Stanford business magazine pdf

Workplace Equality for All! Prejudice against older coworkers persists even among those who openly oppose racism and sexism.

Marketing, Math, and Microseconds. Even modest improvements to organ exchange markets can save many lives. When companies shut down because of executive malfeasance, bottom-tier workers suffer most — especially when it comes to future earnings. Back to Class: The Paths to Power. The basic lessons of this perennially popular class are simple. Putting them into practice is not. A one-of-a-kind gift evokes lessons learned at an eclectic bookstore. Tips for landing a seat in the boardroom at any stage of your career.

Yifan Wu. Read All About It. All Right Now. Tear Up This Tree. How to Limit Distraction Author Nir Eyal discusses how people can control their device use and thus their lives. Physician Maya Adam wants you to love food that loves you back. How to Be Present And what that even means. Intestinal Fortitude Poop pills? Six Secrets for Making It Work Stanford couples share how they balance the demands of relationship and career in a way that's fulfilling for both parties.

How to Be Resilient Setbacks happen. Your New Indulgence: Veggies. BY Charity Ferreira. BY Summer Moore Batte. BY Andrew Tan. We just had our national sales conference where we bring thousands of our entrepreneurs together and celebrate their accomplishments. They made career decisions because they thought it was the right thing to do. They were left with a feeling of: Is this it? Now these women are thriving. Every one of our stylists has a story.

There is one ex-PR exec that had been home raising her three children for the last eight years. Then her husband became ill with multiple sclerosis and was unable to work.

There are other women who have military husbands who are deployed abroad. They are in the delivery room with them, making meals for them, building a community. What do you consider your biggest failure?

I believe you have to fail fast and be proud of your failures. At WeddingChannel we raised a lot of venture capital.

I constantly experimented and iterated. What values are important to you in business? Our company manifesto says it all. Staying agile, nimble. Recognizing that every day is day one. Most of all, I value people truly pursuing their passion.

Life is way too short not to love what you do, why you do it, and who you do it with. Many Stanford alumni will have earned the ability to be selective. You need to ask yourself: Am I doing what I truly want to do, or just what others expect me to do?

Everyone wants to make the world a better place. My role is to help women feel more bold, empowered, and joyful.

I want to help women live their best lives. What do you think is the greatest innovation in the past decade? The emergence of social networking. It has completely transformed the way we communicate and interact with people. It changes everything. Jessica Herrin 23 is best to focus like a laser beam on one or two opportunities. Once you master your products or services in a small area, you can expand from there.

Think big and build diverse, high-quality teams. Small problems can take as much time as big problems, so you should make it all worthwhile. With every organization I have ever built or run, the key to our success was putting together diverse, quality teams.

We hired Republicans, Democrats, and independents, as well as people from the insurance industry and consumer advocacy groups. The diversity of the team led to lively debates.

When I made important, multibillion-dollar decisions they were based on understanding every aspect of the problem. They choose 10 people each year from 1, applications. You can work for someone senior in the executive branch. In I was assigned to work with the National Security Council in the counter-terrorism group. My boss was Richard Clarke, who was the counterterrorism czar for multiple presidents. I worked on a number of projects, including how to protect our banking system, power grids, and the internet from cyberwarfare attacks.

When I ran for California governor in against Meg Whitman, who beat me in the Republican primary. As governor I could have tackled problems in our education and economic engine. I want to create an environment where entrepreneurs can thrive.

Entrepreneurship and innovation are being threatened by a subpar education system. I would love to continue to work on projects that foster innovation. When I was 15 in Houston, Texas, I was an usher in a movie theater.

I learned there what it meant to work hard and be a good employee. I saw that movie 60 times and can quote chapter and verse. What is the best business book you have read? Thomas L. It described for me the chief problem in California. California helped create much of the technology that enables entrepreneurs all over the world to build businesses, which means those jobs no longer need to be in the U.

Friedman does an excellent job of describing how urgent it is to stay competitive in education and job creation. What is the most valuable thing you took away from your time at Stanford? I had come right out of the University of Texas undergrad and was the youngest guy in my class.

It was a growing experience. I am analytical by nature so quant classes were easy for me, but I learned the most in organizational behavior. Thirty years later, I can say that class helped me make the biggest impact. Then focus some more. This serial entrepreneur and California gubernatorial candidate is on his third startup. Disrupt education and help boomers switch careers by closing the skills gap online. Surround yourself with people you trust who complement your skillset, and then encourage debate and dissension.

Keep your ego in check. Everyone at the company should feel comfortable having their own opinions. I like to come in with ideas and ask individuals to challenge them.

How do you come up with your best ideas? The best ideas will not come from slamming three espressos and grinding it out, but rather at weird moments: in the middle of the night, when you are traveling on a train, when you are receptive to oblique inspiration and the suspension of disbelief. Our mind uses us more than we use our mind. Rob Forbes What values are important to you in business? Honesty and simplicity, and doing something that you believe has real value.

Many companies do market research to try and anticipate the needs of the customer. I say just develop great products and tell an honest story about them.

All the excess marketing spin in the commercial world has created a desire for authentic goods. I asked myself: What could you sell such that if you sold more, it would improve the quality of our lives? Bicycles are one solution. Getting people to reduce their dependency on private automobiles would do a lot for our environment and to improve connections with our communities.

We need to sell , bicycles a year in the U. It worked. Maybe it will also allow customers to appreciate themselves as designers; we all design something. Even a business memo is a piece of design. Fortunately, no one has to hand dry crystal goblets any longer. What businessperson do you most admire?

I admire the people who manage small businesses every day more so than those who have been successful in launching larger businesses. The great new chefs and restaurateurs in San Francisco who have built our food culture care deeply about what they do and perform the same tasks again each day out of passion.

The friendships and ongoing relationships trump everything else. Your peer group becomes an important part of your life. Tell an honest story. He earned his MBA from the Stanford GSB in , and founded Design Within Reach in on the premise that he could disrupt the furniture and decorator businesses by selling modern designer furniture direct to consumers over the internet. The value that design brings to our everyday lives: optimism. You cannot control as much as you think you can.

What inspires you — how do you come up with your best ideas? I have a burning desire to win and achieve. I was raised in a typical Asian family where that was important. I have a deep fear of letting people down.

As a working mom I want to be a good role model for my children. Spending time thinking about fashion, toys, or architecture frees me up to think imaginatively.

I pushed a lot of paper. I was making minimum wage and learned that it took a lot of hard work to be able to support yourself. Laura Ching What businessperson do you most admire? My grandfather.

So much of what I have learned in business came from him. He was an entrepreneur in a day when it was hard for Asian people to break through. What is the most valuable lesson you took away from your time at Stanford?

Based in Sunnyvale, Calif. Tiny Prints cofounder Laura Ching talked with us about values, culture, and competing with yourself. Allowing people to connect more meaningfully beyond digital means.

Solve a problem that you would want solved. Building a great culture from the start is important. We invested a lot of time and mindshare into culture from the beginning. It was absolutely shocking. This is it. There is something wrong with banking. At all levels. In the 27 years since receiving her PhD in operations research from Yale, her scholarly pursuits had been primarily dedicated to a highly technical, theoretical sort of work that focused on real-life topics such as bargaining and shareholder activism, but did so from a perspective likely to be of interest mainly, or perhaps exclusively, to other scholars.

The mathematical models she had spent her life working on were colliding with reality. After all, scholars and bankers had been studying this for years, decades even. Numerous textbooks, academic articles, policy papers, and commentary had been written on the subject. And while she was increasingly skeptical of the arguments, she was reticent to step out too far into the public eye. Not an expert on banking per se, she felt she would be viewed as just one of thousands of professors.

Instead of banking, Admati, a mother of three, focused her attention on a community problem: a rash of teen suicide attempts on the train tracks running through Palo Alto. In the evenings, she sat at the crossing with friends and others, including the current Palo Alto mayor.

She went to school board and city council meetings and raised money to hire a guard. Afterward, one of the participants urged her to write up in more detail the content of her comments. He told her he believed there was a lot of confusion in banking. Those who wanted to counter those arguments did not have enough writing that explained the issues.

At a September conference in Vienna, one of the discussants said he had waited 40 years for this kind of paper. Academics have pointed out some of these issues at least since the s. A central banker from New Zealand had said basically the same thing as far back as The next month, she published a full op-ed in the Financial Times. Then, she published pieces in Bloomberg, the New York Times, and elsewhere. First, the implicit and explicit safety nets that support and subsidize banks mean their creditors are less likely to worry about default than they would be with other kinds of companies.

As a result, creditors impose fewer restrictions and covenants on banks, and banks often borrow at lower rates than they would have had to pay based on the risk of their assets. Second, the compensation structure in banking actually encourages high leverage. Even when regulators ask for public comment on a proposed regulation, most contributions come from the industry and its supporters, and additional lobbying goes on behind the scenes.

In such a situation, invalid arguments can win the policy debate. Parker Professor of Finance and Economics. The students have worked together in teams, traveled to 14 countries and worked on 80 projects in collaboration with 22 global partners.

Why is radical collaboration the right model for creating the kinds of products you want? More ideas come out. More excitement comes out. What I know is that this team of teachers has a great time together, and I, personally, am much more creative than I could possibly be doing anything without the team. I imagine it can be daunting for a physicist, say, to be put in the same room as a poet and asked to collaborate.

Sarah Stein Greenberg: My experience as a student was that as a person with a health care and business background — a Scott Macdonald, Jess Adrian, and Anna Xu convert a whiteboard into a gutter to catch and transport water to a bucket.

The documentary also examines the role the instructors play in helping the students grapple with the many challenges of doing so. Here are excerpts of the conversation. Why is that? We would both be there for every session. And the d. I had not worked closely with people from the medical school. I had not worked closely with people from all across the Stanford campus.

That was a profoundly important moment in my own education. Having more diverse perspectives at the table is going to broaden your array of potential solutions. But getting to the point where you can productively work as a team across so many disciplines is challenging. The idea is to show that a multidisciplinary team can all contribute to the area of business research for competitive analysis, for understanding the market, and for various other things. The idea is to get people excited about their new project, their new task, and to start to understand their new environment.

Beach: Being surrounded by people from a variety of disciplines generates very high expectations, of course. People A team of students attempts to capture water with a plastic funnel attached to a wood frame. But I think a couple things mediate against you in the sense of fear. That word: empathy.

For me, coming into this work and getting to work with a remarkable team, I frequently feel humble. That goes on with the students. Stein Greenberg: Having fresh eyes is an incredibly valuable tool. The second thing is empathy. One of the things we force our students to do is put together what we call a point of view statement that captures empathy for the ultimate user, as well as a separate one for partner organizations. What are their constraints? And it all comes down, I think, to a word we use a lot — at least I use a lot — about being intentional.

It can be not entirely managed, but you can be intentional about how this experience unfolds. The professor was wrong. This fact has led to a great misunderstanding among business leaders, especially those trained in business schools, that they should avoid competition. These improvements, in turn, make companies stronger competitors. Once those rivals improve, they now are stronger competitors, starting the whole cycle over again.

Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. The Red Queen is at work around us all the time, triggering progress on many fronts. Some still are competing, but only by remaining innovative. The result? As a consumer, you probably think of this amazing record of innovation as something that was inevitable. But this development did not have to happen. So, if you are lamenting that your device cannot map correctly, worry not.

Competition still thrives in the wireless industry, so the better devices out there will pressure your manufacturer to do a better job. But that is just a way to shut down the engine that generates innovation.

But avoiding competition is just a way to shut down the engine that generates innovation. But, over time, that monopolist gets lazy. So your strategy professor was wrong: Competition is good for you. This piece was originally published on his blog, BarnettTalks.

A new study shows why the answer is often no. Not necessarily. From the vantage point of public policy, IPOs may still be a net positive for tech innovation. Many companies go public because they have just scored a major breakthrough and use their new resources to scale up the business. And even if newly public companies do become less daring, they can still propel innovation indirectly by paying top dollar for startups. Google has bought companies since it went public in Bernstein reached that conclusion after a detailed comparison of patent data between companies that went public and similar companies that decided to stay private.

All told, the study covered thousands of tech companies that either went public or withdrew IPO plans between and Photograph by Jake Stangel Shai Bernstein: Public companies may not be as technologically ambitious or willing to take risks as firms that stay private, but they have better access to capital for tapping innovation generated by smaller companies. In addition to tracking the absolute number of patents, he estimated the innovative importance of each patent based on the number of times it had been cited in other patent applications.

The basic idea is straightforward: Patents that are cited more frequently are likely to represent more fundamental breakthroughs. Last, but not least, he analyzed data about the inventors themselves. He found that the two groups of companies had broadly similar characteristics up to the point they decided to go public or stay private.

The two groups were also similar in size, age, and research spending. Almost one third of all the abandoned IPOs between and occurred in — the year the dot-com bubble collapsed. By contrast, companies that remained private stayed on the same track as before.

One explanation for the brain drain is that top inventors have little incentive to stay after an IPO, in part because they often become overnight millionaires. Executives at publicly held companies may become more cautious, for example, because they are subject to market pressures and worry more about career threats and takeovers, and feel pressure to tell investors a simple story. The second group had separate chairs and chief executives, which usually means the chief executive is less insulated from market pressure.

The result: Companies with separate board chairs and chief executives — those more likely to be sensitive to outside investors — saw a much bigger drop in innovation, and inventors were more likely to leave. But going public clearly changes the mindset of companies, and that might be a reason for some companies to think twice about the Holy Grail. At what point will solar power be competitive with electricity generated by conventional, fossil-fuel plants, and how long will subsidies need to remain in place before the solar industry can stand on its own?

Reichelstein explains: Why did you decide to study the economics of solar photovoltaic power? Renewable energy and solar in particular remain rather controversial in the public debate about energy policy. Passions have been running high. Given the range of opinions, I wanted to do my own analysis.

Your main conclusions? Solar PV is not yet competitive with fossil fuel, like natural gas, from the perspective of a utility that can either build a new natural gas power plant or invest in solar installations. For a commercial power user, say a business with plenty of rooftop space, the cost of generating your own electricity is now on par with what the business would need to pay in retail electricity prices. In that sense, grid parity has been achieved for commercial-scale installations.

The facility has to be in a favorable location, such as the Southwestern United States, and secondly the business must be able to take advantage of the current federal tax subsidies. Concerning the future, and this may sound like a pun, the future of solar PV looks rather bright. The industry What happens if subsidies disappear or are sharply reduced?

If this trend can be maintained for the next 10 years, and if subsidies are continued for that period, there is a real prospect for solar to become cost competitive on its own — that is, without a subsidy — at least for commercial installations.

Utility-scale installations will take longer to become competitive; possibly 15 years, though it obviously becomes murkier to make projections that far into the future. Why will it take longer for utility-scale installations to stand on their own than for commercial-scale installations?

For commercial-scale — and also for residential — solar, the benchmark is the retail price of electricity, while for utility-scale projects it is the wholesale price.

What assumptions are you making about the cost of generating electricity from fossil fuels? We believe that natural gas, as opposed to coal, is the most important fossil fuel competitor to renewable energy. In our cost projections, we have assumed a modern combined-cycle gas power plant with the price of natural gas given by the historical average observed in the United States over the past 10 years. Are you factoring in the price of oil? Oil is not used widely to generate electricity.

The price of oil would be relevant to our analysis only to the extent that you want to compare gasoline-powered cars against electric vehicles. Stabilization Act of and will be in place until unless Congress changes the rules. The solar panel manufacturing industry has been on a remarkably steady learning curve for several decades now, which has pushed down the systems price of solar panels at a dramatic rate. However, this learning curve seems very much dependent upon production volume.

Yes, solar panel producers are waiting for demand to catch up with current industry capacity. Yes, in a sense. What is driving the economics of solar power?

A mix of federal tax incentives has been especially helpful to commercialscale installations, and even to home installations.