• Looking Back

“The Next Century of Business Leadership Begins Here”

The fourth and final episode of GSB at 100 captures the sounds of Stanford GSB’s Centennial Day, considers how far we’ve come, and looks to the bright future ahead.

written by Michael McDowell

On October 10, more than 3,200 alumni, students, faculty, and staff gathered at Stanford Graduate School of Business for its Centennial Day celebration. The event was an opportunity to see familiar faces, connect with the school’s leadership, and enjoy interactive exhibits, activities, good food, and live music. It’s also the subject of the fourth and final episode of our Centennial podcast, GSB at 100.

Excerpts from the day — including a gathering of five deans with a combined 35 years of leadership — bridge past and present, offering a look at how the people who have stewarded Stanford GSB think about their work and legacy. A few other voices anchor the moment.

“Stanford business school teaches management and administration,” says George G.C. Parker, MBA ’62, PhD ’67, the Dean Witter Distinguished Professor of Finance, Emeritus. “I think management and administration, done well, is one of the greatest forces for societal advancement that there is.”

Joanne Martin, the Fred H. Merrill Professor of Organizational Behavior, Emerita, reflects on how the school has evolved since she became the first tenured female professor. “Now, we have [Dean] Sarah Soule and large numbers of women. I have seen a huge change.”

As Centennial Day culminated in an event at Frost Amphitheater, Sarah A. Soule, the Philip H. Knight Professor and Dean and the Morgridge Professor of Organizational Behavior honored Stanford GSB’s past, celebrated its present, and signaled the beginning of its next chapter. “The next century of business leadership begins here, with us, together,” she told the audience.

Full Transcript

Note: This transcript was generated by an automated system and has been lightly edited for clarity. It may contain errors or omissions.

Kevin Cool: This year Stanford Graduate School of Business celebrates its 100th birthday. And on this podcast, you’ve heard the voices of a few of those people who have shaped, and continue to shape, the GSB.

We began this series in the archives and heard from a few of the professors whose ideas and research inform how we understand organizations, markets, and technology. We met a few members of the GSB staff who help give the school its unique character and whose work is critical to the success of this institution. And we went into the classroom to explore the nature of learning at the GSB because that’s ultimately what this place is all about.

Today, in our final episode, we revisit Centennial Day. Consider how far we’ve come and look to the future we’re building together. This is GSB at 100. I’m your host, Kevin Cool.

Ambi: A warm welcome to everyone here in person and as well as those tuning in virtually… [inaudible]

Kevin Cool: On October 10, 2025, more than 3,200 alumni, students, faculty, and staff gathered on campus for the Centennial Day celebration. The event was an opportunity to see familiar faces, connect with the school’s leadership, and enjoy interactive exhibits, activities, good food, and live music.

Speaker: Good morning everyone. Could I ask everyone to take their seats, please?

Kevin Cool: We’re starting in CEMEX Auditorium for a glimpse into several morning panels. The first, moderated by Erin Nixon, MBA Class of 2010, and Assistant Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, brought together a few of those who play a vital role in shaping the GSB community.

Erin Nixon: I am so excited to be here with you all celebrating 100 years of the GSB. And I am even more excited and honored to be sharing — Oh, that is very timely, a phone call.

Kevin Cool: Some of these voices may be familiar, especially if you’re an alum.

Erin Nixon: So my first question is actually for the audience. Who here received a phone call or was admitted by somebody on this stage?

Kevin Cool: Every MBA and MSX student receives a phone call when they’re admitted to the GSB. All of these conversations are memorable.

Derrick Bolton: So for me, I made a call. Person picked up, I said, “Hi, it’s Derrick Bolton. I’m calling to congratulate you on your admission to the GSB.” She said, “That’s not funny, dad,” and hung up.

Kevin Cool: Here’s a lecturer in management, Kirsten Moss, who led admissions from 2017 to 2023.

Kirsten Moss: I happened to hit someone on the East Coast around 5:36, and I’ll usually say, “This is Kirsten Moss. Am I getting you at a good time?” They said, “Yes, no problem. I’m here with my wife.”

And we usually pull up the application. We’ll have looked at the “What Matters Most” story and have some sense of who this person is. I was just about to say, “I’m so happy. That’s great. I want to…” and I was going to say the word “congratulations.” And all of a sudden I hear him screaming. I mean, screaming so hard that I have to pull out the phone just going, “I can’t have been admitted. You didn’t admit me. No, you did not admit me to Stanford. It’s impossible. You didn’t admit me,” going on. And I’m yelling, “No, I did. I did. I did. I did.” And this went on, I’m watching my clock, this went on for about two minutes, and then his wife’s screaming, he’s screaming. And then I think because the phone’s close, they must be hugging or jumping or dancing. And it took about two minutes. And then finally I thought, “Maybe they forgot about the phone call, but can I really hang up? I mean, be so rude to hang up on the phone call.” So I thought I’m going to wait one more minute. And as the time’s going on, then I start to hear… Actually, I hear tears. I hear the wife crying. Then I hear him crying. Now I’m crying. I’m not even there and I’m crying. And he gets on the phone and he says, “I’m so sorry. That was so rude, but I have to tell you why. My wife and I…” They were first gen from Africa.

“Applying to business schools was really expensive. We decided that we could only afford four, and we together made our list of the ones that we wanted most, and Stanford was at the top. But then we had another column that said, what are the chances that I could get in to whatever school? Because we had to be practical and we both put 0% in that column.”

And he said, “So our surprise, our excitement, our joy was that we could not believe that 0%, no chance at all had happened.” And then he said, “And I know you heard us crying at the end, but I don’t think we’d realized, till this moment because it wasn’t even possible, how this call’s going to change my family’s life, my life, my kids’ life.” And I knew, and you guys would appreciate this as an admissions dean, that I knew what he was saying was true. And that’s probably the best part of our jobs.

Kevin Cool: Later, five deans took to the stage to revisit the choices, challenges, and values that have made the GSB the place that it is today. Roelof Botha, MBA Class of 2000, and a partner at Sequoia Capital, asked each dean to consider a pivotal moment that tested or clarified their leadership. He began with Michael Spence, Nobel Laureate and the Philip H. Knight Professor and Dean, Emeritus, who stepped into the role in 1990.

Michael Spence: You know I thought about this when you told me you were going to ask me that, but I’d like to… Well and there was some horrifying moments, like when the backup system didn’t work and we lost all those PhD thesis and it was a disaster. I thought I wasn’t going to make it to the end of the term. But no, you need an ancient history component to a panel like this and I’m it. So I decided to answer your question by asking, “What do I remember?” Well, I’m 82, right?

Kevin Cool: Dean Spence recalled those in whose footsteps he followed.

Michael Spence: So when I came to the school, the group of people that created the foundations of this great institution were still here. So everybody knows about Ernie Arbuckle and Arjay Miller, but there were others. One of them sitting here, George Parker.

But there was Lee Bach and Jim Van Horne, Chuck Holloway, Chuck Horngren, and they were my tutors. They taught me what this place was all about, how they built it and what its culture really meant, and when I say they built this institution, they built the modern business school.

Kevin Cool: Robert L. Joss, the Philip H. Knight professor and Dean, Emeritus, reflected on a different challenge: the ongoing project of strengthening the GSB community.

Robert L. Joss: Well, I think the biggest challenge in this job, and maybe everyone would agree, is connecting with and bringing together in common cause all the multiple constituents that make up the GSB community. We want them all to appreciate each other and understand the vital role each one plays. It’s a team effort in many respects.

Kevin Cool: President of Stanford University, Jonathan Levin, who served as Dean of the GSB from 2016 to 2024, described the enduring value of business education, which may prove all the more essential as we integrate artificial intelligence into our work and our lives.

Jonathan Levin: This current period of technological disruption, it’s mostly an opportunity for the school because the skills that the Stanford Business School teaches to be able to really think critically about problems, to solve problems, to be a leader, to be ambitious, to set big goals, those are skills that are going to be in even greater demand in the future.

I don’t actually worry too much about whether people will want to come to Stanford’s two-year MBA program because just the opportunity to be on this campus, to walk around, to get exposed to the different people and ideas, you’d be crazy not to take that opportunity. No, and I mean it. I firmly believe that. And I always think, “You bring people to this school, even if they come for a weekend and you just sprinkle a little of the pixie dust on them and they go away and they feel that it changed their lives in many cases.” And that is an extraordinary power that we have on this campus here at the GSB.

Kevin Cool: Sarah Soule, who currently serves as the Philip H. Knight Professor and Dean, as well as Morgridge Professorship of Organizational Behavior, shared the values which guide her leadership and the collaborative process she undertook with her team to define them.

Sarah Soule: So the two values that we converged on were excellence and community. Excellence is obvious, it’s Stanford. The second was and is community. If you’ve heard me speak at any of these wonderful Centennial events, I always talk about the community that this place has given us all, given alums, given faculty, staff, students, and how that’s an enduring characteristic and value of what we want to preserve.

Kevin Cool: Dean Soule’s emphasis on community echoed throughout the day, in the reunions that brought old friends back together, in the panels that bridged past and present, and in conversations that stretched from Arbuckle to Frost Amphitheater.

But before we go to Frost, we wanted to spend some time with a few of those whose experiences and perspectives give texture to the history we’re celebrating. George Parker, MBA Class of 1962, is the Dean Witter Distinguished Professor of Finance, Emeritus.

George Parker: I’ve been at Stanford 52 years, one year at a time. One year at a time. Each year I thought, “Boy, that’s been a rich experience, another year seems like a good idea.”

Kevin Cool: We asked George how the GSB has changed over the many decades he’s been part of it. But he started with something more fundamental.

George Parker: What’s changed? Let me start with what hasn’t changed in 52 years as a baseline. Many things about Stanford are the same today as the Stanford I rejoined in 1973 or the Stanford that I entered as a student in 1960.

The first thing is that the place is the same. All of us who are associated with Stanford have a great connection with the physical place that is the Stanford campus. And it starts with Palm Drive coming in off El Camino and looking at the main quad with the Stanford Church before you and looking at the Hoover Tower and the sandstone Buildings and the red tile roofs. And they create a kind of an impression and an ambience that this place is different, it’s unique. And that was true in 1960 and in 1973, and it’s true today in 2025. There is a sense of this campus that impacts everybody who’s associated with it, so that hasn’t changed.

There’s something else which is slightly less tangible, and that’s what modern vocabulary I think calls “the vibe.” And the vibe of Stanford in many ways is a very similar vibe over the last 65 years. It’s a vibe that is best described by being a very forward-looking place, people at Stanford tend to talk much more about the present and the future, and what Stanford is doing to shape the future and what Stanford is doing to represent the future. So those are things I think are the same.

Kevin Cool: If the campus and the ethos of the school create a sense of continuity, the ways in which the GSB has evolved signify its commitment to positive change.

George Parker: My MBA class was 90… Now this is hard to believe actually, but my MBA class was 98% white males. The entering class at the GSB this year, I believe, was 28% white males, from 98% to 28%. Now, of course, the biggest difference in that regard is the addition of females, which are now coming very close to 50/50. I think the number of males is slightly over 50% still, but there’s no question that’s where it’s headed to 50/50.

And then the ethnicity of the student body, the nationality of the student body, the addition of international students, the religious diversity of the student body, I’ve sometimes described it to people when I walk into my class, I feel like I’m looking at a small United Nations in terms of the group. And I would tell you from a faculty perspective, it contributes incredible richness to the ambience and the learning environment in the class to have all these different points of view, all these different backgrounds represented.

Kevin Cool: The story of the GSB today isn’t just visible in its students.

Joanne Martin: Well, my name is Joanne Martin, and I am the first woman to earn tenure at Stanford Business School.

Kevin Cool: We asked Joanne, the Fred H. Merrill Professor of Organizational Behavior, Emerita, what initially brought her to the GSB.

Joanne Martin: I asked advice from all kinds of people in my department and in business schools saying, “I want to do research that’s both rigorous within the discipline and applicable to real world problems.” And they said, “If you want to make a difference in the world, if you want to keep your roots in the discipline and also contribute to scholarship in that discipline, then the best place for you in the entire country, bar none, you’ll never hear an argument is Stanford Business School.” I thought, “Wow.” And he said, “But you better be aware because you’ve got to be applied and you’ve also got to meet the highest standards of the discipline.” And I thought, “Great.”

Kevin Cool: Joanne was more than capable of meeting the highest standards, but she was walking into a world that had been built by men, and for men, a reality which she was reminded of every day.

Joanne Martin: There were lots of stories about what it’s like to be the only woman and in a system that was built without any misogyny necessarily, but just to fit men. My feet did not touch the floor when I sat in my office chair. I’m five foot two.

Kevin Cool: Another story reveals just how male coded the culture was. This took place at an annual faculty retreat.

Joanne Martin: After lunch we had quote, “the traditional touch football game.” Well, I asked someone I valued very much, “What am I going to do? I have never caught a football in my life.” And there was a big, long pause and a couple of people were listening and they said, “Well, you could be a cheerleader.”

Kevin Cool: Moments like this one make it clear what being a trailblazer really involves and how it feels to fight those battles on your own.

Joanne Martin: When you asked me about being a first, as in the case of the first to get tenure as a female, I thought, “Well, that’s an important part of the history of the school, how we went from zero to one. And then, thank God, Anat Admati came. Now we were two. And a few years later, Maureen McNichols came, and all of a sudden the world could see that I wasn’t the only kind of woman faculty member, that they came tall, and curly brown hair, and a math wizard. That would be Anat. And you know Maureen, she’s just wonderful, but in a very accounting, different kind of way. And she actually became a dean. And now we have Sarah Soule, and now we have large numbers of women. I have seen a huge change.

Kevin Cool: Stories like Joanne’s are reminders of how much the GSB’s culture has evolved and how much work it took to get to where we are today.

These stories are also a piece of what another professor, John Roberts, is capturing in an effort that aims to record the GSB’s history in human terms. He’s the John H. Scully Professor of Economics, Strategic Management, and International Business, Emeritus.

John Roberts: I started out as a historian, my first undergraduate career, and I’ve always loved history and much of the reading I do is in history. And one of the things I’ve always done is I’ve enjoyed recounting how things got the way they are in the school to faculty who’ve come since those things happened.

Kevin Cool: John has spoken with about 90 professors.

John Roberts: So what I’m trying to do is tell those stories, and I have to have some framework around it, and I’m going to talk about how this group developed and that group developed, how the curriculum has changed and a variety of things like that. But it’s not a history. It’s… I haven’t come up with the right word yet. Sometimes an appreciation, it tells some nice stories and gives some context, if somebody picks up a book, someone wants to know what’s Stanford Business School about, rather than just checking the GMATs and the placement record.

Kevin Cool: So what is Stanford about?

John Roberts: What Stanford is about, in fact, is constant innovation. We’re pushing the frontiers in research, and we introduce new courses all the time, and we bring our research into our teaching. That’s crucial to who we are.

Kevin Cool: George Parker, put it this way.

George Parker: The Stanford Business School has a title, Graduate School of Business, and business is very much about another word, which is called management. Sometimes graduate schools of business are called graduate schools of business administration. Stanford Business School teaches management and administration. And I think that management and administration done well is one of the greatest forces for societal advancement that there is.

The business school is about organizations and organizations that function well. The business school’s about leadership, and leadership is essential as the society navigates all the complexities of a fast-changing world. The students who are lucky enough to get admitted to this school are being given the training and being given the interaction with the other students that are lucky enough to be admitted to school, that they have the potential to make the most difference in the world going forward of any of the graduates of any of the graduate schools at Stanford.

Kevin Cool: We asked George if there was a moment that sums up what makes the GSB the GSB.

George Parker: I think of the GSB primarily as the sum of the parts, even with 52 years in the classroom. No single moment captures what I’m talking about, it’s the aggregation of all the moments. And so I’m not going to give you a very good answer to what specifically do you remember that made Stanford Stanford for you. It’s just not one thing.

Kevin Cool: Which is, in fact, what we’re trying to do on this podcast, assemble a kind of mosaic that depicts this moment in the GSB’s story.

At Frost Amphitheater, Dean Soule honored the GSB’s first 100 years and signaled the beginning of its next chapter.

Sarah Soule: Good evening. As the sun starts to set over Frost Amphitheater, I invite you to pause for just a moment. Look around. We are gathered in this iconic space surrounded by the history of Stanford campus on a night that will echo in our memories for years to come.

Kevin Cool: She connected the night’s celebration to the ideas that built the GSB.

Sarah Soule: When I think about our history, I think about the improbable. I think about the ideas that at first seemed crazy or fragile or impossible. Phil Knight once sketched a crazy idea in a Stanford paper that shoes could carry not just runners, but they could carry dreams. And that sketch, of course, became Nike.

Kevin Cool: It was a fitting message that the future begins the same way the past did, with a daring, improbable idea, much like Hoover’s initiative to open a school of business on the Pacific Coast more than 100 years ago.

Sarah Soule: So tonight, beneath our open sky, let us remember that this Centennial is not only a marker of where we’ve been, but it’s a launchpad to where we will go. The crazy ideas of the next 100 years are already among us. They may be whispered in a classroom this quarter. They may be debated in Town Square tomorrow. They may be forming even right now in the minds of students and alumni sitting here tonight. Our task is to keep creating this mosaic with curiosity to push us deeper, generosity to bring others with us, and community to hold us together. Thank you for daring, for questioning, for building, and for believing. The next century of business leadership begins here, with us, together. Thank you.

Kevin Cool: Change lives, change organizations, change the world. Endings are always hard to write, but fortunately, the story of the GSB is far from over.

As the celebration at Frost shifted from speeches to music, dancing, and general revelry, it felt less like a finale and more like a beginning, even as the final groups of friends and families trickled out into the night. So how do you conclude a podcast like this one? With the voices of those who will accomplish the things we’ll celebrate in the future, and who will dream up the ideas we’ve yet to imagine: our students and our alumni.

Students and Alumni: Over the past 100 years, what’s made the GSB stand out is it’s always been true to itself.

Students and Alumni: It’s focus on vulnerability and asking people to look inside and the focus on personal development so that you can then become the leaders that you want when you go out.

Students and Alumni: There’s great faculty and staff here that are facilitating these interactions, that are facilitating learning.

Students and Alumni: We talk about changing lives, changing organizations, and changing the world, right? It’s not the GSB’s job to do that. It’s the GSB’s job to equip us as leaders.

Students and Alumni: It’s the community. Every moment with the community that we spend, these are friends we make for life. I mean, the education is great, it’s amazing, no doubt about that. But the people, the people are what’s carried forward.

Students and Alumni: God, I have so many favorite moments and memories. It’s like this beautiful jar of memories. And I came here for the first time since I think eight years last night and just walking around campus, I actually started to cry just because it’s so much. It was such an intense experience.

Students and Alumni: So I remember just walking along this main stretch here and just running into people that you weren’t even thinking of or expecting. And I think those kind of informal collisions along the day-to-day is something that I miss so much. I think when we look ahead to the next century, one way the GSB can prepare for this is not losing our essence. It’s like, how can we continue to evolve, but still keep our values, keep what’s true to us?

Students and Alumni: Focusing on how tight this community is and how connected we are, I think will get us through any kind of challenges.

Students and Alumni: I think it’s impossible to plan for 100 years, planning for the next year, two years, five years. I think eventually we’ll get to 100, or 200 years, and we’ll have an awesome celebration just like we’re about to.

Kevin Cool: A special thanks to all those who made this podcast possible. If you’re just tuning in now, we invite you to listen to the first three episodes of GSB at 100, and thank you for joining us.

George Parker: Even in 52 years, I have never gone to a class, I can’t think even once, that I haven’t felt a tinge of stage fright walking into the room.

• Share on LinkedIn
• Share on Facebook
• Share on X
• Email this Page
• Copy URL

---