Interaction

May 17, 2006

Future leaders dress the part

BY MARGARET STEEN

L.A. Cicero

Reuters Digital Vision fellows, from left, Rita Sandhu and Avni Jamdar, and Business School student
Ute Breden developed a project called Cooperative Connection.

When Ute Breden, Atli Knutsson and four other first-year MBA students at the Graduate School of Business were first assigned to help get a project called Cooperative Connection off the ground, neither their role nor the expected result was spelled out for them.

The Business School students were teamed up with Avni Jamdar, a fellow in Stanford's Reuters Digital Vision Program who is working to develop a business that will sell fashionable fair-trade clothing made by women in developing countries. Jamdar, who grew up in India, has a background in women's issues and economic development strategies. She has degrees in urban planning and architecture and previously had worked for PolicyLink, a nonprofit that operates in low-income communities in the United States.

"I was really surprised by how paralyzed I felt without an explicit, pre-defined goal," Breden recalled.

But ambiguous roles and loosely defined projects are common in the business world. A collaboration this year paired the Business School's Leadership Development Platform, a program for first-year MBA students, with the Digital Vision Program (http://rdvp.org/), a mid-career sabbatical program for fellows working to develop projects to solve problems in the developing world. The goal of the collaboration was to give the business students a real-world challenge while providing the Digital Vision fellows with business expertise.

As the MBA students sought to define their role, they learned the importance of simultaneously building strong relationships while managing performance.

The projects were one part of the two-quarter Leadership Development Platform, in which 72 first-year MBA students improve their leadership and teamwork skills.

"Some learn that while they're very good at making logical arguments, that's not necessarily all there is to persuading others," said Beth Benjamin, director of the school's Center for Leadership Development and Research, which runs the program.

The Digital Vision Program is being run for the fifth year by Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information. Fellows, whose past experience ranges from positions with Hewlett-Packard and Adobe to leadership posts in nonprofits and government, spend a year at Stanford auditing classes and working on a project that uses technology, innovation and social entrepreneurship to solve a problem in the developing world.

At the start of winter quarter, each team of MBAs was assigned to work on one Digital Vision fellow's project. The idea, Benjamin said, was for the business students to support the fellow by analyzing the business case for the project and identifying ways to strengthen its strategy and sustainability.

The teams spent the first half of the quarter analyzing the projects using frameworks they were studying in their strategic management course: What is the project's mission? What is its competitive advantage over other providers? Which challenges and success factors must be considered? Which organizational features will be needed to support the mission and strategy?

"If you're going to be successful at all and scale your idea, you've got to figure out some sort of organization and leadership," said Stuart Gannes, director of the Digital Vision Program.

In the quarter's final exercise, the teams presented their plans to an expert panel of outside venture capitalists, strategy experts and venture philanthropists. The students fielded the same type of questions that consultants might get from a client, or entrepreneurs from investors.

The MBA team helped Jamdar define her company's competitive advantage, which is that the clothing will come with the stories of the women who make it. They also had to create a formal, methodical analysis while not extinguishing the passion that fueled the project to begin with. In Jamdar's case, the passion clearly survived: Breden came to the group's final presentation dressed in a skirt of the type Jamdar hopes to sell.

Because the students were juggling a full course load along with these projects, their time constraints posed another challenge similar to those seen in the business world. The fellows, who were entirely focused on their projects, had to figure out how to get the most out of the MBA students' limited time, said Rita Sandhu, a fellow who collaborated with Jamdar.

The cross-departmental collaboration comes at a time when the business and nonprofit worlds are moving closer together, Gannes said. "There's been a shift on the nonprofit side," he said. "People used to sort of be allergic to business practices and knowledge. Now they just crave it."

He noted that younger people are increasingly trying to align their business lives with social goals. "It's not just the best-paying job, it's not just one that has the most potential for career development. It's got to be something they care about socially," he said. "I think that's new, and I think it's quite a healthy trend for society."

And the blurring of lines between disciplines is also something students will undoubtedly see in the business world.

"Business School students, computer science students and members of the business community working with fellows from all around the world on real problems and creating solutions—there's something cool about that," Sandhu said. "That's the future. We're all going to have to work together. The world's problems are getting too complex."