen by Frank Pierson, published the same year.

“It was not sufficient anymore to just tell case stories,” said James Van Horne, a finance professor who joined Stanford GSB in 1965 and directed the MBA program from 1970 to 1973. The school embraced a modern approach that came to be known as the “New Look” for business education. Under the leadership of Dean Ernest Arbuckle, MBA ’36, who shepherded Stanford GSB through the 1960s, the curriculum became more expansive and analytical.

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Arbuckle ramped up the hiring of “teacher-scholars” — professors with serious research chops who could also command a classroom. “We saw from the beginning of this that research and teaching are not mutually exclusive,” recalled professor of accounting William Beaver years later. “It’s a very broad-based approach to business that we’ve developed.” Arbuckle also brought in more faculty trained in the social sciences and computing, leading to an expansion into areas such as organizational behavior and operations. Rapidly improving technology and computational capacity elevated the importance of data in both research and foundational courses.

“Arbuckle wanted to differentiate Stanford,” Van Horne said. As other business schools became associated with a particular discipline or focus, Stanford GSB went its own way by essentially choosing “all of the above.” In an oral history interview, Howell, who served as an assistant dean under Arbuckle and taught until the late ’90s, recalled these changes with pride: “There was a revolution here.”

When he arrived at Stanford GSB from the Ford Motor Company in 1969, Arjay Miller made it his mission to broaden the scope of business education. Influenced by his encounters with the nascent consumer movement and having witnessed the 1967 Detroit riots, the new dean was intent on training civic-minded executives who would not just manage employees more efficiently but also engage with societal problems. In 1971, Miller launched the Public Management Program, whose legacy is now carried on by the Center for Social Innovation, which has trained hundreds of MBA students to work in industry and government and fostered dozens of enterprises addressing social and environmental problems.

Miller also adopted the mantra of “balanced excellence,” building on the idea that Stanford GSB should excel in research and teaching and extending it to include all academic areas and aspects of management. Charles Horngren, a professor of accounting, noted that this ethos led to more variety and flexibility in the classroom. “We aren’t committed to teaching by cases,” he recalled in an interview in the late ’90s. “We’re not committed to teaching by other methods. We have a balance, and that’s a strength, in my opinion — one of the real strengths of this school.”

In 1972, the curriculum was updated to provide first-year MBA students with a foundation in data analysis, accounting, and decision science. The school ditched traditional letter grades for three new levels: distinction (H), pass (P), and unsatisfactory (U). (The system was slightly modified in 2000 to include Honors.)

Students had more freedom to pursue their interests beyond the core requirements. The number of electives exploded, coming “from almost every field in the school,” recalled former Dean Robert Jaedicke, who served as associate dean for academic affairs from 1969 to 1979. At one point, he told an interviewer, he and Van Horne counted all the courses sprouting up: “We had about 100 electives, and he calculated that about half of them were new every five years.”

Through the 1980s and the 1990s, Stanford GSB kept on blending academics with real-world applications, an approach that came to be known as “relevance with rigor.” In 1992, the core curriculum got its first major upgrade since the early ’70s. Data Analysis and Decision Making Under Uncertainty (AKA “Trees”) were out; Data and Decisions was in. New required courses were introduced over the next few years, including Management in Nonmarket Environments, which tackled topics like regulation and corporate responsibility, and Managing the Global Enterprise, a reflection of students’ deeper connections to the globalized economy.

Beyond the core, a tempting array of elective courses remained a key part of getting an MBA. Faculty created new courses in response to shifts in the economy and students’ interests driven by the explosion of personal computing, the internet, and Silicon Valley. By the mid-’90s, nearly half of all content taught in electives each year was new.

Incoming MBA students still wanted to learn how to manage a company, but a growing number sought to start their own. Irving Grousbeck, the MBA Class of 1980 Adjunct Professor of Management, developed an entrepreneurship curriculum and in 1996 cofounded the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies with Charles Holloway, the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Professor of Management, Emeritus. The emphasis on entrepreneurship “was really a way in which we separated ourselves from sister schools,” says Margaret Neale, the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management, Emerita, and a former academic associate dean.

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The entrepreneurship course built on the school’s marriage of scholarship and practice. “Chuck Holloway and Irv Grousbeck really started this model of an academic and a practitioner teaching together,” says David Kreps, the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management, Emeritus, who joined the faculty in 1975 and served as a senior associate dean from 2000 to 2009. The model, which evoked the school’s past recruitment of consulting professors from the field, was honed in other classes. In 1991, Robert Burgelman, the Edmund W. Littlefield Professor of Management, and Andrew Grove, the CEO and chairman of Intel, created Strategy and Action in the Information Processing Industry, which gave students an inside look at running a large tech company. Today, more than 150 industry practitioners teach at Stanford GSB, often alongside a tenure-line faculty member.

Stanford GSB also expanded its offerings in interpersonal and leadership skills grounded in social science. The 1992 core curriculum added a course on human resources management, which went beyond personnel issues to focus on topics such as diversity and temp workers. Experiential “learning by doing” became more common in classes teaching “soft skills” such as team building, negotiation, and conflict resolution. “Stanford was increasingly focusing on the use of teams within the classroom,” Neale recalls. To prepare students coming from a range of international and corporate cultures to work together, she and Deborah Gruenfeld, the Joseph McDonald Professor and Professor of Organizational Behavior and a senior associate dean, developed Managing Through Mutual Agreement (currently taught as Managing Groups and Teams).

Another hands-on offering was Design for Extreme Affordability (originally Social Entrepreneurship Startup), an interdisciplinary course that taught design thinking and “radical collaboration” as ways to create products that help the world’s poorest people. “It was super popular, in part because it really hit all of the buttons — design thinking, which was hot at the time, entrepreneurship, and it had this do-good aspect to it as well,” says Jesper Sørensen, the Robert A. and Elizabeth R. Jeffe Professor, and Professor of Organizational Behavior, and a senior associate dean from 2021 to 2025. “That, for me, was Stanford GSB’s canonical experiential course for some time.”

By the mid-2000s, the school was approaching another inflection point. Feedback from both sides of the classroom suggested the curriculum needed to be rebalanced. Students said they wanted more engaging coursework and an MBA that could be personalized to fit their career path. Faculty members believed that core courses could be more intellectually challenging. A faculty committee, headed by Saloner, took a holistic look at the MBA program, consulting extensively with members of the Stanford GSB community before introducing a concept for a thoroughly redesigned curriculum. After being overwhelmingly approved by the faculty, it was rolled out in the fall of 2007.

The new curriculum was the most ambitious yet. Dean Robert Joss, Sloan ’66, MBA ’67, PhD ’70, who oversaw its implementation, said it was well worth it. “I felt the risk of not doing something was bigger than the risk of trying it,” he recalled afterward. “The bigger risk was in doing nothing and just sitting with the status quo and saying, ‘Gee, we’re really a very good school,’ and resting on our laurels. That is a far riskier position, from my point of view.” At the time, Jeffrey Pfeffer, PhD ’72, the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior, who had researched the effectiveness of business education, called it “the most important thing that has happened at Stanford in my 27 years here.”

One of the curriculum’s signature elements was a revamped Autumn Quarter for first-year MBA students. It was packed with new requirements, including courses on leading and managing teams and critical analytical thinking. Another addition was Strategic Leadership (now Leadership Labs), where tightly knit squads of students navigate a series of role-playing and interactive lessons. It culminates in the Executive Challenge, in which alumni and faculty evaluate squads’ performance in a day of fast-paced simulations. Recent additions to the first-quarter core include Leading With Values, which explores the challenges of ethical leadership in a polarized society.

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In a shift from a one-size-fits-all approach, some core courses were offered in different “flavors” — base, accelerated, and advanced — to provide more customization and challenge for students with specialized experience. “We shouldn’t have a CPA in Accounting sitting next to someone in class who’s never seen an income statement and expect either to get much out of it,” Saloner says about the reasoning behind the change. “We tried to have a curriculum that met each of them where they were.”

Students were required to participate in a Global Experience program, such as a global study trip or a summer Global Management Immersion Experience — journeys that have become iconic parts of a GSB education. After the first year, students were given more leeway to design their own path through dozens of electives. The spirit of the new curriculum was reflected in the Knight Management Center, which opened in 2011 with a range of spaces designed for everything from lectures to small group breakout sessions.

As it enters its second century, Stanford GSB’s approach to business education has stayed true to its roots, guided by the question posed by its founders: What’s the best way to teach leaders how to navigate complexity, translate theory into action, and see the big picture without losing sight of the people they work with? (And somehow accomplish this in just two years?) The result is an MBA program that mirrors the qualities it seeks to instill in its students: balance, rigor, relevance, and the ability to change.

The program keeps evolving to reflect its student body. “People are older and more experienced than they used to be,” says Paul Oyer, the Mary and Rankine Van Anda Entrepreneurial Professor and Professor of Economics, who served as a senior associate dean from 2019 to 2025. Students have also become more varied in their ambitions: One-fifth of current MBA students pursue joint or dual degrees in fields such as law and education and around two-thirds make a career pivot after graduation. “Students have always pushed us in the direction of relevance,” Kreps says.

Innovations in the classroom continue to make the Stanford GSB experience stand apart. Launched in 2019, the Teaching and Learning Hub helps professors design interactive and experiential activities that go beyond traditional lesson plans. “Most business schools don’t have an office like mine,” says Grace Lyo, the assistant dean of teaching and learning. Her team has produced a mock newscast for a crisis management simulation, helped design a card game to teach about power and cooperation, and put a new twist on an old teaching method with “podcases” — case studies presented in an audio format.

The rapid rise of artificial intelligence has provided another opportunity to connect research and the real world. Faculty are creating and testing new applications for AI while dozens of courses help students understand its potential and limitations. Meanwhile, the Business, Government & Society Initiative launched in 2024 has renewed the mission championed by Arjay Miller five decades ago: preparing new generations of leaders who will engage with the world and make a positive impact.

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Throughout the moments of transformation, from the New Look of the 1960s to the New Curriculum of 2007, Stanford GSB has preserved its unique character. “I’m intrigued to reflect on all the things that have not changed,” says George Parker, MBA ’62, PhD ’67, the Dean Witter Distinguished Professor of Finance, Emeritus, who joined the faculty in 1973. “Stanford has gained stature, reputation, and mystique over the years, but it has also continued to be the place that I came to originally in 1960, which is a place that radiates a spirit of discovery and innovation.”