The Stanford Business Reporter

 Q: At a recent Dean's reception, Dean Joss discussed Stanford's commitment to remaining small in the future, relative to other business schools. How can Stanford best capitalize on its small size?

A: This question naturally breaks down into two more focused questions: What are the “traditional advantages” that small size affords? What are some of the new programs/initiatives that the GSB is undertaking to even further capitalize on our small size? 

      We begin with the traditional advantages. One that MBA students frequently point to is the strong sense of community that arises within each class. Ironically, in MBA programs with twice or three times the number of students, students seem to bond with a smaller group – a “section” or a “major”. With a cohort size of 360, it is indeed possible for each of you to know practically every other individual in your class by the time that you leave here. In addition to this social advantage, we believe there is an academic advantage. You have heard us wax poetically on a number of occasions that we emphasize frameworks rather than current best practice. We do so because we believe that frameworks are more robust with respect to change--frameworks endure as a way to make sense out of a complex world; best practices are constantly being replaced and, in many cases, revealed over time to be mediocre or poor practices. Remember re-engineering? However, a school that seeks to teach frameworks requires a higher level of intellect than a school that seeks to teach best practice. Understanding and applying general analytical constructs across empirical contexts is a more intellectually demanding activity than simply imitating what someone else does. By virtue of being small and having a strong reputation, we can select on the level of intellect that is an essential input into the MBA production function. A third traditional advantage of small size is that there is less balkanization among the faculty. The GSB does not have formal departments. It has teaching areas, and individual faculty often move between and work with those in adjacent areas. The absence of strong intellectual boundaries is especially important in a school of general management since general management is inherently cross-disciplinary. Indeed, some of our most successful core courses--strategic management and human-resources--were explicitly cross-disciplinary in their design. 

      There are some advantages on the research side of this institution as well. For example, we believe that our faculty members do better research because they are forced to come into contact with faculty who challenge them from different disciplinary perspectives.

      Now for the new initiatives: we believe that the way to capitalize on our small size is to look for programs that are intense and intimate. The 2nd-year seminars during pre-term this past year were the first of what we hope will be a number of intense/intimate learning experiences. While we are still working out some of the details, we want to set up procedures for a group of say 12 to 18 1st years to submit a course topic to the Deans in the late winter/early Spring. The Deans will in turn suggest one or several faculty members who could lead a course on that topic. The students would then, in consultation with the faculty member, have responsibility for developing a reading list for a seminar-like course that would be offered in the following year. While not all faculty would prefer this format to a standard case or lecture class, we suspect that a large number would, and if the 2nd-year seminars are any indication of the popularity of a more intimate format, we expect that this initiative will be popular as well. (Thanks, by the way, to Professor Jim Baron for suggesting such a format.) As for the details to be worked out, we need to think about how we will decide among proposals if they are too many. We also need to decide on a minimum number of students for the course to be offered. However, we are pretty confident that we will have this format available by the end of the winter.

      A somewhat different type of initiative that we are currently contemplating is involving alumni in a mentoring/coaching role around the socioemotional aspects of the MBA program, finding a job, and starting a career. Students have asked for more contact with alumni, and alumni have expressed a strong willingness to give time to helping the school in its mission. Given our small size and given the large number of alumni who live in the near vicinity, we believe that we are probably uniquely positioned to execute this type of program. Importantly, planning for this program is only in its earliest stages, but we have started to talk to interested alumni, and we are reasonably confident that we can at least pilot the program on a small scale the next year. 

      If you have some other suggestions on programs/initiatives that would meet the criterion of intimate and intense learning experiences, we would love to hear them.  

 Q: In the future, joint degrees between the business school and both the education school and engineering school will take longer to complete. The administration has mentioned moving from focusing on joint degrees to emphasizing certificate programs in those areas. What do you see as the costs and benefits to students of that change? What do you see as the main reason for the certificate programs in general (attracting students, signal employers)?

A: First we have to get the terminology straight. What we have had with the Ed School and the Engineering School are dual degree programs. The only joint degrees programs are the JD-MBA and a very unused MD-MBA. The difference is significant: A joint degree is a specific program of study that leads to a single joint degree. It is approved by the university (by the Senate of the Academic Council) with specific requirements, etc. A dual degree program is something more informal: it involves a student satisfying the requirements for two (or more) separate degree programs.

      Next, we should clarify why the dual degree programs will take longer to complete. The University, as a matter of general policy, stiffened the requirements for getting any sort of Masters degree. Essentially, you’ll need 45 units not counted for any other degree, to get any Masters anywhere in the university. You’ll still need 100 units for the MBA--that’s a GSB requirement--but if you want a second masters somewhere else, you’ll need another 45. (In fact, we aren’t sure this is quite true. While the GSB requires 100 units, the University has set our statutory minimum at 90. So we think dual degrees where one is an MBA will take a total of 135 only. But this is still a matter to be clarified with the University.) When the University did this, they weren’t aiming at our dual degree students at all; it was an action aimed at other folks who, the University felt, were abusing the system. But, the GSB’s students got swept up in a general policy shift.

      So how do we respond? One response, the one we are currently looking at with the Ed School, is to form an official joint-degree program which will give an MBA-M.Ed. combination, for around 120 units (or maybe fewer). We can’t promise this will happen--it will take first the consent of the faculty at both schools and then the University Faculty Senate---but both the GSB’s administration and that of the Ed School think it is an excellent idea, and we will do our best to make it a reality.

      We could pursue similar joint-degree programs with departments in the School of Engineering, but that, it seems to us, is a harder target to hit, because there are a number of departments that students from the GSB might be interested in. Moreover, we aren’t sure that the greatest number of our students interested in some exposure to courses in the School of Engineering really want as many courses as a masters would require. By looking into certificates, we are looking at a commitment of 15 to 20 units in a department in the School of Engineering, which we view as enough to develop a serious claim to expertise, without making you a full-fledged expert. And the same is true going the other way: Students in the School of Engineering want some exposure to management, but not as much as a full-fledged MBA would require.

      So:  Costs and benefits to the students: For those students who want something more than a four or five courses worth of training, you can do it, but it takes a lot, lot more (double or triple) to get to the next official step, which is a dual degree. But we think---maybe hope is a better verb---that by lowering the cost to the range of fifteen to twenty units, we can get more of our students interested in this sort of technical training.

      And that’s great for us: It goes without saying that we’re always trying to work out where the profession of management is going, so the GSB can be out in front of the train, rather than hit by it. We believe that managers in the future are going to have to blend management skills with a level of technical sophistication that, usually, doesn’t exist yet. Technology is changing all sorts of businesses in all sorts of ways, and serious expertise in technology is going to be quite a strength for managers of the future. Actually, we’d go further with this: We believe that a central challenge of management in the future is going to be in the interface between people and technology. The GSB is blessed with incredible strength on the people side of this equation, in terms of our faculty, course offerings and the like. If we can leverage the fact that we are across the street from one of the great schools of engineering in the world, we’ll have a package that simply can’t be beat, or even matched, by anyone.  

 Q: What mechanisms are in place to equip Junior Faculty with teaching skills and / or improve them?

 A: Before answering this question directly, we would like to first address the implication that junior faculty somehow have more difficulty in the classroom than senior faculty. It turns out that the correlation between rank and difficulty in the classroom is surprisingly low. One can look to anecdotal evidence--like the fact that Jennifer Aaker and Ming Huang--are the two most recent recipients of the Teacher of the Year Award. (While Jennifer is now a tenured faculty member, she was a junior faculty member at the time that she received the award.) However, there is more than anecdotal evidence. Some time ago, the Dean’s Office conducted a study that examined the correlation between rank and teaching ratings, and there was no significant positive correlation. The study did find that faculty generally have a tough time their first year teaching at Stanford; however, this effect holds regardless of rank. In earlier columns, we have commented on the reason that this is the case: this is a tough place to teach. Faculty who come here from our sister institutions generally see their ratings drop; faculty who go to our sister institutions generally see their ratings go up. It is a tough place to teach because you have high expectations, and you have high expectations because faculty like Aaker and Huang establish a high benchmark for how good teaching can be.

      Because of the low correlation between rank and classroom effectiveness, our mechanisms for improving the teaching of junior faculty are largely the same as our mechanisms for improving the teaching of senior faculty. The focus on teaching begins with orientation. Two faculty members lead 2-hour sessions on teaching at the GSB: one focuses on the case teaching format, and the other focuses on the lecture format. A second mechanism includes group preparation (teaching meetings, sharing of teaching plans, etc.) for class. We try hard to ensure that a faculty member’s first teaching experience is in the core or a multiple-section elective so that they can benefit from the experience and insight of others. A third mechanism revolves around videotaping of a class. Faculty members are asked to videotape one of their class sessions, and then they are provided with access to individuals who can help them evaluate their teaching. Over the last two years, pretty much every faculty member has been taped at least once. A fourth mechanism has been the hiring of a teaching coach\consultant who runs 2-day seminars with nine or ten faculty members each time. We hired this coach\consultant for the first time this year, and the first of these seminars received rave reviews from the participating faculty. Our plan is to run two more of these seminars this year, and the sign-up list oversubscribed---we have enough faculty seeking to get in to fill the two more this year and at least three more seminars next year. A fifth mechanism was the change to the teaching evaluations: in modifying the forms; one of the objectives was to design them in such a way that they provided more valuable feedback for the faculty.

      While the vast majority of mechanisms are common to junior and senior faculty, there are two additional things that we do for rookie faculty. First, we reduce their teaching load for their first two years at the GSB. We do this because they do not have any accumulated preps, and we want to make it easier for them to balance research and teaching given that their tenure clock is ticking. Second, we pair them with a senior mentor in one or, when the capacity is there, both classes that they teach in their first year. A mentorship-protégé relationship establishes a very natural social context for in-depth conversations about teaching.  

 

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