Architecting Impact

Dear Friends,

We are always grateful to the Stanford Graduate School of Business community— for its capacity, energy, and dedication to working together in pursuit of bold goals. This year, we have gained tremendous momentum. I have been fortunate to connect with many of you, and I am consistently amazed at what a select group of committed, capable people can achieve. It is clear that GSB community members are shaping the world across industries, functions, and geographies with innovative thought and principled leadership.

Particularly significant for us has been the completion of the Knight Management Center, our new home for innovation, impact, and inclusiveness. Thanks to the generous support of Nike founder Phil Knight, MBA '62, and more than 200 alumni and friends, the Knight Center has already become a place where you can reconnect with familiar faces and meet new ones; share your ideas with others and learn from them; and seek inspiration, ideas, and allies to change the world.

The Knight Center is built upon the GSB's distinct style and strategy. In architecting a lasting structure, we strove to envision what the school will become in the future, and we created a facility that bridges our roots and our possibilities. Originally, we had hoped our new home would support the GSB in employing our traditional strengths in new ways. It has already done so and promises much more.

Architecting for Identity and Innovation

In designing Knight, we wanted to leverage our identity, literally building the unique aspects of the GSB into the bricks and mortar of our home. The new center ensures that we will continue to:

• Deliver a transformative educational experience built around the individual learner.
• Build a cohort of preeminent scholars to further our understanding of business and the world.
• Convene an unrivaled community, mobilizing global leaders in thought and in action.
• Accomplish all of this in the GSB's distinctive culture: vibrant, passionate, innovative, and committed to a better future.

This identity is the bedrock of the GSB's distinctive success. Still, we strove for more. We also wanted to ignite innovation. By intentionally designing a home that attracts leading thinkers and an environment that fosters collaboration and creativity, we have created a place from which great ideas and initiatives will emerge. This will pave the way for our continued contributions in the coming years and will enable future generations of scholars and students to flourish and to realize their dreams.

Transformative Education

We architected the Knight Center to deliver a transformative educational experience, rooted in the philosophy that course content and pedagogy should determine teaching method and class size. By releasing the traditional constraints of a prescribed section size and tiered classroom, we created conditions for innovation.

The new facility's seminar rooms were designed to house our Critical Analytical Thinking course and our courses on personal leadership development. Additionally, faculty have employed them for new small-group, discussion-based classes. Professor of organizational behavior Jesper Sørensen developed a seminar on Poverty, Entrepreneurship, and Development. This fall, GSB faculty member and former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will co-lead the seminar Crisis Management on the World Stage with the Rt. Hon. David Miliband (MP), U.K. secretary of state for foreign and commonwealth affairs from 2007 to 2010. The Knight Center's NGP Collaboration Lab, known as the CoLab, was created to foster courses in innovative thinking. Using hands-on, design-thinking methods, faculty members Jim Patell and Stefanos Zenios developed Design for Service Innovation. This course uses multidisciplinary teams of students to address the needs of underserved users. Last spring, the focus was on young adults living with chronic medical conditions. One team developed a social tracking system for teens with lupus and rheumatoid arthritis to help identify which lifestyle choices cause flare-ups and to share information quickly with others living with the diseases. Other teams developed ways to increase medical compliance of transplant patients, raised testicular cancer awareness, and created a discreetly portable catheter to help those with bladder problems.

To innovate, one must build upon established knowledge. We continue to hone essential classes across the spectrum of management and to develop new foundational courses as opportunities arise. We also are creating electives that delve more deeply into specific topics. Nobel laureate Myron Scholes developed Managing Under Uncertainty, which looks at how changing opportunities shape investment planning. Accounting professor Ron Kasznik teamed up with Safra Catz, president of Oracle, to lead Mergers and Acquisitions: Accounting, Regulatory, and Governance Issues, to discuss both the theory and practice of M&A.

Preeminent Scholarship

The Knight Center was designed to bring scholars together, exchanging ideas within and across disciplines, to advance the understanding of management. We envisioned a place that fostered creativity and spontaneous intellectual discussion and designed ample shared space for this to occur.

Faculty collaborations have led to groundbreaking insights. Accounting professor Charles Lee partnered with two Peking University scholars to assess the size and extent of damage created in China by "tunneling," the practice in which a majority shareholder diverts corporate funds for personal use. Faculty member George Foster teamed up with the World Economic Forum and Endeavor Global to study the growth accelerators and inhibitors of early-stage companies in a report that included businesses from more than 20 countries. Marketing professor Itamar Simonson developed pioneering insights into the role of genetics in influencing consumer choice. Finance faculty member John Beshears combined psychology and finance to uncover surprising findings about how people make investment decisions.

Books remain an important vehicle through which we synthesize current thinking, provide original perspective, and share our knowledge with the world. Finance professor Darrell Duffie published Why Big Banks Fail and What to Do About It, in which he analyzes weaknesses contributing to the crisis failures of large banks and recommends changes. Organizational behavior professor Jeffrey Pfeffer published Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don't, which provides insights on paths to top management.

Working across disciplines, our faculty members are exploring topics from new angles. We are on the threshold of launching a major initiative to encourage innovation in the developing world to alleviate poverty. We are working with colleagues throughout the university to bring perspectives from other fields to help solve intractable management problems. We are seeking ways to provide comprehensive support to family businesses, combining among other areas studies in entrepreneurship, succession planning, governance, and personal leadership.

Together with Stanford Law School, we founded the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance. Here, we bring together top experts in finance, policy, and law to advance the development and deployment of clean energy technology.

Leading scholars recognize the vibrancy of our intellectual atmosphere. We experienced tremendous success in faculty recruiting this year, with 10 new hires, plus 2 more faculty rejoining us from other institutions. With promising young talent coming aboard in every area within the GSB faculty, we are laying the groundwork for distinctive scholarship in the years and decades to come.

Unrivaled Community

At the Knight Center, we wanted to assemble leaders from all walks of life to share knowledge and develop new ideas. To this end, the center includes numerous spaces for conferences, both large and small, as well as the Town Square, which serves as the hub of the complex.

CEMEX Auditorium in Zambrano Hall and the Oberndorf Event Center have already been put to great use. Over the past year our students have had the opportunity to hear from the presidents of Mexico and Costa Rica; the Latvian prime minister; the CEOs of Disney, Ford, United Airlines, Siemens, and AB InBev; and the founders of Sequoia Capital, SM Entertainment (the largest entertainment agency in Korea), Mercado Libre, and Skype.

We have used the Town Square and conference facilities to bring people together to exchange insights and understanding. The Health Care Innovation Summit assembled academics, industry leaders, venture funders, service providers, and representatives of NGOs to discuss how medical innovation can be spurred to prolong lives, especially in the developing world. The Stanford Finance Forum brought together academics, financiers, government policymakers, and regulators to discuss the state of the banking system and regulatory proposals.

Distinctive Culture

We developed the Knight Center to capitalize on and enhance the GSB's vibrant, innovative, and collaborative culture. We envisioned a place abuzz with intellectual energy. Alcoves outside classrooms encourage students and faculty to exchange ideas directly after class. Seventy break-out rooms are used by students to collaborate on group projects and for club meetings and videoconferences. 

GSB students form a flash mob as part of the April 29, 2011, Knight Management Center Opening Day celebration.

We envisioned a campus that is alive during all hours of the day and all months of the year, and designed the facilities and services to enable this. Students now regularly stay on campus late into the evening, grabbing dinner at the new Arbuckle Dining Pavilion, studying in the Bass Center, or watching international sports events in the Hemsley MBA Student Lounge.

In sum, the Knight Management Center underscores and augments what is distinct about the Stanford Graduate School of Business: Its transformative education, preeminent scholarship, unrivaled community, and distinctive culture. By architecting a home that facilitates intellectual discovery, audacious dreams, and innovation, we further inspire our faculty, students, and alumni to change lives, change organizations, and change the world.

Architecting for Impact

We are thrilled with the energy, ideas, and outcomes the Knight Management Center is generating. At the same time, we understand that not everyone can take time to come to Silicon Valley. With the increasing pace of change, today's leaders must learn continuously just to keep abreast. This raises the questions: How can we apply the spirit of the Stanford GSB to empower future leaders, including those who can't spend considerable time in Palo Alto? How can we best draw on the vast resources of Stanford to leverage the extended GSB community in pursuit of a better world? How can we architect for future impact?

Rapid change demands lifelong learning, and thus we are piloting ways to better serve alumni beyond graduation. Our faculty members continue to host webinars, which are often attended by more than 1,000 alumni, to share new ideas and knowledge. This winter, economics professor Edward Lazear and lecturer Keith Hennessey conducted a multipoint videoconference with alumni leaders in the finance industry to exchange ideas on fiscal policy and implications for the macroeconomic outlook. This spring we launched Beacon, a program aimed at helping our alumni define and achieve success in their second careers. In the upcoming years, we will look for new ways to support and engage our alumni throughout their careers.

We are also experimenting with new ways to reach global leaders. We launched an executive program in partnership with Caterpillar that leverages the advances in our curriculum, including Critical Analytical Thinking and personal leadership development, using distance learning to reach senior managers around the world. This past year we held Executive Circle Summits in India and China, with a third planned for Brazil in September. These events bring together alumni, faculty, and executives to explore global business challenges and ways to overcome them.

As the pace of change and forces for globalization increase, we will continue to experiment with new ways to educate the world's leaders. Yet, all avenues must be consistent with our core identity. We will remain intimate in size and continue to deliver a personalized, high-touch education to the most promising of leaders. We will engage with our students in ways that are life changing, leading them to think, act, and dream differently because of their Stanford experience. We will maintain the highest level of scholarship, ensuring that our research will stand the test of time. We will continue our bent toward innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship, grounded in academically rigorous business fundamentals. Always striving for impact, we set our sights on making the world a better place because of our actions.

Architecting for Inclusiveness

The Knight Management Center is a testament to your commitment to the GSB. Your generosity allows us to demonstrate the power of the GSB in changing lives, organizations, and the world.

Your support has allowed us to continue to attract the very best faculty and students and to provide a truly transformative experience for all. You have helped us build a world-class facility, a place where we can convene leading thinkers to share ideas and turn them into action. You have enabled us to lay the foundation for a future of innovation and leadership.

You have joined with us, dedicating your time to this effort. You have shared your knowledge with peers by participating and speaking in conferences and chapter events. You have furthered our students' learning through your participation in the Executive Challenge and by returning to our classrooms. You have helped us identify promising applicants and helped those same people find rewarding jobs after they graduate. You have celebrated with us at reunions and in the opening of the Knight Center.

Much of what we do, especially the creation of the Knight Management Center and all that it enables, would not be possible without you. Your contributions have been invaluable to the Stanford Graduate School of Business, to our students, and to leaders and communities worldwide. Thanks to you, we can architect a better world for tomorrow, transforming dreams and passion into reality.

With deepest gratitude,

Garth Saloner, AM '81, MS '82, PhD '82
Philip H. Knight Professor and Dean
Email: deansaloner@gsb.stanford.edu