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So it's a real pleasure today to be joined by Dean Levin from the Stanford GS B on the NFX podcast today. So I've got to know that Dean over the last couple Liers as part of serving on the Pete Management board. And, also, I have super full memories of my time back in the GSB from a few years ago now and also get to go back there and co teach a couple of cases there. So, indeed, it's it's a real pleasure to have you.
You're a distinguished academic and economist and out the end of business school, and and Stanford is really at just at the heart of Silicon Valley since Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley. So you're sitting on this fascinating ecosystem in environment about technology, about entrepreneurship, and society at large. So let's kick off, John. I know you're insanely busy right now. You're preparing for the class 2021 graduation in just a few days. So for joining us. And so maybe we'll start there.
Like, give us a preview of the upcoming celebration. Is there a theme that you'll focus on at all during this graduation time? Pete, thanks for having me on the show, and it's real pleasure. And, you know, thanks for everything you do for Stanford and for the GSV. By the way, you can call me John. So graduation.
So we've had a, you know, a year that really has been unlike any other and from to the year, our students, although they were able to live on campus, have had to study virtually and the opportunities for interaction have been much less This quarter's been quite a bit better with ability to do hybrid teaching and people can interact outside and so forth, but we're really looking forward to getting to bring the students and families together to graduate next week.
And we're gonna do it outside in Stanford's beautiful frost amphitheater, and everyone gets to walk across the stage and be cheered by their classmates. They normally shake their hands and give them a diploma. We'll have to pass on that this year with COVID, but it'll be much the James.
The theme I'm thinking about for this year for graduation, I haven't written my remarks fully yet, but the theme that's on my mind is optimism and not optimism in the sense of being Palliana about all the challenges that we've come through over the year, but optimism in the sense of as a great leadership characteristic.
And being able to stay positive and focused even when there's a lot of adversity, which is something that, you know, our students and everyone in the world really has gone through over the last period. And now with the world starting to emerge from the pandemic, I think there's a lot of reasons to be optimistic, both about the world, but also about the prospects and the opportunities for this particular graduating class, which is a very, very special class.
Yeah. I'm sure it I'm recollecting back my own graduation, and I was fortunate enough to be there in 2005, and Steve Jobs gave the commitment speech, which is to stay hungry, stay foolish speech, which is a different kind of optimism, but, you know, that's a sort of iconic moment in commencement speeches. So I'm looking forward to kind of rereading your remarks at some Flint. If I can say something as great as, you know, you can only connect the dots looking backward.
That was a great moment in commencement speeches when he sort of everything is clear about your trajectory and retrospect always looks uncertain and is hard to chart at. Indeed. So you mentioned that sort of being a very special class. How would you characterize this class. And then maybe it's, you know, perhaps generalize about the sort of the graduating classes across universities in 2021. You know, what are you seeing that's different this year than in prior classes?
I think all students this year and certainly for our graduating class, but I think true, as you say Morgan broadly, they've been called on to be hugely adaptive and resilient, and they haven't gotten the experience that they expected or signed up for. They've gotten something very different, but, of course, it is the experience that they got. The hand that was dealt to them, and you can't control that, but you do get to control what it is you make of your circumstances.
And so in that sense, I think the students at the GSP, I have great admiration and respect for the way that they have handled themselves this year in working hard in the classroom and making the most of virtual teaching and staying connected and forming new connections to each other in seeking out opportunities And I think that experience, although they might not choose to repeat it, if given the option, will serve them incredibly well in their lives.
That ability to deal with the unexpected and then to figure out, you know, how is it that you're going to make something great out of, challenging situation. And just what do you think's next? I mean, perhaps particularly the students do you work with? Is there a sort of expectation around founding companies? I think you know, remote work for many people has inspired them to think differently about their career choices.
Do you think many of them will start companies or join technology companies I think the COVID is shone a light on the, you know, the future of biology and, you know, technology and that sort of Morgan vaccines. I'm curious if there's any particular focus or theme you're seeing in where the talent is going post graduation? It's such an interesting question.
I think, you know, many ways is a great time to be coming out of school because the world has been so disrupted, and there's so much change going on in technology, society, business. It's exactly the time that you wanna be setting out and looking for opportunities because it is a time of rapid change and a time of disruption. I think the opportunities are many for the students who are graduating. When I look at what people are interested in, questions go in all different directions.
That's one of the wonderful things about the school. People go off and do all kinds of things after they graduate in all different industries and roles, and then often change them over the course of their career much like you were an and then became an investor.
And the students again, and I'm sure in this graduating class will go in many, many different directions, but I do think there's incredible opportunity right now because of what has happened during COVID with the whole acceleration of digital and online, the changes in work that are coming and everyone is thinking about how to have more flexibility in the workplace. There's gonna be great opportunities there.
The Beller care, we're seeing a lot of interest of students, particularly the entrepreneurial minded students in Beller care, fintech, a lot of changes in payments. So I think the opportunity is right now, you know, I guess it'll be one of those things where we'll look back in a few years. It'll be easier to connect the dots, but it does seem like this is a time of really wonderful opportunity for students setting out on the next phase of their careers.
Are you sensing there are more entrepreneurs today than in the pocket? I think just my own experience and generally looking at sort of graduate students, it feels like as a percentage Morgan more people are starting companies, and business schools are almost, you know, incubating kind of ideas. I don't know if that's quite the right word. They're basically sort of helping founders Morgan ideas rather than perhaps joining the traditional big banks or management consultancies.
Do you see that trend increasing and has it increased this year?
We have seen over say the last 20 years at the GSB, a very significant change in careers, which includes entrepreneurship, but is broader that is it's really about students, many students searching for jobs that are somewhat idiosyncratic and unique, and they find through calling people not necessarily advertise jobs jobs that they just find through network search as opposed to the very traditional business school model of on campus interviewing with, large Morgan.
And I think that's that perhaps somewhat distinctive to Stanford and we see that in all different industries. We see it in finance. We see it in technology. Of course, we have lots of interest in students going to small companies and startups, both in Silicon Valley and then also increasingly around the country and around the world. If you look at our entrepreneurship numbers, when you were student, and you'd have to tell me if you were lonely as an entrepreneur at the school.
Although, of course, their entrepreneurship quite part of the ethos of Stanford going back many years. Today, somewhere around 15 to 20% of our class ends up founding a company right out of the business school, which is really quite a robust number in the class that it makes for a very strong community. By the way, most of our peer schools are more like 1 or 2%. So we're maybe 5 or 6 at the high end. So that is a somewhat distinctive feature.
It's still a relatively small fraction of class, that means 80 to 85% are doing other things. And I think what is really special about Stanford is Beller people decide to become entrepreneurs or not, you just can't help it. Everyone walks away from the campus with that sort of spark of innovation and entrepreneurial thinking that they take wherever they go. You know, that's a really wonderful thing about the school and, you know, I think it has, served us well over many years.
It's, I mean, just racking into my own experience. I think when I was there, it was certainly 5 to 10%. No more than that, and it definitely felt as more of a kind of outlier.
You know, there's a lot of folks that perhaps sort of critique the MBA programs, and I think the sort of mistake that I've seen from personal experiences that MBAs today are not about training people to be soldiers in the corporate American businesses, which is sort of a misnomers, that GSB really helped me to, you know, 10 sessions I think, like, an entrepreneur, you know, much like, I think other folks like, and I think how to build
businesses, much like folks go to Y Combinator and get that experience there or other environments. So I'm absolutely not surprised. I think you make a good point, which is that sometimes people do come through a business school too narrowly to think of it as sort of road training for, very defined roles in large Morgan, and it's just nothing like that.
The business school is really about in a sense, I sometimes think of it in contrast to my own experience as Pete student, which was like being handed the high powered microscope to zoom in on a particular problem that I tried to become the world's expert on. And I think about the students coming to the Pete, and it's we're handing them a telescope so they can just see a huge expansive opportunities out there that it broadens perspectives.
It opens you up to all different roles, different paths you might take in your Currier and gives you the ability to think critically, to think strategically to think in innovative ways and some of the practical skills that you'll need to be successful all different organizations and roles. And in that way, it's just an incredibly powerful educational experience. And just thinking specifically about the early stage entrepreneurs listen to the podcast.
What do you think that are today's major opportunities that you'd like them to tackle? I think that's a better question for you than for me. I way. So I wanna hear your answer too, but I'm happy to go first. We're seeing a lot of interest in things like Flint that the whole, change in payments and opportunities, you know, really across the board there. Those are, by the way, not that's not just the US. That's all over the world. Asia Latin America.
I mean, completely global Beller care, which you earlier mentioned. Again, lots of interest there. I'm hoping that some of our students are going to get interested and they are some of them are in thinking about the transition to a low carbon economy I don't know who it's gonna be or what the exact opportunities are, but I think that's such an important problem for the world that needs innovation and needs the the kind of thinking that our students can bring to bear.
And I went for a walk around campus a few weeks ago with one of our graduating students who is starting a company that applies artificial intelligence to battery design that he has been working on with a faculty member in the Stanford School of Engineering.
And it just reminded me that so many of the interesting companies that come out of Stanford are places where there's a advance in technology and a student with a great idea Morgan business model and the leadership and the product design field that allows some sort of pairing to take place that creates a really great business. So that's always an exciting place for entrepreneurship. Yeah. I'd just, answer the question. I would feel similarly.
I think the father's opportunities about Beller care plimer and fintech and just the way that money and whether that's crypto Morgan otherwise it's gonna change it. I think there's also just the notion of job coffee has changed substantially. And so how does that impact our lives, you know, whether that's where we live, where we work, where we study? I think that is just fertile ground and supply chains, you know, how we think about transportation.
I think we really haven't sort of rocked the way that our sense of geography has changed. As we kind of become more and more virtual in everything that we do. Yeah. 2 years ago, who would have thought that the big problem in the world would be supply chain optimization and logistics. I mean, we've just seen how important that is over the last 18 months of the pandemic.
And also with the, you know, you Flint out the changes in work you know, that's an area where the uncertainty of just about how that will play out after the pandemic and how much people will work remotely and what the effect will be on cities and on different types of jobs and on the labor market and on how organizations function. I think that's such an interesting question.
We have a class at the GSV that we started during the pandemic, a leadership for society class that, Brian Lowry started that has a theme this year where the theme is around race and power. And next year, the theme is around reimagining work after COVID. It'll be livestreamed actually open to Pete, and there's a podcast as well. And I'm really excited to just have a lot of discussion about that year because it really is something that could transform the work experience for so many people.
Yeah. And work experience and also opportunities for people that perhaps wouldn't otherwise have them, which is just terrific. Let's hope that happens. You know, I think even here in the Bay Area, the reception expensive place to live, giving people who, you know, might have to be doing a lot of commuting if there's a way to give them more flexibility and, you know, allow them to devote their time to more productive things than driving around in traffic.
That would be a real improvement in people's lives. Yeah. Just talking about entrepreneurial students, I guess, what did the, perhaps, you look at 10, 15 years ago today versus perhaps in the future. Are there any sort of characteristics or constants as well as changes in what you see in founders today versus the past or the future? Well, I think one big change is we have a much more diverse founder base at the school now and entrepreneurial community.
Even a few years ago, as what example, there was a big gender gap in entrepreneurship rates at the school. So even though our class was 40% women. The number of entrepreneurs was very small, more than 2 to 1, probably male, female. And today, that gap has been steadily closing. And I think that's a tremendously positive development. I think the faculty who teach entrepreneurship have done a great job in helping to make that happen. I think there's a lot of commonality to over time.
The willingness to try something new, the ambition, the creativity. We probably have better structured support now for entrepreneurship at the GSP because we have classes like startup garage instead of going to figure it out, but people still come to the school who are interested and interested in and still get turned on to it while they're hearing, and that's true today. And it was true.
It was true back in 1919 sixties when we only had one class in entrepreneurship and Phil Knight came and wrote the business plan for Nike. So that's a enduring constant. Do you sense that mean, this may be a reflection or more the generation than perhaps third school, but there's a sense of more mission orientated folks in terms of just looking at the social contract or societal contract they're looking to make part of their startup? For sure. There's no question.
We have a program in social entrepreneurship, which is a wonderful program And in many ways, it has sort of come together with our traditional entrepreneurship programs.
That is to say it's come to that from both directions, by the So we have students who wanna pursue social ventures who have found that they believe the way to do is often not through necessarily founding something with capital that is social impact capital, but maybe to go with traditional capital because they have access to different types of investors and so forth.
And at the same time, I think many of the students who are thinking about entrepreneurial ventures come in with a problem that they wanna solve. And often that problem is a problem about education, about access to Beller care, about creating opportunity. It's a very socially minded problem. And then the question is, what is the solution? What's the entrepreneurial solution that's going to get at this problem. And I think it's a great development that people are thinking coming in.
What's the problem I wanna solve and coming at that from a social orientation? Then using all the business skills that they have Flint entrepreneurial skills to try to craft a solution. Yeah. And just as well, you know, you think about the expectations of perhaps you know, startup leaders in graduating classes in general is like, how have the expectations changed?
And this may be more of a broader business question, but the know, when you're training leaders today, like, what's the stuff that perhaps you felt is increasingly Morgan, perhaps that isn't obvious from the outside?
Oh, I think the expectations on all business leaders and all businesses have been undergoing a dramatic change And that's a big change in the world over the last several years that there's more expectation for all types of organizational leaders to be engaged with, you know, often social or political issues that may be directly relevant to their businesses, but may go beyond their businesses.
And also to be able to articulate and demonstrate, you know, an alignment between what the organization is doing and societal well-being. And that's a very big change and it applies entrepreneurial leaders as well in a way that maybe a few years ago, it didn't because Morgan instance, here in Silicon Valley, we felt pretty sheltered from lots of issues, outside of Silicon Beller, and I don't think feelings there anymore.
You know, the example I would give there is around the relationship with government that leaders today have to be much more attuned to the role of government in their industries. We certainly are seeing that in technology. And 10 years ago, that was just much less of an issue. So there have been some very big ongoing changes in the demands on leaders to be able to have a broader context for the organization and what it's doing.
And that is, it's an important thing for us to be thinking about as a school because trying to educate those leaders and prepare them to handle the sort of new things that are happening in the world. You're listening to the NFX podcast. If you're enjoying this episode, feel free to rate and review our channel and share this conversation with someone you think would benefit from these insights. Follow us on social, add n effects, and visit n effects dotcom for more content.
And now back to the show. Speech gears a little bit. You're not just the deed. You're also a economist. And so maybe let's talk from owner about macroeconomics, like, what's the state of capitalism now? And how do you see it potentially changing over the next 10 years or so? Okay. That's a big question. You know, we are going through a period that is opening up questions about the macro economy at the role of government that in a sense we're sort of settled for many years.
So an example, which is we went through the pandemic and we went through a major experiment with hugely increased government spending and deficits, and it was clearly needed because the economy got shut down with social distancing and COVID, but now we have a question of how long do we continue that? Should the government be permanently larger and play a bigger role in people's lives? Can we run deficits sort of out into the indefinite future?
We might have to think about inflation, which is something that we haven't thought about in the US in 30 years, 40 years, almost And so these are really big economic questions right now. I'm a believer that we do need smart regulation Morgan technology that we need to make investments people in infrastructure, but I also look at some of the things that are happening right now, and I do think we're running some big experiments with an uncertain outcome.
And if I was still a lot of time doing economic research, there would be a lot to to work on right now. Sure. And also just the mass experimentation that we've seen going on society through COVID. It's a fascinating petri dish both in economic policy as well as health care policy. You know, I think we're in come out of this with just fascinating insights of countries and communities that make different decisions and some would decorate some would that defray different Absolutely.
I think there's gonna be a lot to be learned looking back and looking at how different countries approached it. I think there's some very positive things that could come out. You mentioned in credible advances that happened with the vaccines, but there were also things that have happened just from relaxing regulations, for example, during COVID by allowing for telemedicine and changes in care delivery that could have a really big effects on the Beller care system.
And that could, by the way, go into smaller things like you could eat outside. And have a beer. And that's kind of a nice development too. I hope we're not gonna lose that when COVID ends. There's no doubt there's been some silver linings COVID, even, of course, there's been a lot of tragedy and challenge for so many people. And then just on this notion around sort of capitalism and, you know, thinking about the August 2019 business roundtable at it declaring a new purpose of the corporation.
Do you see that it made any impact? And, like, have you seen perhaps the pendulum's shift away from short termism to a different perspective and measurement of corporation success and impact. And maybe just explain that letter for the audience.
Well, the business roundtable, that was a letter signed by many of the CEOs of the largest companies in the US saying that the objectives of their business was to serve a whole range of stakeholders that is rather than the goal of the business being to match optimize the returns for shareholders of Milton Friedman View that has prevailed for many years. It was to think about not just the shareholders, but employees and customers in the broader public and communities.
And some of that of course, is just obvious. But how could you run a business for the long term and not think about your employees, your customers, and the area around you in a conscientious way, but it could also have been taken to be a statement that these CEOs and the companies were going to actually make more explicit trade offs that would get resolved in favor of stakeholder groups who were not the investors. And I think the evidence and whether that has happened is sparse at this point.
I haven't seen any systematic evidence that that has happened although maybe one can point to some examples where it looks like, you know, employees were vocal and companies have moved in the direction of serving employees or customers or other stakeholders, but I haven't seen any systematic yet. But, and so I think the jury's out in some sense.
I do think that just the way people have been talking about the objectives of business and the need to be attentive to different stakeholders that's clearly changed. I mean, just clearly the nature of people's discussion has James.
And you have seen just in the last, the 12 to 18 months, lots of companies making commitments to social goals, things like 0 Pete carbon emissions or more diverse hiring and promotions, And I think the question that everyone should be looking at is is this gonna happen? How will it happen? What trade offs will need to be made in some James, like to get to Morgan net 0 in order to get there, will it be actually costly for shareholders?
I think that area of thinking about corporate governance is just fascinating right now, and we have a number of classes where the students and the faculty are debating that. And I love sitting in on those classes and hearing people's thoughts because there's such a range of views to what extent should businesses, you know, reorient their objectives. Should they or should they not and what will the implications be?
Yeah. It feels that there has been, with just from the entrepreneur shipping business environment, I mean, that there's a shift from this being a moral imperative to being a commercial imperative. Which is fascinating how and quite rightly so that this is in the best interest to shareholders, not just the right thing to do. Yeah. I mean, a great example. That's very interesting to see that in entrepreneurial space. I think you see that with large companies.
We saw with Exxon this week, the activist shareholders who were pushing for more focus on preparing for climate change and sustainability. And all the big institutional investors backed them up, and that ended up changing the board. I think we're likely to see more and more examples of things like that, and that is a profound shift in governance.
And I like your way of framing it, which is there's certain things like thinking about sustainability, your climate, or diversity in your way population that people might have thought of before as a moral imperative, a moral thing to do but they also may be a really good business right now. That definitely changes the calculus for many organizations. I'd love to a little bit about this new task force that you're building?
Like, who's on the task force and why does exist, perhaps what's broken or what needs advancing? Yeah. So this relates closely to what we've been talking about. We've had a group of faculty and alumni and some students that I asked to think about issues that are coming up at the intersection of a business and government and society and exactly these changes in the expectations for businesses and business leaders.
You and I have been discussing the rethinking of the respective roles of government and business.
I think really these discussions and debates that we're having now are being driven by a very fundamental question, which is, you know, how is business going to produce the innovation that we need to address the big challenges of the coming century around sustainability and equality, ensuring opportunity, ensuring that the benefits of technology are widely enjoyed so this group has been meeting for some months and trying to survey the landscape of what are
the changes that are going on and what are opportunities for us in our curriculum, in seventating research and bringing people together.
I think one of the interesting takeaways has been that the importance of ensuring a real diversity of viewpoints on many of these issues that people naturally disagree, and it's important to capture that disagreement at a school on a campus and have a real diversity of perspectives and that when we're in an area like Silicon Valley, we're tends to be somewhat homogeneous in terms of people's politics that we need to push back against that and really
try to get people talking and debating and listening to different opinions, and that's important as we think about who comes to the school, what the environment is like in classrooms, what kinds of events we're having and discussions. And there's been lots of discussion around that, lots of discussion around how can our faculty have more voice and impact with their research and ideas I'm looking forward.
That group's been meeting all through the spring and excited to see the ideas that are surfacing, and that'll hopefully be an important area for us to be investing in as an institution and moving forward. And can you share who's on the task force? That group has a set of faculty members from the GS B and also, a set of alumni and a couple of current students.
It's being chaired by one of our alumni, Jim Culture, who was the founder TPG and Ken Shatz, who's a political scientist on our faculty who has, for many years, taught the 1st year with another faculty member named yamaha taught the 1st year ethics class, which is a great class that is geared toward getting students to start thinking about and debating complicated situations that they're gonna face as, as organizational leaders. I'm sure.
Is it like a fascinating group looking to hear what comes out of that? You mentioned earlier about tech and regulation. And the involvement that perhaps students today need to be more conscious. So if you see as regulation and tech being good or bad fellows, it very much used to be that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs would go out of the way to avoid regulated industries or Washington, but it seemed like it's changing. Do you see some sort of reckoning happening? For sure.
Certainly for the large tech firms, there's just no question that they're coming under so much scrutiny. Some of it is about technology. So it's less about the individual companies and more about anxiety about touch. And I think it was something like facial recognition and the deployment of cameras that might or might not happen in different places that would be able to track people and essentially surveill people. That's a case where the concerns in some sense about the technology.
It's less about whether the cameras are owned by one company or by many, many companies. Some of the other concerns though are about just the size and power of the largest technology firms. And when I think back over the history of the US in certain ways, this is a little like the progressive year, 100 years ago. Where there was a lot of concern about the biggest companies and that at the time was what led to things like the origin of antitrust and a lot of regulation and a big pushback.
And I think there's some possibility that we are on the cusp of a similar type of shift. In the relationship between the government and, the biggest stores which are pretty much all technology firms at this point. Yeah. That's really what the big technology firms, but I think even for smaller entrepreneurial companies, so many of the interesting areas that companies are getting started and that we've been talking about Beller care financial services, these are heavily regulated industries.
So it's very difficult to start up a company without having some sense of the regulatory landscape and how that might impact the business. You know, that's different than some of the other areas that Pete have been innovating and starting companies in over the last 20 years. I do think that's a big change and an important one.
Yeah. I I 100% agree that, you know, what we're seeing entrepreneurs, you know, I think it's oversimplification, but, you know, back sort of 10, 20 years ago, to be successful, you needed to have, you know, a great product in a market to be successful. And then now I think the founders and particularly the founding teams of building these kind of multi faceted teams to tackle the interesting problems of today.
Where you've got, you know, an amazing technologist meets an amazing person that can navigate regulation that can, there's perhaps a deep domain knowledge in a particular space. And those are very complicated businesses to get going, but they construct these teams which tick many of these boxes because it's software alone. It's often not gonna tackle these big problems that face us and they need some of this deep domain expertise. It's such a great point that you're making, Pete.
We often talk about the virtues of sort of interdis disciplinary teams and what you get from that, but it's also hard to build teams where people come in with different expertise and backgrounds and get people to work together effectively and actually have an organization that work well. So there's a lot of excitement when you can bring the IPO for those different skills, but it's also hard and challenging both companies that way.
And so it touches on this sort of notion about, I'm sure people from different sectors disagree and talk about the task force that people naturally disagree. And it's certainly kind of when you have these collisions between different people and different disciplines. You often see their disagreement, and that it can be a spark for innovation. Is there a way that you can teach disagreement or debate there any philosophy you have around that?
Yeah. I mean, I think you're raising 2 great points that really hit home for me. One is about if you've got a topic that people naturally have different views on it. You know, and what we're talking about now, say the regulation of internet platforms is a natural. People have very different views about that. How do you structure a discussion so that you draw out difference of opinion and people debate, but they don't take it personally. That's about the ideas and people are curious.
They wanna learn that they hear some things. I'm gonna say something that they don't agree with or they don't like or maybe even offends them a little bit. They Pete as a chance to curious. That's a really hard thing to do. You know, we have some faculty who are incredible at doing that in the classroom. That's a skill that is it's a hard thing to do. And everyone has to work hard at that because it's partly cultural to be able to have that kind of discussion.
The other point you're making, which I also really resonates with me, is of that, you know, collisions, and that just hits home for me so much right now because having run an educational and tuition through COVID where we did it remotely and resume. That's the part that I missed, and I think everyone missed. Was just the bumping into people and the sparks that happen, the collisions that happen on a physical campus.
And those symptoms happen because you start arguing and disagree with them, but they sort of just happen because you just start talking and someone says something, boy, that's a great idea. And that's, you know, that's how companies get started. That's how great research projects Pete started. That's how people learn, and why can't wait to get back to that in the fall. I hear you.
Yeah. The serendipity of kind of hallway conversations or lunch tables or whether that's, you know, in companies or in campuses, can't wait for sure. Absolutely. I think by the way that it connects to what we Pete talking about with remote work. I think for workplaces, can you figure out if you're gonna have a more flexible workforce, more remote workforce, I think that's the ingredient Morgan of the ingredients that people have to figure you get that outcome from more virtual interaction.
And, you know, no doubt it's there there are probably ways to do it, but that's something that people really need to be attentive to. Okay. So we're nearing the end. Just a couple of quick fire questions. So what are 2 or 3 books in your shelf right now that you'd wish start up fans would read as soon as possible? So that's a great question. My reading is so strange and eclectic, but I'll give you a couple I've been reading a book by a faculty member who's just about to join the GSB.
His name is Michelle Gelfine. She's written a book called Rulemakers And Rule Breakers It's about cultural differences across organizations. It's a very interesting way of thinking about organizational culture. I'm reading another book that I don't know that it's Sarah League and I help you run your business, but it's called Invisible China by a Stanford faculty.
My name is Scott Rossell, and it's a fascinating book about some of the challenges that China is facing with, having a low skill workforce. And it's made me think really differently about China. So that's always interesting. The last book I'm reading, which has nothing to do with entrepreneurship at all, but it actually touches on some of the things we've been talking about is a biography of John Matered Keynes.
Who wrote a lot about both the role of government in times of crisis, the great depression, and about the relationship between economic policy and democracy. And that's much on the minds of many of us now. How are we going to have great, stable political institutions in this country? Okay. I'll check those out on our by reading it as you can tell. It's all over the place. I studied physics, but I'm a check economist at heart.
I didn't teach good economics back in the day in England, but I checked it out But I hope they taught you cans at least so that they're You're also celebrating 5 years as the dean. So congratulations. Are there any couple of key things you've learned during that time? Many things. You know, I think one thing I learn every day being a dean and it's true that all academic leaders is that, you know, people don't work for you at a university. You work for them.
We have a purimid structure of organization, but it's an inverted pyramid. You're at the bottom. And that's just a really important thing to keep in mind that you're there to serve other people ultimately and to help them achieve their aspirations. That's what universities and business schools are about. I've learned a lot in this job about communication.
I think the landscape for communication for organizational leaders has changed a lot even just over a short period of time, and that's been a tenuous learning for me. I would say most of all, I've been Stanford now for 25 years as student and a faculty member and changed my life as a student, and then I was fortunate to come back as a faculty member. But I came to the GSP from a different part of diversity. So now I've been there for 5 years.
And during that time, I've really learned to appreciate just how unique and extraordinary institution is you got to experience. It, of course, is a student. Brilliant to the faculty and the energy and passion and the drive to action of the students and how that comes together that makes us a great job that I've really enjoyed and look forward to the next years. And as you think about the few of colleges or educational institutions, what might look different in 10 years' time?
That's a fabulous question. I do think this period of the pandemic has been, by far, in my view, the period of the most innovation that has happened decades, just in terms of everyone rethinking the way they teach what's important, what matters, you know, what aspects of being together physically on a campus are really Morgan. And can't we replicate it? Otherwise, we talked about that, the serendipity What parts can be done really well online? What are different ways to engage people?
And I think as a result of that year of kind of experimentation, innovation forced, of course, not necessarily have asked for it. We're gonna have a period of a lot of transformation in higher education. We're gonna see much more opportunities for online education, for virtual types of education for ways of connecting with people more across their lifespans as opposed to just assembling them for short periods of time on a physical campus and those are gonna be great.
We're in much need of innovation in higher education. We're very slow moving industry, and this is gonna be a really exciting period is try to assimilate and deploy some of the things we've learned during the COVID period. James pressure to make diamonds, and I think we've had a lot of pressure over the last 14 months or a ago. And maybe just to finish on your first point about optimism, I think we all have a lot to be really optimistic for. So on that note, John, thank you joining us today.
It was a real pleasure to have you on, and thank you so much for your insights and the organization that you run. Keith, thank you so much. It's really a pleasure to get the chance to talk to you. Thanks again. At NFX, we believe creating something of true significance starts with seeing what others do not. Send this episode to any friends that may need these insights and frameworks, and feel free to rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for listening. NFX podcast.