The U.S. Small Business Administration offers a window into a number of business and policy issues: for example, how to encourage entrepreneurship, the role of government in helping businesses grow, and the interaction between business and government.
This made Isabel Casillas Guzmán, who served in the Biden administration as the 27th administrator of the SBA, a natural choice to be the inaugural visiting fellow for the Business, Government & Society Initiative at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
“The goal of the Business, Government & Society Initiative is to bridge the gap between the academic and intellectual, between student experience and the practice of governing,” said Ken Shotts, the David S. and Ann M. Barlow Professor of Political Economy at the GSB. Many GSB students will have government roles at some point during their careers, and those who do not will still interact and work with government. “It’s important for them to understand how governments function.”
The visiting fellow program is designed to bring experienced practitioners from industry, government, and civic organizations to the GSB for one or two weeks per quarter to contribute to the intellectual life at the school.
“My life’s work has been about working in small businesses — working with founders in the entrepreneurial landscape — as well as working in government,” Guzmán said. “I’ve had a unique vantage point into how the two can work together to deal with societal issues and help our country and our world be more prosperous and better places to live.”
Guzmán led the SBA’s COVID-19 response, oversaw a $500 billion portfolio of government-backed financial products, and served as the voice of America’s 34 million small businesses in President Biden’s cabinet.
In late February and early March, Guzmán spent two weeks at Stanford — one week as a policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) and one as a visiting fellow at the GSB — engaging with both students and faculty members as a guest speaker in classes, during roundtable discussions, and in one-on-one conversations. Topics included government policy and decision making and its impact on the private sector, particularly entrepreneurial ventures.
A unique window on government and business
Learning about the SBA is an excellent way for students to explore the many different ways in which the government engages with the private sector, Guzmán said.
“It’s a smaller agency in the federal government that has an outsized impact in terms of the amount of capital that it backs,” Guzmán said. “In addition, since small business touches nearly every issue, the agency plugs in across the whole of the government. One example is the care economy. You wouldn’t necessarily think that the SBA would play a role. But 95% of childcare centers are small businesses, and entrepreneurs face massive inefficiencies when their entrepreneurial ventures are disrupted by a lack of elder care or childcare.”
One of the classes Guzmán visited was on the care economy, where many students were interested in social entrepreneurship and impact investing. She also sat in on classes on finance, strategy and other topics.
“Many GSB students have goals to solve complex problems,” Guzmán said. “I think there is a natural curiosity about how government interplays with markets and can solve problems.”
Broad-based benefits
In addition to giving students and faculty an opportunity to hear from an experienced practitioner, bringing Guzmán to campus promoted collaboration within the university. The two-week program that combined fellowships at SIEPR and the GSB allowed Guzmán “to integrate and explore different parts of the university,” Shotts said.
Another aim of the program, he said, is for the visiting fellow to benefit as well as the GSB students and faculty. Guzmán said she enjoyed hearing about students’ goals.
“The students were very inspiring and gave me a lot of optimism,” Guzmán said. “They’re working to try to solve some very challenging issues — in some cases those where government plays a role in leading and hopefully carving out public policy that supports the marketplace.”
Giving students a window into the complexities of decision making at the intersection of government and private enterprise will help them become better leaders, Shotts said.
“Fundamentally, this is about leadership — and the people who are going to be leaders of companies are going to be grappling with major societal issues,” Shotts said. “We want people to start out in their path to becoming effective and thoughtful leaders by thinking about those things now.”
Shotts said visiting fellow program will continue, with a long-term goal of establishing lasting relationships with practitioners.
“We want people to learn to think for themselves, and to grapple with difficult societal issues,” Shotts said. “Bringing in guests who have a variety of different perspectives and experiences will help do this.
