Garth Saloner, Philip H. Knight Professor and Dean

Garth Saloner is the ninth dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. A faculty member since 1990 and a two-time winner of the Distinguished Teaching Award from MBA students, he has taught management, strategy, entrepreneurship, and e-commerce. He has been a leader in the evolution of management education and he was a key architect of the Business School's innovative new MBA                                                         curriculum introduced in 2007.

William Barnett, Thomas M. Siebel Professor of Business Leadership, Strategy, and Organizations

William Barnett studies competition among organizations and how organizations and industries evolve over time. He has studied how strategic differences and strategic change among organizations affect their growth, performance, and survival. This research includes empirical studies of technical, regulatory, and ideological changes among organizations, and how these changes affect competitiveness over time and across markets. His studies span a range of industries and contexts, including organizations in computers, telecommunications, research and development, software, semiconductors, disk drives, newspaper publishing, beer brewing, banking, and concerning the environment.

Schedule

12:30 - 13:00       Registration 

13:00 - 14:00       Lunch

14:00 - 14:30       Welcome & Overview 
                            Dean Garth Saloner

14:30 - 15:45       Leading Organizations to Global Competitiveness I 
                            William Barnett

Companies worldwide face a dizzying array of changes due to globalization. New technologies transform not only the high-tech sectors, but many traditional industries too.  Often from unexpected places, new competitors materialize and challenge our established approaches to business. Regulatory changes, often coming from far away, introduce new rules of the game, new constraints on business, and new standards.  Faced with these challenges, business leaders often find their old approaches to be inadequate, and yet are not sure what new practices would better fit today’s changing landscape. Amidst this uncertainty, we hear commonly from policymakers and pundits about the importance of macroeconomic, political, cultural, and technological changes sweeping the world economy.  We know that the global economy is filled with potential opportunities, but it can be difficult to seize opportunities when we are busy dealing with so many unforeseen challenges.

In these sessions, Professor William Barnett explains how globalization is the source of both the most daunting challenges and the most attractive opportunities facing business today.  He starts with a riddle: Most of the economic growth being generated in the world economy today is coming from a relatively small number of unlikely businesses.  These engines of growth are not the traditional large-scale enterprises we know from the 20^th- century.  Rather, most of these businesses are relatively new firms that approach business in ways that were not imaginable just a few years ago.  Professor Barnett explains the underlying source of these new, high-growth firms, and spells out the leadership lessons they offer for managers in today’s changing business environment.

15:45 - 16:00      Break

16:00 - 17:45      Leading Organizations to Global Competitiveness II 
                            William Barnett

17:45 - 18:00      Conclusion

Contact

Janet Faridi
Associate Director of Programs
Phone: 650.724.7727
Email: [email protected]