Stanford Graduate School of Business

The Stanford Graduate School of Business is the business school of Stanford University, the private California university on the doorstep of Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1925 by a group of trustees headed by Herbert Hoover, elected president of the USA three years later, as a counter-measure against the brain drain of the West Coast’s brightest and best to universities and cities further east.

It has succeeded to the extent that it is routinely cited as peer and comparator of the sector’s historic leader, Harvard and can claim in some respects – notably a residential MBA programme with an admission rate which in 2018 dropped to not much more than five per cent – can claim to have overtaken it. The MBA is noted not only for the salaries commanded by its graduates, but the "Interpersonal Dynamics" elective, popularly known as "Touchy Feely", first offered in 1968 and taken by 90 per cent of students.

It has a formidably starry faculty, including three Nobel Prize winners and five John Bates Clarke medallists, teaching on a campus endowed by a $105 million gift from Phil Knight, founder of sportswear firm Nike, whose installations incorporate three notable modern works of art, one known as the "Monument to the Unknown Variables". As much as the MBA, its repute rests on the Sloan Fellowship Programme, now known as MSx, introduced in 1957 and shared with MIT and the London Business School.

Recent initiatives include the Seed Transformation Programme, a one-year course for business leaders in Africa and Asia. Supported by all seven Stanford schools, it was launched in Accra in 2013 and extended to Nairobi in 2016 and Chennai and Gabarone in 2017.