• Recent Posts

  • Upcoming deadline for BASES social-e and e-challenge!
  • ETL, Microfinance, and Social E-Challenge Mixer TODAY
  • Social-E Mixer
  • E-challenge and Social E-challenge Kickoff Tomorrow!!!
  • Introducing: BASES Accelerator

• Upcoming Events

  

• Recent Comments

  • Jesse Dawson on ETL, Microfinance, and Social E-Challenge Mixer TODAY
  • 8 Mistakes Big Brands Make Fighting a Social Media War « nsamembernews on What They Don’t Teach You at Stanford’s GSB About Getting Revenge
  • Wage a Social Media War To Protect Your Entrepreneur Rights « IEN :: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on What They Don’t Teach You at Stanford’s GSB About Getting Revenge
  • 5 Mistakes Big Brands Make Fighting a Social Media War on What They Don’t Teach You at Stanford’s GSB About Getting Revenge
  • 8 Mistakes Big Brands Make Fighting a Social Media War : WhatTheyDontTeachYouAtStanfordBusinessSchool on What They Don’t Teach You at Stanford Business School About Public Speaking

You’re invited to the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar!

This week’s ETL speaker, Spencer Ante, has been a distinguished business journalist for over a decade.  He currently serves as editor of the Computers Department for Businessweek, a position he has held since February 2000.  Prior to that, he worked as a staff reporter for TheStreet.com and Wired News. Recently he has been nationally recognized with for his outstanding work in his field.  For a 2006 investigative story about the world’s most dangerous cybercriminals, called “Meet the Hackers”, he was the recipient of a 2007 Deadline Club Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.  A year earlier, he won a 2006 award from the American Society of Business Publication Editors for a story called “A Hole in Bush’s Exit Strategy” about the problematic American training of Iraqi security forces.  His newest book, Creative Capital: Georges Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital, was published just this past April by the Harvard Business School press.  We hope that you will be able to join us on Wednesday, February 4th, at 4:30 PM in Skilling Auditorium to hear Spencer speak about the lessons he’s learned about entrepreneurship and business journalism along the way!

This past Wednesday, January 28th, Teresa Briggs spoke before a Skilling Auditorium about her 25 plus years of experience working at Deloitte and Company.  As the third installment in ETL’s Winter Quarter lecture series, Teresa’s talk proved to be quite different than those of the first two guests, Hugh Martin and the Cooliris founding team.  Unlike the majority of ETL speakers, Teresa is not an entrepreneur, per se.  She has worked at Deloitte and Company – a huge company with 165,000 employees in 140 countries – for virtually all of her career, in various roles, locations and capacities.  Her presentation, fittingly, focused on how Deloitte has encouraged her (and thousands of other employees) to bring the ingenuity of the entrepreneurial spirit into a large company environment.  Despite the size of the firm and the resources that Deloitte can tap into around the globe, much of Deloitte’s business strategy, Briggs emphasized, revolves around the effort of trying to “make big small” – to listen to creative and new ideas from individual workers and implement those ideas in offices worldwide.
The ensuing part of the presentation was structured around the multiple ways that Deloitte tries to make the big into the small, in every service that it provides.  To do this, of course, Deloitte needs new ideas – which is why they opened a research division called “Center for Edge Innovation.”  The Center is run by 3 directors, John Steely Brown, Lang Davison and John Hagel, who are all written up in The Harvard Business Review and Businessweek regularly.  Virtually any consultant at Deloitte can go and take a 6-12 month hiatus from their normal company role to go work side by side with the three directors in the Research Center.  Deloitte’s philosophy is that, in order to be shaping the market instead of being shaped by the market, a company must have their thinking at the edge, away from the center of business activity.  With researchers constantly thinking of new ways to innovate corporate strategy, and then taking them back to their offices when they finish their hiatuses, Deloitte is able to predict and dictate market changes.  Many writes-ups from “the Edge Center” can be found online.
Teresa dedicated almost the entire second half of her presentation to talking about Deloitte’s innovation in the non-profit sector.  The driving credo behind Deloitte’s non-profit mission is their belief that “doing well allows you to do good.”  With this in mind, Deloitte workers take all their skill sets and services that afford them success in the for-profit sector and simply offer them to other clients, free of charge.  They have found that non-profit organizations have very similar problems to those that for-profit companies face; the only difference is that non-profit companies often lack workers with the skills to fix them, or the money to hire consultants to do it for them.   This is where Deloitte comes in.  Here in the Bay Area, Deloitte is involved with many local organizations.  Teresa focused mainly on their work with RAFT, a non-profit working on developing resources for schoolteachers.  Many of Deloitte’s top consultants have chosen to dedicate significant portions of their work schedules to helping RAFT in their mission of making classroom learning more interactive and dynamic for young students.  One day last year, 45 Deloitte consultants spent the entire day at RAFT, helping them design new educational implements for math and science projects out of classroom materials that RAFT already had on-site.  To help RAFT continue to grow, Deloitte also funds the organization and offers free consulting services to the board members.  Not surprisingly, Teresa said that the key to successful non-profit consulting is getting the Board Members to think about the right issues and ask the right questions, so that, in the future, they will be able to solve more of their own problems independently.
The presentation ended with a 15-20 minute Q&A session, in which other Deloitte workers who were present had the opportunity to talk about the company and the general office culture at Deloitte.  They gave the impression that Deloitte has a collegiate, intellectual, and relaxed culture, with an extremely flexible career customization program.  One easily got the impression of how there would be room for an entrepreneurial spirit in such a dynamic corporate setting.

You’re invited to the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar!

RSVP here & checkout etl.stanford.edu

This Wednesday we will host our third Winter Quarter Speaker, Teresa Briggs.   Teresa currently serves as a Managing Partner at Deloitte’s Silicon Valley Office.  Over the past two years, she has been responsible for doubling the firm’s staff in Silicon Valley.  Prior to her role as Managing Partner, Briggs worked as a Consultant in Deloitte’s San Francisco Office for 24 years.  Later, she was in Deloitte’s New York Office for a time, working to redesign the company’s corporate strategy at a national level.  On top of all her accomplishments at Deloitte, Teresa has served on the Management Board of Advisors at her alma mater, the University of Arizona, and spent eight years serving on the Board of the Boys and Girls Club of San Francisco.

We hope you can join us at Skilling Auditorium, this Wednesday (1/28) at 4:30 PM

Don’t forget about the scheduled dinner with Teresa that will follow her presentation!  Enrolled Stanford Students are encouraged to apply at http://etl.stanford.edu/dinners/form.shtml.

• Subscribe

  join our mailing list

  * indicates required

  Email Address *

  Close

  
  Twitter

• BASES Community

  Join the BASES groups on LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouNoodle!
  
  
  

• Job Board