Beyond Grey Pinstripes

     

Stanford Graduate School of Business

All Participating Schools

     
Stanford Graduate School of Business 518 Memorial Way
Stanford, CA, 94305-7298
United States
View A School Profile: Compare to Another School

Demographic Information

Number of full-time MBA students (2011): 

396

Number of part-time MBA students (2011): 

0

Total duration of full-time MBA program: 

21 months

MBA faculty (Fall 2010): 

173


Description of MBA Program: 

At the Stanford Graduate School of Business, students learn to think creatively to solve problems. Stanford’s history as a university is all about innovation and forward thinking--from pioneering education and entrepreneurship in the West to sowing the seeds of Silicon Valley. Stanford MBA graduates learn to translate ideas into workable solutions for complex problems such as global poverty, human health, and the environment. These are problems that increasingly only can be met with social innovations--novel solutions that cut across corporate, nonprofit, and government sectors.

 

At Stanford, a great deal of momentum has built around 1) a retooled MBA curriculum from which the first class graduated in 2009, 2) an expansive new $350 million complex of eight buildings around three quads opened in 2011, and 3) a commitment to collaborative learning with students and faculty within the business school and across Stanford University. The new business school complex is expected to achieve the highest LEED Platinum certification for environmental sustainability from the U.S. Green Building Council. With this effort, the school has made a commitment to both teaching sustainability and living it.

 

Issues related to corporate responsibility and social impact are integrated throughout the required curriculum as well as in electives. The curriculum includes cases on international bribery, design for social good, forest conservation, sourcing products in developing countries, and microfinance in Africa, to name a few examples of issues that have social impact. A required Critical Analytical Thinking seminar, one of the hallmarks of the MBA curriculum, pushes students to think deeply and to develop, hold, and articulate a position in a group of just 16 people. Topics include issues such as the trade-off between energy efficiency and cost to the consumer when considering the shift to electric cars.

 

The Center for Social Innovation at the Stanford Graduate School of Business provides a critical mass of support to sustain research and MBA course development. Its 40-year-old Public Management Program (PMP) offers a certificate in public management and social innovation in conjunction with the full-time two-year MBA program or one-year Sloan Master’s program. The certificate program provides students the opportunity to focus their educational efforts in domain areas such as environment, international development, health care, and education. They can also shape their academic efforts in approaches to social impact such as corporate social responsibility, social entrepreneurship, nonprofit management, or government. Students tailor their experience to their career objectives and topical interests by tapping into a vast offering of academic and extracurricular activities including, by way of examples:

  • The Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability course, where students learn the design, business, and engineering tools that have enabled them to design LED lighting systems, low-cost infant warmers, human-powered irrigation pumps, and a host of other real products for real people that have made a real difference.
  • Service Learning Trips, during which students explore social and environmental innovations around the world. MBA students travel to meet globally recognized social entrepreneurs and see, through engaged service, firsthand experience, and on-site consulting projects, how their management education can contribute to effective and sustainable solutions. Examples include:
  1. Economic development and environmental preservation in China
  2. Health education and empowerment in Thailand and Cambodia
  3. Health services in India
  • An annual Public Management Initiative, which first-year students vote on and commit as a class to explore in detail throughout the academic year. The initiative engages the entire GSB community in discussion and debate. The 2009-2010 PMI topic was Debating Tomorrow: The Changing World of Business, which examined the post-financial crisis. 
  • Numerous speakers, panels, and conferences providing students with an opportunity to learn from the vision, experience, and wisdom of practitioners and social innovation thought leaders, all of whom are captured in a growing bank of social innovation podcasts available online for ongoing reference.
  • The Social Innovation Fellowship Program supporting recent graduates who have developed a practical, innovative, and sustainable approach to benefit society through the creation of their social venture.

 

The school continues to develop new classes that encourage good corporate citizenship among for-profit managers, strengthen the management knowledge and resources of nonprofit organizations and philanthropists, and recognize the role of public policy. By addressing these three areas concurrently, students begin to envision the role of business as a social institution and the potential for achieving social change and solutions.

 

In addition to a robust curricular and co-curricular program for MBA students, the Center for Social Innovation also provides Executive Education non-degree courses such as Business Strategies for Environmental Sustainability and the Executive Program for Social Entrepreneurs. Among its many activities, the Center co-hosts events such as the Socially and Environmentally Responsible Supply Chain Conference with the Stanford Global Supply Chain Forum each spring.

 

As part of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the Center for Social Innovation enjoys the intellectual resources of one of the top-ranked management schools in the world. The Center’s location in the heart of Silicon Valley also imbues it with the risk-taking, paradigm-shifting spirit of the Internet revolution. Over 40 faculty affiliates from the GSB and across Stanford contribute to the Center’s programs and initiatives.



How does the MBA program 'walk the talk' of social and environmental impact?: 

Highest Level of Environmental Sustainability:

  • In 2011, the Stanford Graduate School of Business opened the Knight Management Center, a new complex of eight buildings around three quads intended to support an innovative MBA curriculum put in place in 2007. The center is expected to achieve the highest LEED Platinum rating for environmental sustainability from the U.S. Green Building Council. With this new complex, adjacent to the Schwab Residential Center for MBA students and executive education participants, Stanford GSB aims to demonstrate to the academic community, business community, alumni, and general public its commitment to environmental leadership. The 360,000-square-foot complex underscores what is taught in many of the school’s electives and core classes covering sustainability across the functions of business, and in its MBA/MS Environment and Resources joint degree program.
  • For example, photovoltaic panels on the roof will harvest solar energy to generate 500,000 kilowatt-hours per year, enough to power 12.5% of the complex’s energy demand. The relatively narrow dimensions of the classroom buildings with their floor-to-ceiling glass maximize the amount of daylight entering the building, significantly reducing the need for electric lighting. The center will use rainwater or re-circulated gray water to reduce potable water usage for sewer conveyance by 80%.
  • More than 50% of the 12.5-acre Knight Management Center site has been preserved for open space. More than 60 trees were removed from the site, boxed during construction, and then replanted at the center.
  • Stanford’s current MBA curriculum includes more seminars, hands-on experiential classes, and more leadership development in small groups. The Knight Center has more flexible classroom spaces, including more flat classrooms in addition to traditional tiered lecture rooms, an increase in study rooms from 28 to 70, a 600-person auditorium that features university-wide programming, a collaboration lab for hands-on learning, and two Cisco Telepresence facilities for remote classroom communications. The state-of-the-art center, with a dining pavilion and café, is expected to engage students and faculty from Stanford’s six other world-class schools. It will incorporate sustainable compost and recycled garbage disposal areas, a program that has been in practice for several years.

Social Innovation Fellowship:

  • Through its Center for Social Innovation, which is dedicated to teaching and supporting students to develop solutions to persistent social problems, the school introduced a Social Innovation Fellowship in 2009. The grant funds students or alumni who have graduated within three years with an $80,000–$120,000 stipend to launch a social venture. Some of these have included an effort to alleviate poverty by matching semi-skilled laborers in developing countries with jobs in the developed world, a venture dedicated to improving the value chain for Sri Lankan rice to reduce the plight of the rural poor, and an organization working to address the achievement gap in U.S. public schools.

Nonprofit/Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program:

  • As part of the school’s broader goal to have greater social impact, it encourages MBA graduates to enter public service or the nonprofit sector by reducing the burden of a student’s educational debt in light of lower salaries typically available in the public and nonprofit sectors.
  • Through these and other programs, its sustainable facilities, and support of students, Stanford GSB demonstrates the values that it hopes to inspire in its students.

Academic Department

Course Name: Human Resource Management
Instructor: Hayagreeva Rao, Paul Oyer, Peggy Phalen

This course teaches students to think strategically about managing an organization’s human assets, and to achieve competitive advantage through people while also behaving responsibly. Focus is on aligning human resource practices consistently to produce the skills and behaviors that make organizational strategy work.

Relevant course content focuses on social impact management and public policy. One session is devoted to exploring the challenges and benefits of merit pay for teachers. Readings include “When Students’ Gains Help Teachers’ Bottom Line” and “Into the Hornet’s Nest.” Multiple sessions address employee rights, work-life balance, and the social impact of compensation plans, contrasting benefits-rich systems with piecework rewards systems with minimal benefits (e.g., no sick days, no retirement benefits). One of these sessions also includes discussion of the ethical ramifications of outsourcing to developing countries. Cases include Lincoln Electric in China and SAS Institute; readings include “Fringes vs. Basics in Silicon Valley.” In addition, the course touches on the impact of company values and reputation for positive social impact on the ability to attract, retain, and motivate employees (case: Infosys; reading: “Employment as a Social Relation”).

Course Name: Incentives and Productivity
Instructor: Edward Lazear

This course is designed for the general manager and focuses on how to use economics to solve practical personnel problems that affect worker productivity. Topics include selecting the best workers to hire, training workers, turnover, setting compensation strategically, structuring salespersons’ commissions, downsizing, and using promotions as an incentive mechanism.

Relevant course content includes social impact management, public policy, and diversity (culture and ethnicity). One session explores the impact of government intervention into labor markets and uses the example of alleged gender discrimination at Home Depot. Multiple sessions address employee working conditions and company values through mini cases and assignments that explore alternate compensation systems and work team organizations. Readings include “Jeans Therapy: Levi’s Factory Workers Are Assigned to Teams, and Morale Takes a Hit.” Another session explores the value that the labor market assigns to various professions and whether compensation reflects responsibility and social value. This session uses school bus drivers, professional golfers, and nurses as examples. An additional session explores the challenges of different cultures and legal systems when building global teams.

Course Name: Individual Research
Instructor: Bill Meehan, Stefanos Zenios, William Barnett, Various others

Students often choose to conduct independent study projects under the sponsorship of a faculty member. Many of these projects relate directly to social or environmental issues and allow students to immediately begin using the power of business to solve wider societal concerns.

Many students choose Individual Research projects that address social entrepreneurship, environmental management, public policy, and/or social impact management. Project topics range from social ventures and environmental issues to biodesign innovation and political economics. One student’s project cuts across all these areas through an assessment of the value students and alumni place on the GSB’s Public Management Program and Certificate.

Course Name: Initiating, Sustaining, and Monetizing Green Marketing
Instructor: Sridhar Narayanan, Baba Shiv

The last few years have seen a dramatic increase in environmental consciousness among customers. Going green for marketers is becoming a necessity. How should marketers think about initiating and sustaining green marketing? How can they differentiate themselves from competition? How can marketers exploit this rapidly growing trend in terms of monetizing such efforts? Where are such opportunities likely to arise in the future in terms of both technological and marketing innovations? The primary goal of this seminar is to address these questions across different domains and industries.

Specific topics include motivating consumers to adopt green products; research on the social influences that lead to adoption of green products; the development process for green products; building a brand architecture around the environmental sustainability of a set of products; and measuring the willingness of consumers to pay for product features that are critical to its being green. Guest speakers and cases add dimension to these topics. For example, a guest speaker from Toyota uses the Toyota Prius case study to illustrate social effects in the adoption of green products. In addition, students apply what they have learned to a real-life situation—a reworking of PG&E’s SmartAC program.

Course Name: Innovation and Management of Healthcare
Instructor: Stefanos Zenios

This course focuses on the interplay and tension between main players in the health care field—providers of health care services, payers (insurance companies, employers, consumers, and government), patients, and innovator companies (biopharma, medical device, diagnostics, and health care IT).

Relevant course content includes social impact management, ethics, corporate social responsibility, and public policy. This course focuses on the effect of innovation on value generation and patient care integration. Topics include the implications of genomic-based diagnostics (cases: Genomic Health and Navigenics); the benefits and risks of imbedding cost effectiveness analysis in the health care system (readings: “Is Health Care Spending Excessive? If So, What Can We Do About It?” and “Redefining Competition in Health Care”); models of health care delivery and their impact on patient choice, quality and consistency of care, and expense/cost control incentives (case: Intermountain Health); regulatory and ethical issues in the development of new drugs and devices (reading: “When Testing a Drug Means Withholding It”); ethical issues with stem cell research (case: iPierian); and the impact of health care reform on innovation in medicine. Guest speakers include senior executives of biotech and pharmaceutical companies and a health care service provider.

Course Name: Intellectual Property and Its Effect on Business
Instructor: Bradley Handler, David Hornik, Daniel Salkeld

This course explores the impact intellectual property rights have on business decisions. The course begins with a general background of intellectual property law including copyright, trademark, patent, and trade secret. The course also covers quasi property rights such as database and privacy. Each of these distinct rights is examined through a case methodology affording students an opportunity to gauge the relative strengths and weaknesses of a particular form of protection. As the value of intellectual property rises, the avenues of economic return increase. The course analyzes various methods of maximizing such economic returns. Focus for this course is the impact both technological innovation and intellectual property law have on business strategies. This is not a class designed to teach students the law of intellectual property. Rather, this course educates business decision makers on the impact intellectual property can have on the bottom line.

Course Name: International Business
Instructor: Bruce Mckern

This course addresses key issues in the creation and implementation of company strategies in the international environment. The course is in two parts, which are closely linked. The first is concerned with the strategy and operations of international firm, focusing on how corporations overcome the challenges of foreign environments to expand globally. In the second part, the course considers the development and adaptation of competences in the face of international competition. This section concerns the operational processes and organization structures firms use to support their international strategies. The course uses a combination of case studies, problems, lectures, and discussion over a variety of companies and countries. Country settings include Japan, Spain, Italy, Singapore, India, Brazil, Romania, China, and the United States.

Relevant course content focuses on diversity (culture and ethnicity). The course looks specifically at the cultural, financial, political, and economic complexities of foreign environments and the influence of culture on business decisions. The case Renault Nissan: The Challenge of Sustaining Change highlights cross-cultural challenges that result from a global alliance.

Course Name: International Financial Management
Instructor: Ilan Kremer

This course provides a framework for making corporate financial decisions in an international context. The course begins with an examination of monetary policy and exchange rates, then focuses on the markets for spot exchange, currency forwards, options, swaps, international bonds, and international equities. The final part of the course addresses exchange rate risk management, financing in international capital markets, and international capital budgeting.

Relevant course content focuses on public policy and the global impact of decisions made by central banks and governments. The course also includes limited discussion of distribution of wealth between countries, as well as the effects on local economies of varying levels of education, differences in culture, and diverse tax and benefit policies (case: European Monetary Union).

Course Name: Interpersonal Dynamics
Instructor: Florence Hoylman, Richard Francisco, Carole Robin, Scott Bristol

The focus of this course is to increase students’ competencies in building more effective relationships. Learning is primarily through feedback from other group members.

Relevant course content focuses primarily on diversity, but also addresses leadership and ethics. Through this course, students learn how to discuss and confront thorny problems encountered in the business world, including race, gender, and ethics. A special session is dedicated to the discussion of minority relations in the workplace. Time is taken to watch a video of a group exploring these issues, followed by a class discussion on the video and several readings on the topic of minorities in the workplace. Students are encouraged to revisit personal experiences of their discrimination against others, dig deep into their own beliefs, and re-evaluate their approach to this still-challenging issue. Relevant readings include “What Makes a Leader,” “The Management of Diversity: A Hierarchy of Action for White Male Managers,” and “The Power of Talk: Who Gets Heard and Why.”

Course Name: Investment Management and Entrepreneurial Finance
Instructor: John Mcdonald

This investment course discusses many practical and conceptual factors influencing the value of companies and deals—both publicly listed and private equity investments—and the success of investment approaches.

Relevant course content includes corporate social responsibility and social impact management. The course addresses CSR from an investor’s point of view and includes the reading Financial Shenanigans: How to Detect Accounting Gimmicks and Fraud in Financial Reports. The course also touches on social impact management. As part of the course, students are required to write a research report on a company of their choice. Some students select companies with a social or environmental focus as the subject of this required report. In addition, the course explores the potential for economic bubbles and subsequent impact on investors, and includes Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds and Tulipomania among the readings.

Pages

Type of Offering

Pages