With the coming revolution in artificial intelligence and machine learning, the naysayers are spinning all kinds of doomsday scenarios about the likely dislocation of workers and massive unemployment. Robots will replace blue collar workers, they predict, and algorithms will displace white collar professionals.
Jonathan Levin’s response to the anxiety? Bring it on.
The tenth dean of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business views change as pure opportunity. In an interview with Poets&Quants, Levin says he is recruiting and hiring faculty to help students learn how to cope with the vast changes AI, machine learning and data science are bringing to organizations. He laughingly shrugs off any suggestion that MBAs will be replaced by computer algorithms in the future.
‘WHAT MBA STUDENTS LEARN IS GOING TO BE MORE IMPORTANT AS WE AUTOMATE SKILLS THAT ARE ROUTINE’
In fact, he says, the basic skills taught MBA students are more likely to protect them from whatever upheaval occurs. “How to think critically, how to ask the right questions, and how to be effective leaders and collaborators are really durable skills,” says Levin. “They are going to be more important as we automate skills that are routine or are non-collaborative. I think we are going to see the ascendency of the MBA skill set.”
“All the changes in technology are right here in this ten-mile radius around where we sit. If you look at the way this technology wave is going, a lot of the decisions about how these technologies are developed and deployed are going to get made in the private sector. The students we are educating are going to be making those consequential decisions. We have to try to equip them so they can make those decisions thoughtfully and responsibly. We want to be proud of the decisions they are making.”
In fact, says Levin, there could be no better time to be in an MBA program. “When you have a situation where there are big changes going on in the world, it’s an incredible opportunity for an educational institution because people are interested in learning,” he says. “It just galvanizes people’s attention and they want to understand what is going on. That is the best thing that can happen at an educational institution. People are focused and excited. It’s sort of what you hope for.”
‘WHAT I LOVED ABOUT RESEARCH WAS THINKING THROUGH PROBLEMS’
Having recently celebrated his two-year anniversary as dean of Stanford’s business school in September, Levin says he has no regrets about giving up his career as a serious scholar in the field of economics for an administrative job, even though he had won in 2011 what many consider to be the baby Nobel Prize, the John Bates Clark Medal. “What I loved about research was the thinking through problems,” says Levin. “That’s what was fun. You see a big problem and you ask yourself, ‘Do I have something to say about that?’ You get to do that also when you are in a leadership role in a university. You get to do it working with lots of faculty and students instead of your two collaborators.”
Besides, he notes, his deanship is not all that different for him. “I have been at Stanford for almost my entire professional career and I had been a student and faculty member and a department chair. I love being around the faculty and I knew coming in that the GSB had this extraordinary interdisciplinary faculty,” Levin adds. “They are great researchers, and I love being around the students. My sister had been an MBA student here and she learned an incredible amount and formed amazing connections with her classmates and the faculty here. It’s like a transformative experience being a student here so I had seen that through her eyes when she was a student and I had a sense of the role the business school played in the university (partly from personally collaborating with people here and having students in my classes and being involved in university governance.”
He also came on board at an opportune time. The university has just launched a long-range planning process, allowing Levin to play a key role in re-imagining the business school’s role at the university. “The collaboration across the schools has been a big focus here and it’s been a priority for the new president,” adds Levin. “So I got this opportunity right from the start to think about not just the future of the GSB but how the school can contribute to the university.”
‘IT’S HARD TO WALK ON THIS CAMPUS WITHOUT FEELING GOOD’
In his first year at dean, Levin traveled the world to meet alumni, a part of the job that made him realize how different his deanship of a business school would be from his days as a professor in the university’s economics department. “Everywhere I went, alumni told me stories about how the school changed their lives,” he says. “They feel this profound emotional attachment. It’s really inspiring. It makes you excited about the mission of the school. In economics, you go around and present your paper and people tell you everything that is wrong with it. Ten years later, people come around to the view because they think it through themselves and say that was a pretty good idea there. But at the time they just see all the problems.”
In a wide-ranging interview with Poets&Quants, Levin reflects on the MBA experience at the GSB, his priorities as dean, the unusual co-teaching model at Stanford that brings together faculty with practitioners in half of the elective units at the business school, and the future of management education. The son of former Yale University President Richard Levin had earned his BA and BS degrees from Stanford in 1994 and returned to teach at the university in 2000 after earning his PhD in economics from MIT in 1999.
There’s no question he is at home here on the Stanford grounds. “It’s hard to walk on this campus without feeling good,” he admits.
The 46-year-old Levin displays the youthful exuberance of someone two decades younger. He displays unbridled enthusiasm for the school he now leads, and he shows great pride in the inspiring achievements of the GSB’s alumni. An unabashed optimist who is easy to laugh, Levin takes a positive view of the challenges facing business and the management education field. “I’m an optimist about the world,” he declares, with a wide smile. “That is a good match for Stanford because this is fundamentally an optimistic place. I’m going to give you an optimistic answer no matter the situation.”
Asked about the growing sense that capitalism is broken, Levin acknowledges that “you hear that coming from journalists and from business leaders and investors and from our students and faculty. This is an important topic of discussion and this is the right place to have that discussion. You want to have that discussion in a place where you can draw on lots of expertise at an academic institution that values inquiry and you can be exposed to different views. That’s actually important. You don’t want everyone to agree. You want people to come in and argue points and counterpoints and for the students to form their own views.”
‘IT’S A REALLY IMPORTANT TIME FOR MANAGEMENT EDUCATION’
An afternoon tea with Dean Levin led to a novel course to be co-taught by Fei-Fei Li
When Levin became dean in September of 2016, he set for himself three core priorities: To sustain and build on the school’s research mission, to extend the global reach of the school, and to more deeply collaborate with the rest of the university. He identifies his primary challenge as not merely keeping up with the changes occurring in the world of business and technology bur rather getting ahead of the big changes that are happening in the world.
“The history of the school is trying to pursue great scholarship in academic research and also great management leadership education,” he believes. “That dual mission of bringing those things together is central to the school. So my job is to sustain and strengthen both those elements, and they are both changing and that is what is interesting. The advent of data science and the ability to collaborate with companies, government agencies and social organizations is creating all kinds of new opportunities.
“For our students, the world is changing. Technology is changing, and the expectations for business leaders are changing. The questions today are about what is the role business should play in society and how will the private sector address fundamental challenges around inequality, globalization, diversity and sustainability. It’s a really important time for management education.”
One way to address these issues, he thinks, is through more interdisciplinary collaboration. One example Levin cites is a new course called Designing AI To Cultivate Human Well-Being that will debut in the upcoming winter quarter. The idea for the course came from Levin after having tea in his home with Fei-Fei Li, a professor of computer science at Stanford and the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, who also happens to be a neighbor.
Jonathan Levin when he was an economics professor at Stanford University
A NEW COURSE WITH A HIGH-MINDED GOAL TO EACH STUDENTS HOW AI TECHNOLOGY CAN BE USED TO PROMOTE ‘HUMAN FLOURISING’
Levin paired her with a well-known marketing professor at the business school, Jennifer Aaker, and the two created the multi-disciplinary offering. It has the high-minded goal of teaching students how to build AI technology that promotes human flourishing, the opposite of pernicious disruption.
The collaboration accomplishes two of Levin’s most immediate objectives for the business school: To build bridges between the GSB and Stanford’s other schools and departments and to expose MBA students to the future of cutting-edge technology. The course will combine MBA students with computer science students in studying AI techniques, behavioral science and design thinking.
Levin, who betrays a naturally ebullient personality, cannot contain his enthusiasm for the new course. “I am really excited about it,” says Levin. “She is an amazing brilliant scientist and she is teaching with Jennifer Acker who is fabulous. Hopefully something great will happen in that room. Fei Fei and I have been spending a lot of time together recently because we are working on this AI initiative for the university. She is just so interesting and has so many interesting things to say. I told her, ‘You should come teach a class at the business school because the students would love it. Anyone would want to hear you talk for an hour about the way technology is advancing.'”
50% OF THE SCHOOL’S ELECTIVE UNITS ARE CO-TAUGHT
Levin thinks that academia will also be greatly impacted by the new technologies as well. “When you look at the advent of data science and machine learning, that is transformative across many industries,” he says. “It’s also transformative for academics because it enables people to ask and answer questions that just couldn’t have been addressed before. So it has created opportunities for our faculty and there are fundamentally hard social policy questions about the effects technology is having. Those are questions we should be thinking about here, and we are thinking about them. These are questions that call for different types of perspectives and they are questions which are best addressed in an academic setting. We have a real responsibility to be focused in thinking about those issues, particularly what is the effect of technology and how can we make sure it benefits people broadly.”
Levin believes that MBA students will be taught about the impact and implications of AI, machine learning and data science throughout the curriculum in core classes as well as specific electives such as the new seminar-style course with Acker and Li–just as the GSB addresses issues of ethics and values. “We teach a first-year ethics class in the fall where students are in small classes with faculty, and they are talking about a whole range of ethical frameworks, including around technology,” he explains. “And then there are classes where these issues come up. In Startup Garage, for example, this year they added a component on ethics so they could talk explicitly about how do you build values into new ventures. It was not an accident that that came up now.”
Levin says that 50% of the school’s elective units are co-taught, largely by pairing academics with practitioners. “We use that academic-practitioner model in many ways,” he says. “It integrates the academic mission and the practical application. Those classes are a way to do that in a very direct way for students because you see the interplay between someone who can bring in academic frameworks and thinking and someone who just knows what the reality is. David Kreps, one of our faculty members, used to describe that model by saying it generates friction but it is friction that generates light.
RATTLES OFF EXAMPLE AFTER EXAMPLE OF STANFORD’S ACADEMIC-PRACTITIONER MODEL
“It happens in different ways. Some classes, like Startup Garage, could have a a whole team of investors and VCs who work with operations Professor Stefanos Zenios. The places where we end up making connections (between academic research and the real world_ is often with academics co-teaching with practitioners.”
Levin, who rarely if ever saw that teaching model in play in Stanford’s economics department, rattles off a number of current examples. There’s a sustainability class this year with David Lobell, an agricultural ecologist and an associate professor in Environmental Earth System Science who is a MacArthur Award winner. “He is coming over to teach a class with Greg Page, who was the CEO of Cargill,” says Levin. “That is a great way to have someone with incredible expertise who is at Stanford who can come to teach MBA students and expose them to an area that will be hopefully helpful.”
Stanford’s investments class, which had been co-taught by the late Jack McDonald, a legendary finance prof who had more than 10,000 MBA and executive education students in his classes over a 50-year career, is delivered by two finance faculty and two investors. Leadership Perspectives is taught by Professor Charles A. O’Reilly and Joel Peterson, chairman of the board at JetBlue Airways. Former General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt is now co-teaching a course called the Industrialist’s Dilemma with Bob Siegel, a partner at XSeed Capital and a protege of late Intel founder Andy Grove who taught the Strategic Management of Technology with Professor Robert Burgelman at the GSB for many years.
‘WE ARE TRING TO WIDEN THE APERTURE THROUGH WHICH STUDENTS SEE THE WORLD’
Ultimately, Levin says, ‘we are trying to widen the aperture through which students see the world. So having them exposed to students and faculty from different areas is a way to widen their aperture.”
Part of this effort is about making sure GSB students take classes outside the business school and that non-B-school students take GSB courses. At Stanford, all seven schools are on the same academic calendar and the same class schedule to make that happen. As a result, 71% of the school’s MBA and MSx students from Autumn, Winter, and Spring of last school year took at least one course “across the street,” while 467 non-business school students enrolled in a GSB course last year. Roughly 20% of the school’s MBA students pursue a joint or dual degree.
“Our students can take classes all across the university,” he says. “Some of the classes are open to undergraduates and others to graduate students at other schools, and some of the programs like our entrepreneurship programs are open to students from all around campus. The faculty collaborate all across campus and because of an ongoing long-range planning initiative, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about university initiatives where the business school will play an important role but be part of a much broader effort. We have new initiatives that are going to be coming out over the next year around artificial intelligence, data science and social problem solving and responsible investment and governance.
‘ENTREPRENEURSHIP IS IN THE WATER HERE’
In Startup Garage, the entrepreneurship project course taken by 242 students this fall, MBAs often work with engineering students on their teams. “That engineering student adds a different element to the project. Every student at Stanford in the business school will take something in entrepreneurship. Some of them will become entrepreneurs but the goal is for all of them to become innovators. Only 15% will start companies. It’s in the water here.”
Levin also speaks with great pride in describing some of the school’s rituals. Only last Wednesday, for example, some 300 to 400 alumni descended on campus for the annual Executive Challenge. The initiative, part of a class called Leadership Labs for first-year students, organizes students into small squads, each with a second-year student as their leadership fellow, requiring members of each squad to do a 20-minute presentation and then accept ten minutes of feedback from alumni.
“You go into the case rooms and two of the students in each squad are put on the spot in front of alums to role play out a board meeting or a leadership decision,” explains Levin. “They get the cases in the morning and they take it very seriously. The thing that is great about this day is that it brings together the faculty, the first- and second-year students, the alumni and the staff. Everybody gets to be at their best. The students are so articulate. You can’t believe how good they are. It’s so much fun. It has a very constructive frame because the alumni get to mentor and give feedback. It’s a real educational moment.”
Stanford University Graduate School of Business – Ethan Baron photo
‘SOME THINGS HAVE TO CHANGE TO PREPARE STUDENTS TO BE MORE DATA LITERATE’
None of this is to say that Levin believes the MBA curriculum is perfect. He envisions important changes in how MBA curriculum has to change. “The thing about MBA education is that there are some things that have to change and are changing in to prepare students to be more data literate and to be able to help students pose hypotheses that can be answered with data,” says Levin. “If you are going to work with engineers and data scientists, you have to be able to ask a question that you could then answer with data. What is the new business model or new opportunity that you couldn’t do before? These are all opportunities and then we get into the issues around what are the new responsibilities. Those are the hard questions, the questions that everyone in the world is struggling with. Privacy. Job automation. Income inequality. A fundamental question is will this wave of technology advance in a way that it doesn’t leave people behind?
THE LIMITS OF TECHNOLOGY
“What will the new jobs be? What type of jobs will be created? Will they be jobs that give people dignity in their work and a sufficient income? That’s one of the big questions of the next couple of decades. There will be important decisions that will get made in Washington and Beijing and other places around the world but a lot of the decisions are going to be made in the private sector. So the students we are educating today and the students we graduated recently will be making those decisions.”
In terms of whether machines have a role in those decisions, he is doubtful. Levin maintains that technology has often unforeseen limitations that make judgments by thoughtful people important. “When the fires broke out in southern Los Angeles last year, they had to tell people to stop using mapping software because the maps routed people to where there was no traffic and they were routing people to places that were on fire. The point of that is that these systems which seem very smart can also be very dumb.
“There also was this interesting and troubling work that a student in our AI lab did on facial recognition. Algorithms on available data became really good at recognizing white male faces with a high degree of accuracy and not so good in recognizing the faces of women of color. No one had even noticed that when these systems were used. No one ever thought about that. The challenge is to be able to look ahead and ask what questions might this raise? That is a great challenge for our faculty and our students.”
‘WE ARE COMMITTED TO CREATING AN ENVIRONMENT THAT IS WELCOMING FOR ALL STUDENTS’
Levin shows little concern over MBA application declines or the diminished number of international applicants who have been scared away from the U.S. due to anti-immigration rhetoric or concerns over obtaining work visas. “We are trying to get great students from wherever they are from,” he says. “What we are committed to is creating an environment that is welcoming for all types of students. That is what we try to control and focus on. We want to make sure this is a place that is attractive to students from all different places and industries with different ideologies and aspirations.
“And we are going to stay committed to that even if there are fluctuations in policy and the business cycle. We are getting great applicants. We are fortunate in getting a great pool of applicants and it translates into having great students. I think the rise of alternative programs is interesting and it’s a great thing that there are more ways to get access to management education. That is really positive for the world.”
Whatever the future holds, Levin seems excited by his school’s efforts to address what he calls the fundamentally hard social problems of the day. “Having a dynamic private sector has lifted billions of people in the world out of poverty,” says Levin. “It’s extraordinary. It’s like nothing in the history of humanity in the last two centuries of economic growth. That is an amazing thing and we don’t want to lose sight of how innovation drives economic growth and that drives increases in well being. Having said that, you look at the U. S., and you have to think about people who are left behind. When you have advances in technology they broadly benefit humanity and society but how do you make sure you are creating a wide variety of jobs that insures the dignity of work and how do we sustain our workforce in productive ways.”
DON’T MISS: THE MBA GATEKEEPER TO STANFORD GSB
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