Professor Steve Ballmer Will Teach At Two Universities This Year

redletterdave (2493036) writes "When Steve Ballmer announced he was stepping down from Microsoft's board of directors, he cited a fall schedule that would "be hectic between teaching a new class and the start of the NBA season." It turns out Ballmer will teach an MBA class at Stanford's Graduate School of Business in the fall, and a class at USC's Marshall School of Business in the spring. Helen Chang, assistant director of communications at Stanford's Business School, told Business Insider that Ballmer will be working with faculty member Susan Athey for a strategic management course called "TRAMGT588: Leading organizations." As for the spring semester, Ballmer will head to Los Angeles — closer to where his Clippers will be playing — and teach a course at University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business. We reached out to the Marshall School, which declined to offer more details about Ballmer's class.

Comments

I'd love to be in his class

[0xdeaddead]

and know what not to do. If anything Steve is the textbook example on how an MBA brought zero growth to Microsoft, and destroyed not only two biggest cash cows in history, Windows & Office, but doomed the company to failure by de-incentiving through MBA theory of the week games like bands, to constantly backdooring H1B1'ing the workforce.

Gates made Microsoft, but Balmer destroyed it.

Re:I'd love to be in his class

[Anonymous Coward]

Gates made Microsoft, but Balmer destroyed it.

By what metric?

http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/msft/financials
$62 Billion in revenue in 2010 and 87 Billion when he retired.

Compare these to win Ballmer first took over

"REDMOND, Wash., July 18, 2000 — Microsoft Corp. today announced revenue of $22.96 billion for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2000, a 16 percent increase over the $19.75 billion reported last year. Net income totaled $9.42 billion."

So under his 14 year reign, revenue damn near quadrupled. It would appear that the only place he failed is in your mind.

Re:I'd love to be in his class

[rmdingler]

Much like the coach in his new venture into the NBA,

the CEO is often given too much of the blame when things go poorly,

and too much of the credit when things go well.

Re:I'd love to be in his class

[lord_mike]

Ballmer defenders like to point out the stock value and revenue numbers, which is valid, however Ballmer's reign ended Microsoft's dominance in mindshare and allowed their monopoly to essentially break up. Their revenue gains were made at a great cost to the company's prestige and future dominance and are likely to be short lived. There is only one product now that is making money and that is Office/Exchange and their cloud version of that. The desktop Windows market is shrinking rapidly, Surface is a financial failure, Windows Phone is a laughingstock, Silverlight a joke, and Xbox One is circling the drain. Where is the future? No one cares what Microsoft wants to do in the marketplace. They are ignored. Ballmer made them a one trick pony--a revenue generating one trick pony, but one that is extremely vulnerable to being completely toppled by a better, more respected competitor.

Re:I'd love to be in his class

[michelcolman]

Sure confirms the old saying: Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.

"...will teach an MBA class..."

[Cornwallis]

Guaranteeing yet another generation of assholes will be coming down the pike.

Those who can't...

[MachineShedFred]

It's been said many times - Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.