In the late 1960s, Stanford GSB Dean Arjay Miller envisioned a program that would educate government leaders about business, and business people about government.
After Ralph Nader published his 1965 searing critique of the automobile industry, Unsafe at Any Speed, a handful of auto executives traveled to Washington, D.C. Among them was Arjay Miller, then president of Ford Motor Company. “We blew it,” recalled Miller. “Businessmen just didn’t understand the political process, or how to deal with the new social demands that were starting to be placed on them.”
This wake-up call — along with his subsequent struggle to bring jobs to post-riot Detroit as chair of Detroit’s economic development committee — convinced him that future leaders needed to know how to bridge the gap between the private and public sectors.
So in 1968, when Stanford offered Miller the deanship of Stanford GSB, he agreed to take the job if the school promised to start a program to train managers for the public sector. Stanford GSB faculty and trustees agreed. Miller became dean in 1969, and in 1971, the Public Management Program (PMP) was born.
While its core mission remained intact, the PMP evolved over the next twenty-five years. In its early days, the program had a simple mandate: Forty spaces were reserved for applicants who wanted to go into public service. It was a solid model for a program in the early 1970s. The government was still seen as a place where bright, ambitious, and socially conscious young people might actually want to work.
But by the late 1970s, government careers were beginning to look less appealing. “It stopped being cool to go into government,” said Jim Thompson, MBA ’86, director of the PMP from 1987 to 1998. As more and more PMP graduates began taking jobs in high-paying careers, the mission of the program came into question.
So, in 1986, James Patell, then associate dean for academic affairs, broadened the focus of the PMP to include not just government but nonprofits as well. “The thing just exploded,” says Thompson. “We had people coming in who had no experience with public service. There was a big influx of student excitement and energy.”
