Stanford Knowledgebase

STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS — Plenty of corporate CEOs say they want employees who know how to have fun. But Anheuser-Busch InBev NV chief Carlos Brito, describing the demanding corporate culture he maintains, admits he doesn’t even like the word.   ”I think fun’s too weak. … I have fun at the beach with my [...]

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STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—Back in the 1970s, Stanford professor Myra Strober wanted to understand how elementary school teaching became an occupation dominated by women. The trouble was the young economists in her interdisciplinary research group focused on statistical data from the 19th century, while the historians favored anecdotal evidence from teacher diaries. Neither faction [...]

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STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS —When Ori Brafman, MBA ’01, met Rod Beckstrom, MBA ’87, at a fundraiser to support tree-dwelling environmentalist Julia “Butterfly” Hill, neither of them imagined that they would write a book that would become the doctrine of the Tea Party. “It’s an interesting world,” Brafman said. “Sometimes, you write something and you’re [...]

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STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—It’s almost axiomatic that business is a Darwinian struggle. But what that means is far from clear. Do businesses, like living creatures, survive because they learn to adapt to a changing environment? Or, like dinosaurs, are they unable to change and thus die out when the climate shifts, only to be [...]

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STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—In the early 1950s, 300 actors, writers and others suspected of being communists were blacklisted in Hollywood and excluded from the workforce. A recent study, coauthored by Professor Hayagreeva Rao of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, analyzes how social networks of the day resulted in hundreds of individuals whose names [...]

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STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS — Getting all the senior leaders on board in advance is the most effective way to be successful in introducing change to an organization, according to research co-authored by Business School Professor Charles O’Reilly III. The research found when leaders across levels of an organization consistently support a particular change, [...]

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 STANFORD UNIVERSITY – We now live in what is being called the Information Age, because with the invention of the internet and digitization humans can access, exchange, and act through massive quantities of knowledge more easily than in any previous time in human history.  A unique aspect of digital information, however, is that much of [...]

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STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS – More than half of companies today cannot immediately name a successor to their CEO should the need arise, according to new research conducted by Heidrick & Struggles and Stanford University’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance. The survey of more than 140 CEOs and board directors of North American public and [...]

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When executives of oil companies and suppliers lined up before Congress recently to blame one another for the Louisiana oil disaster, they may have increased the odds that this type of behavior will spread like an oozing oil slick, according to research from Stanford Graduate School of Business and the USC Marshall School of Business.. [...]

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People want change  while also not wanting to upset the status quo. Professor Chip Heath coauthored an examination of successful paths to realizing change. STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS — Humans possess two minds — an “analytical brain” that plans for the future and an “emotional brain” that falls in love with routines and familiarity. [...]

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