Interview: Stanford GSB Dean Jon Levin

A NEW COURSE WITH A HIGH-MINDED GOAL TO EACH STUDENTS HOW AI TECHNOLOGY CAN BE USED TO PROMOTE ‘HUMAN FLOURISING’

Levin paired her with a well-known marketing professor at the business school, Jennifer Aaker, and the two created the multi-disciplinary offering. It has the high-minded goal of teaching students how to build AI technology that promotes human flourishing, the opposite of pernicious disruption.

The collaboration accomplishes two of Levin’s most immediate objectives for the business school: To build bridges between the GSB and Stanford’s other schools and departments and to expose MBA students to the future of cutting-edge technology. The course will combine MBA students with computer science students in studying AI techniques, behavioral science and design thinking.

Levin, who betrays a naturally ebullient personality, cannot contain his enthusiasm for the new course. “I am really excited about it,” says Levin. “She is an amazing brilliant scientist and she is teaching with Jennifer Acker who is fabulous. Hopefully something great will happen in that room. Fei Fei and I have been spending a lot of time together recently because we are working on this AI initiative for the university. She is just so interesting and has so many interesting things to say. I told her, ‘You should come teach a class at the business school because the students would love it. Anyone would want to hear you talk for an hour about the way technology is advancing.'”

In yet another pairing, GSB professor of economics Mohammad Akbarpour has joined with Susan Athey, a professor who studies the economics of technology, to teach a new course called Using Technology and Market Interventions to Solve Social Problems. The course will call on students to research and evaluate potential technological solutions to social problems.

50% OF THE SCHOOL’S ELECTIVE UNITS ARE CO-TAUGHT

Levin thinks that academia will also be greatly impacted by the new technologies as well. “When you look at the advent of data science and machine learning, that is transformative across many industries,” he says. “It’s also transformative for academics because it enables people to ask and answer questions that just couldn’t have been addressed before. So it has created opportunities for our faculty and there are fundamentally hard social policy questions about the effects technology is having. Those are questions we should be thinking about here, and we are thinking about them. These are questions that call for different types of perspectives and they are questions which are best addressed in an academic setting. We have a real responsibility to be focused in thinking about those issues, particularly what is the effect of technology and how can we make sure it benefits people broadly.”

Levin believes that MBA students will be taught about the impact and implications of AI, machine learning and data science throughout the curriculum in core classes as well as specific electives such as the new seminar-style course with Acker and Li–just as the GSB addresses issues of ethics and values. “We teach a first-year ethics class in the fall where students are in small classes with faculty, and they are talking about a whole range of ethical frameworks, including around technology,” he explains. “And then there are classes where these issues come up. In Startup Garage, for example, this year they added a component on ethics so they could talk explicitly about how do you build values into new ventures. It was not an accident that that came up now.”

Levin says that 50% of the school’s elective units are co-taught, largely by pairing academics with practitioners. “We use that academic-practitioner model in many ways,” he says. “It integrates the academic mission and the practical application. Those classes are a way to do that in a very direct way for students because you see the interplay between someone who can bring in academic frameworks and thinking and someone who just knows what the reality is. David Kreps, one of our faculty members, used to describe that model by saying it generates friction but it is friction that generates light.

RATTLES OFF EXAMPLE AFTER EXAMPLE OF STANFORD’S ACADEMIC-PRACTITIONER MODEL

“It happens in different ways. Some classes, like Startup Garage, could have a a whole team of investors and VCs who work with operations Professor Stefanos Zenios. The places where we end up making connections (between research and the real world) is often with academics co-teaching with practitioners.”

Levin, who rarely if ever saw that teaching model in play in Stanford’s economics department, rattles off a number of current examples. There’s a sustainability class this year with David Lobell, an agricultural ecologist and an associate professor in Environmental Earth System Science who is a MacArthur Award winner. “He is coming over to teach a class with Greg Page, who was the CEO of Cargill,” says Levin. “That is a great way to have someone with incredible expertise who is at Stanford who can come to teach MBA students and expose them to an area that will be hopefully helpful.”

Stanford’s investments class, which had been co-taught by the late Jack McDonald, a legendary finance prof who had more than 10,000 MBA and executive education students in his classes over a 50-year career, is delivered by two finance faculty and two investors. Leadership Perspectives is taught by Professor Charles A. O’Reilly and Joel Peterson, chairman of the board at JetBlue Airways. Former General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt is now co-teaching a course called the Industrialist’s Dilemma with Rob Siegel, a partner at XSeed Capital and a protege of late Intel founder Andy Grove who taught the Strategic Management of Technology with Professor Robert Burgelman at the GSB for many years.

‘WE ARE TRING TO WIDEN THE APERTURE THROUGH WHICH STUDENTS SEE THE WORLD’

Ultimately, Levin says, ‘we are trying to widen the aperture through which students see the world. So having them exposed to students and faculty from different areas is a way to widen their aperture.”

Part of this effort is about making sure GSB students take classes outside the business school and that non-B-school students take GSB courses. At Stanford, all seven schools are on the same academic calendar and the same class schedule to make that happen. As a result, 71% of the school’s MBA and MSx students from Autumn, Winter, and Spring of last school year took at least one course “across the street,” while 467 non-business school students enrolled in a GSB course last year. Roughly 20% of the school’s MBA students pursue a joint or dual degree.  

“Our students can take classes all across the university,” he says. “Some of the classes are open to undergraduates and others to graduate students at other schools, and some of the programs like our entrepreneurship programs are open to students from all around campus. The faculty collaborate all across campus and because of an ongoing long-range planning initiative, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about university initiatives where the business school will play an important role but be part of a much broader effort. We have new initiatives that are going to be coming out over the next year around artificial intelligence, data science and social problem solving and responsible investment and governance.

‘ENTREPRENEURSHIP IS IN THE WATER HERE’

In Startup Garage, the entrepreneurship project course taken by 242 students this fall, MBAs often work with engineering students on their teams.  “That engineering student adds a different element to the project.  Every student at Stanford in the business school will take something in entrepreneurship. Some of them will become entrepreneurs but the goal is for all of them to become innovators. Only 15% will start companies. It’s in the water here.”

Levin also speaks with great pride in describing some of the school’s rituals. Only last Wednesday, for example, some 300 to 400 alumni descended on campus for the annual Executive Challenge. The initiative, part of a class called Leadership Labs for first-year students, organizes students into small squads, each with a second-year student as their leadership fellow, requiring members of each squad to do a 20-minute presentation and then accept ten minutes of feedback from alumni.

“You go into the case rooms and two of the students in each squad are put on the spot in front of alums to role play out a board meeting or a leadership decision,” explains Levin. “They get the cases in the morning and they take it very seriously. The thing that is great about this day is that it brings together the faculty, the first- and second-year students, the alumni and the staff. Everybody gets to be at their best. The students are so articulate. You can’t believe how good they are. It’s so much fun. It has a very constructive frame because the alumni get to mentor and give feedback. It’s a real educational moment.”