Stanford GSB Executive Education

Fellow marketers ascending to the C-suite, this program is for you. Lifelong learning is critical as you continue your professional journey. Applications are due June 28 and the program begins in August. Check it out!

“The program provided me with customer-centric strategic marketing frameworks to increase my impact as a marketing leader.” – Luiz Piovesana Luiz Piovesana, chief marketing officer of Nuvemshop, attended The Emerging CMO: Strategic Marketing Leadership program and gained frameworks and skills to grow his technology company. Read to learn more about his experience. #StanfordGSBExecEd https://lnkd.in/gup8jNSk

As your business grows, how do you balance the need to apply business discipline with the desire to stay entrepreneurial? How do you scale management systems? The Executive Program for Growing Companies is a comprehensive two-week program solely focused on the needs, challenges, and opportunities of growing companies. You’ll discover business growth strategies and build a stronger company designed to sustain progress, scale management, and facilitate market expansion. Learn more about the program’s curriculum, participant profile, and faculty to see if this program could be a fit for you. The application deadline is June 21, 2024. #StanfordGSBExecEd https://lnkd.in/gDJvDfAT

Curious about Stanford LEAD? This Wednesday and Thursday, you’ll have an opportunity to learn more! Join one of our Meet a LEADer interactive virtual sessions, where a past participant will share their experience and the impact that LEAD has had on their professional and personal growth. Plus, there will be a live Q&A to get your questions answered in real-time. Read to find out more details about this week’s sessions. #StanfordGSBExecEd #StanfordLEAD https://lnkd.in/g3EQVURc

95% of past program participants agree that the Stanford LEAD online business program is worth the investment. Find out why: Tune in to hear past participants discuss their aspirations for pursuing LEAD, as well as their program experience and outcomes -- unscripted. Join a series of live discussions this week with Swyl Saksena, Malvika Sinha, and Paula Pardo González. Click below to mark your calendar, and we'll see you there! > Google calendar: https://lnkd.in/gk_pW68K > All other calendar types: https://lnkd.in/gmfxQBVy

Search ads are often considered a necessary evil — the price we pay to use a search engine for free. But according to Associate Professor Navdeep Sahni, searchers might actually benefit from seeing these ads. With Charles Zhang, PhD ’22, Sahni collected data from real users and real ads in a field experiment on a widely used U.S. search engine. Three million unique users were split into two groups: one saw the usual number of “mainline” ads that appear among the top results and in the middle of the page; the other group saw fewer. If ads are a nuisance, one would expect that seeing fewer of them would lead to higher user satisfaction. But that’s not what Sahni observed. Instead, with fewer mainline ads, subjects used the search engine less. “People are going to use a product more when they like it and less when they don’t,” Sahni says. “We concluded that users liked the search engine less when the ads were removed than when the ads were present.” As the researchers find, search ads offer value to users that they miss out on when ads aren’t present. “We are not saying that all search ads are good,” Sahni notes. “Our point is that [they] can be positive for users. That goes against the widely held point of view that ads are a high price that users are forced to pay for access to search.” #marketing https://lnkd.in/gHJEyGcE

Where are we most likely to find breakthrough ideas? According to Associate Professor Amir Goldberg, we should focus on the fringes. “One of the perennial debates is whether new ideas are more likely to come from established players or new entrants in a field,” Goldberg says. To answer that question, he deployed deep-learning #AI to trace the genesis of original, enduring ideas. Using a dataset of 5 million congressional floor speeches, 4.2 million court decisions, and transcripts of 108,000 quarterly earnings calls, Goldberg and his team tasked an# AI model with finding language they defined as “prescient” — novel at first, but becoming common over time. As Goldberg found, prescient thinking was more likely to emerge from the fringes of a field. In business, prescient ideas were eight times more likely to emerge from the smallest companies than the largest. In law, highly prescient decisions were 22 times more likely to come from state appeals courts than the U.S. Supreme Court. “We’re not saying innovation always comes from the periphery, only that it’s more likely,” Goldberg notes. As investors and business leaders seek the next big idea, Goldberg says “Openness to outsiders and welcoming a diversity of voices is a good place to start.” #innovation #tech #businessandsociety https://lnkd.in/g4_UEw7c

Many have speculated about what will happen when companies unleash generative #AI in their workforces. Now, Professor Erik Brynjolfsson has some hard data to bring to the discussion. Brynjolfsson is one of the first researchers to test what happens when companies use AI at scale in a real workplace. In a study of nearly 5,200 customer support agents, he found that generative AI tools helped them perform their jobs better and boosted customer satisfaction. Brynjolfsson observed a Fortune 500 software firm that introduced a virtual assistant tool to aid chat support agents. Compared to a control group, agents with AI help were able to resolve 14% more support issues per hour. These workers ended conversations faster, handled more chats per hour, and resolved problems more successfully. As agent efficiency went up, so did customer satisfaction. “People like it when you solve their problems, and the system seems to be doing a better job of that,” Brynjolfsson says. Additionally, AI-assisted agents were less likely to quit. “I would guess that it’s more enjoyable to be in a job where the customers like you and you can solve customer problems faster,” he says. #businessandsociety #tech https://lnkd.in/gRP5yPT6

How do you make quick decisions and move on without looking back? According to Professor Ilya Strebulaev, it helps to have a “rejection mindset.” In their new book, ‘The Venture Mindset: How to Make Smarter Bets and Achieve Extraordinary Growth,’ Strebulaev and Alex Dang, MS ’14, outline why “no” is a mantra for successful startup investors. “VCs start by looking not for a compelling reason to invest, but for a way out,” they write. Instead of falling in love with many potential deals, #VCs rapidly eliminate concepts with critical flaws, giving them more time to pursue only the most promising opportunities. “Sometimes it’s better to speed up the decision process and find efficient ways to say no early so that you can evaluate more ideas,” Strebulaev and Dang write. The authors illustrate this approach in action through the show ‘Shark Tank,’ where investors grill contestants about their business plans. “When each [shark] identifies a factor that they believe to be a ‘critical flaw,’ they immediately lose interest,” Strebulaev and Dang note. While it may seem harsh, a "fast rejection mindset" is a vital skill for anyone deciding what to do with their limited time and resources. “Being selective [about] opportunities is not a privilege limited to venture investors,” write Strebulaev and Dang, “but a skill that anyone can master.” #venturecapital https://lnkd.in/gWTcPMTS