Stanford GSB: “We Don’t Want To Be The Graduate School of Entrepreneurship”

An aerial view of Stanford’s new nine-building complex for its business school.

‘WE DON’T WANT TO BE THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP’

The new curriculum also included expanded leadership and communication development. The Strategic Leadership course now integrates strategy with leadership development and implementation. A major feature of the CAT seminar is the honing of students’ written and oral communication skills. In a new capstone seminar near the end of the two years, students synthesize what they have learned, examine strengths and weaknesses in their personal leadership style, and reflect on how they hope to achieve their goals as they embark on their careers.

What Stanford hasn’t altered is as interesting as what it has attempted to change. While many business schools now require students to put together business plans, launch businesses, and take at least one required course in entrepreneurship, Stanford has held back. “We don’t even support our students doing business plan competitions,” says Rajan, who notes that Stanford is one of the few schools these days without a business plan or startup contest. Instead, he believes that the school’s location–in the heart of Silicon Valley–allows it to have a near hands-off approach to entrepreneurship because the startup bug strikes naturally given the surrounding ecosystem of angel investors, VC firms, and company founders.

“From our standpoint,” he says, “we don’t need to sell entrepreneurship here because we get it for free. Students will automatically think Stanford is entrepreneurship. We don’t need to sell anybody on it. If anything, this is a trend we have to push against more than embrace. We have a completely different problem than anybody else. We don’t want to be the graduate school of entrepreneurship. We are a school of general management. Our alumni are all the big VCs and our students go to those classes on their own. This is like a freight train going down at its own pace. But we don’t want students who launch companies that they will regret later on. We can’t say don’t do your startup, have it go bust in your second year, and think you have wasted your MBA.”

Though stats have yet to be released on the percentage of Class of 2014 grads who started new companies, Rajan says “it will be a big number relative to other schools.” Last year, nearly one in five graduates–a record 18%–launched their own firms.

Not surprisingly, Rajan’s overall appraisal is upbeat. “The MBA program is doing extraordinarily well,” he says. “We continue to see growth in applications. Our applicant pool is very global, with incoming classes of over 40% international. China, India, Brazil and Mexico have become big markets for us. We want to have a global pool of students coming in. We have not seen any decline in the two-year MBA. In fact, we have slowly increased the number of students in our program. If we were to get more excellent applicants, we would increase it more.”

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