Stanford Business Magazine

The first mention of computers in the pages of the GSB’s Alumni Bulletin (this magazine’s predecessor) was in November 1953. Bill Otterson, MBA ’53, wrote from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio to say he’d been deployed to the digital frontlines, using machines to pursue “office management in its highest form.” Computers barely came up again until five years later, when the school got its first “electronic brain”: an 800 pound “mobile” IBM 610. List price: $55,000 — more than $650,000 in today’s dollars.

For more facts about the history of technology at the GSB, check out the timeline, part of our ongoing coverage celebrating the school’s centennial year. The old specs and archival photos we’ve dug up are fun, but they convey a larger message about our quest to outpace obsolescence. Just as punch cards have become punchlines, the GPUs churning through AI prompts will one day seem quaint. And yet it’s remarkable how much we can get done with our nonelectronic brains, which haven’t had an upgrade in years.

Our cover story (“Looking Back, Moving Forward,”) builds on this idea. If you’re rushing to disrupt the status quo, it’s tempting to think you have to break with the past. Yet what if tested solutions to old problems could be retooled to solve current ones? It’s a deceptively simple idea that could be applied to some complex problems. That’s what a team led by Professors Stefanos Zenios and Kevin Schulman, with Ken Favaro, MBA ’83, are doing as they apply their “precedents thinking” framework to the United States’ tangled healthcare system.

The evolution of proven ideas is also the story of the GSB’s Center for Social Innovation, which celebrated its 25th birthday last year. As detailed in “The Center of Impact,” CSI has taught thousands of students how to apply their business education to maximize social and environmental benefit. The center is descended from the Public Management Program founded in 1971 by Dean Arjay Miller to fill what he perceived as a vacuum of leadership. Decades later, his vision still feels fresh. As Miller reflected in 2010, “The idea was good 40 years ago, and actually the need now is greater than ever.” Our biggest problems, he said, are not how to make faster computers or more profitable companies. “Making money is the easy part. Making the world a better place in which to live is the hard part.”

— Dave Gilson