10 Maxims for Success from Stanford

Lessons from my time at Stanford Business School

I had the great honor of going to Stanford Business School 20 years ago. While most of what I’ve learned as a marketer and leader has come from working in the field and building businesses over the last 30 years, there are 10 key takeaways from business school that have stuck with me all these years. Looking back, I see how much these things have impacted the way I conceptualize and approach my work.

1. Spreadsheet mastery is key. The summer before first term even started, anyone who wasn’t coming from a finance or some other spreadsheet-heavy industry had to do an excel bootcamp where they turn you into a total ace at using a spreadsheet. Looking back now, this was a real gift. Spreadsheets let you model things, forecast outcomes, and score and weigh different factors. Which feeds directly into lesson 2 …

2. Business is math. There’s a lot of math and analytical modeling at Stanford Business School. They’re constantly trying to get you to drill things down to the numbers so you can understand what a company is worth when you’re raising money and make sure the unit economics will be profitable. You’re using math to evaluate opportunities and reduce them to equations that can be compared on an apple-to-apple basis. And it’s not just for the finance side of things. It’s for the marketing side, too. There’s definitely art and soul in marketing, but one of the first things our marketing professor wrote on the white board the first day of class was: marketing is math.

3. Think objectively. It’s crucial to train yourself to think objectively — about decisions, problems, and opportunities. Without emotion and without bias. Spreadsheets help you do that because numbers and math don’t have emotion or biases. They tell you a story about an opportunity as an unbiased set of facts. Boiling decisions down to a set of numbers helps you see a problem soberly and objectively, and it helps you make a better decision based on potential outcomes.

4. Quantify risk and time. This means taking risk seriously when you are making a decision. It means knowing the value of your own time. Based on an equation my Corporate Finance professor put up on the whiteboard, I’ve come up with the following tool I use all the time for choosing between different options in marketing at Chief Detective. I evaluate each option and score them based on these questions:

   What is the potential financial impact of this decision?

   What is the % chance or the probability that the financial outcome will actually happen?

   How long will it take? How much time needs to be invested to make that outcome happen?

   Let’s say you’re thinking about taking a job at a startup. You might think, “Okay, my equity could be worth $5m.” But you’ve got to factor in the risk, the fact that most startups don’t work. Let’s say there’s a .01% chance that the startup goes to the moon and exits. Well, .01% x $5m is unfortunately only $500. Not to mention the two years it will likely take you to figure out if the startup is going to pan out. So if you’re 35 years old and trying to support a family, the startup job may not be a great decision. But now you know because you’ve pulled your excitement over the potential $5m out of the equation and forced yourself to factor in risk and time to look at the opportunity more soberly.

   

5. More brains are better than one. A very important part of effective leadership is seeking out other perspectives. Ego was a huge problem for me when I was younger, so this was a very important one for me to learn. Back then, my instinctive leadership style was what is called “Autocratic” leadership, which, as you might guess, is very ego driven and very limited. At Stanford, you’re forced to do a ton of group work. It taught me that you’ll get better outcomes when you ask other people what they think, and invite others to contribute to the thought process. Which ties in to lesson 6 …

6. Attack your leadership style. You’ve got to be deliberate and self-aware when it comes to developing your leadership style. You have to ask yourself, What kind of leader do I want to be?

   
   I learned this the hard way in my early 30s. At some point, if you have an autocratic leadership style and you’re running a meeting or a business like a dictator, you’re going to fall flat on your face and learn the humiliating lesson that you’re not as smart as you think. You’ll come to realize your overly dominant, ego-driven leadership style is actually an immature, self-indulgent, and unsophisticated way of leading people, and in the long term, very ineffective. Consensus driven leadership is so much better on every level.

   
   So, study and understand the different types of leadership styles out there, and through deliberate practice, develop yourself into a strong, sophisticated, effective leader.

7. Embrace flexible thinking. We all operate with inherent psychological and emotional biases and behaviors that will prevent us from making good decisions. Those biases can make us dig in our heels and stick to an opinion or an idea even when the facts change.

   
   One time at Stanford they split our class into two groups and gave us each a case study to read. They told us to study the case and decide what to do based on the data. What they didn’t tell us was that the data Group A was given was incorrect and Group B’s was correct. After the professor revealed this, everyone in Group A was given the chance to change their mind, walk over to the other side of the room, and side with Group B on the right course of action, now that they had the correct data.

   
   And guess what? Only three people stood up and walked to the other side of the room. The rest of Group A stubbornly stuck to their original decision and refused to change their mind even when presented with factual reasons for why their original thinking was wrong.

   
   You’ve got to be willing to be open and flexible when facts and circumstances change. This is something I try hard to model at my company, Chief Detective, to show my staff that I’m willing to be wrong.

8. Soft skills are everything. The single most popular elective of all time at Stanford Business School is a class called Interpersonal Dynamics, better known as “Touchy Feely.” In this class you work with a small group on exercises that help you understand how you’re perceived by others, how you communicate and make other people feel, and how you give and receive feedback. Regrettably, I didn’t take this class myself, but they squeeze a lot of this into other classes across the curriculum, and Stanford has a very feedback-oriented culture. Along the way, I received multiple points of negative but constructive feedback about my behavior as a part of group projects, respectfully worded from very smart and talented people. All very helpful.

   
   I tell my team at Chief Detective all the time that people ultimately don’t care what we do, they care how we make them feel. Soft skills are everything. It’s something I constantly work on and try to be better at.

9. Business is a team sport. You need to make time to grow and cultivate and nurture your network. Business is so much easier and so much more fun when you have a network to tap into to help develop opportunities, recruit talent, and get perspective on problems or markets that are new to you. It’s a core pillar of your time and will pay dividends. Go out of your way to develop and maintain a strong network of colleagues.

10. Jump. And keep jumping. Value your own ideas and your own possibilities. If you have an idea, do it. Don’t let inhibition stop you from doing the next great thing. Everyone has the potential to change the world.

    
    That’s the Stanford ethos. It’s an ethos of courage, optimism, boldness, open-mindedness, and persistence. It’s so positive and inspiring, and almost wholesome in its orientation to possibility and the power of a single person with an idea. Ideas are critiqued but never criticized. They’re challenged, but never dismissed. It’s a culture of entrepreneurial spark totally devoid of cynicism, because cynicism has no place in innovation.

    
    And it is a place where very brilliant people walk around in flip-flops. Because success doesn’t have a uniform. It isn’t what someone looks like. It’s who they are.

So that’s it, 10 lessons for success and entrepreneurialism from my time in business school. America’s wizardry is our economic output and constant entrepreneurialism, from small mom and pop businesses all the way up to Apple and Google. And I like to think of Stanford Business School as our country’s Hogwarts. I hope these lessons from my time there inspire and help you bring your wizardry out into the world.

And as always, good luck!
Emily