Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/54894
FOCUS ON INNOVATION Innovation: A Leadership Essential by Garth Saloner B y the time Jake Harriman, a U.S. Marine who had served as a special operations platoon commander in Iraq, landed at Stanford University in 2006, he had concluded that the way to fight terrorism was to fight the kind of extreme poverty he had seen in the Middle East. He wasn't sure how to tackle the problem, but two years in our MBA program gave him a good start. His degree equipped him with the financial, organizational, and managerial skills he needed to launch Nuru International, an African nonprofit that helps impoverished villages in high- risk conflict zones improve access to water, healthcare, education, agricultural solutions, and economic development. Today Harri- man is completing his first project in Kenya. Harriman's situation illustrates where management education needs to be today. It remains essential for students to learn how to use financial statements to uncover a company's underlying performance, identify an attractive industry structure, think holis- tically about the levers they can use to market a product, interpret statistical data about operations to spot production inefficiencies, and select the best options for raising capital. They also should learn many other ways to assess industries and companies, as well as ways to diagnose business problems. But, as Harriman's situa- tion illustrates, such knowledge is not sufficient. 26 BizEd JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2011 At Stanford, innovative thinking is one of three critical leadership capabilities built into the curriculum.