The Story Behind Our New Look
By Kathleen O'Toole, Editor

Kathleen O'Toole, EditorAs a kid in 1920s Chicago, Gabriel Almond and his friends hung out summers on the beaches of Lake Michigan. They loved the clean sand, but they also took pride in the air quality.

“We saw the floating slag of ashes arriving from the steel mills in South Chicago and Gary, and we thought, ‘that’s progress,’” Almond told me with a grin and a shake of his head one day in 1993. He was then an 82-year-old professor emeritus of political science at Stanford, well aware of the downsides of the industrial revolution.

That image of youth standing in awe of belching factories comes to mind whenever I find myself trying to be an environmentally conscious manager of this organization. What do our readers and the population at large expect of us today, and what will they expect tomorrow? To be forward thinking, it seems to me, you have to appreciate both history and new knowledge that come along regularly to reinvent the future.

In the new-knowledge category, I recall my own teenage years in the 1960s. Arriving home from school one day, I found Grandmother O’Toole reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Looking up from the book, she asked me if I had heard any birds on my walk home. I shrugged my shoulders, I suppose. She said that she had been missing the birds singing for a long time, but until Carson’s book she had not realized their decline might be attributable to DDT, a chemical her son, my father, was using on our farm.

Since Carson, many others have brought us new evidence for alarm. My predecessors at this magazine had the foresight to switch from petroleum-based inks to ones made from soybeans once the risks to the environment and health were clearer. History tells us no organization can rest on its laurels.

When you picked up this issue of the magazine, did you notice that it looks and feels different? My colleague Arthur Patterson recently went shopping for paper that would use fewer trees. The trend among responsible publishers is to use paper that prints well with the least new wood and greatest amount of recycled content, especially post-consumer waste, as opposed simply to recycled material from print overruns. At this time, the best match to our needs was paper from Italy. But when we thought about the greenhouse gases created by transporting paper for 26,000 magazines from Italy, we decided instead to press North American manufacturers to do better. ...

Read Stanford Business Magazine, August 2008 Online

Preventing Corruption
First Hand Look at a Scandal
By Douglas Minge Brown, MBA ’61

I HAD JUST LAUNCHED Douglas Minge BrownIndependent 529 Plan, a prepaid tuition program for 275 independent colleges and universities, and was ready to retire in October 2005. Sarah had sold her business, and we were planning an eight-month sabbatical in Manhattan, when an aide to New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson called requesting I meet with the governor. ...

Visit Stanford Graduate School of Business Website

The Stanford Graduate School of Business (also known as Stanford Business School or Stanford GSB) is one of the professional schools of Stanford University, in Stanford, California. It is one of the leading business schools in the United States.

The Stanford Graduate School of Business offers a general management MBA degree and thus does not offer degrees in specialized areas such as finance or marketing, although it does offer certificate programs in public management and global management. The school also offers the Sloan Master's Program, a full-time ten-month MS in Management for accomplished mid-career executives and entrepreneurs, and a Ph.D. program. The school also offers a number of dual degrees jointly with other schools at Stanford University including Education, Engineering, Law and Medicine. (Wikipedia.org)

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