Stanford Graduate School of Business

Our Mission

Our mission is to create ideas that deepen and advance our understanding of management and with those ideas to develop innovative, principled, and insightful leaders who change the world.

Our Strategy

We seek to attract faculty and students with high leadership potential and engage in an academically-rigorous, research-supported, mutually-responsible learning process, enhanced by uncommon levels of interdisciplinary scholarship and community engagement. Classes are conducted only on a full-time residential basis in an intimate-scale environment, and take full advantage of the assets of Stanford University and its surrounding communities. The impact of our ideas and our students extend globally in meaningful ways.

Distinguished History

The Stanford Graduate School of Business, with a faculty that includes three Nobel laureates, has established itself as a global leader in management education and has built an international reputation based on educational programs designed to develop insightful, principled global leaders. Since its creation in 1925, the School has continued to innovate its curriculum and to build a faculty known for its cutting-edge research. Over the years faculty members have been leaders in developing academic fields such as organizational ecology, organizational behavior, political economy, personnel economics, and economic development, to name a few. The School created a Public Management Program in 1971 as a bridge between industry and government. The Global Management Program followed in the early 1990s. Early classes in entrepreneurship were launched in the 1980s, followed in 1996 by creation of the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. In the 1990s, as the dot.com era created an unprecedented boom in the surrounding Silicon Valley, the Graduate School of Business created a Center for Electronic Business and Commerce, announcing it would exist for five years before being disbanded as the topic became a ubiquitous part of the curriculum. Today, besides entrepreneurship, the School boasts the Center for Social Innovation, the Center for Global Business and the Economy, and the Center for Leadership Development and Research. The School was created after a 1924 meeting, at the request of Herbert Hoover, to bring together a group of business leaders to the Bohemian Grove, an executive retreat north of San Francisco, to consider creating a graduate school of business on the West Coast. Hoover, a Stanford alumnus, trustee, and future U.S. president, hoped to halt the drain created when bright students went to the East Coast to pursue business degrees.