Our Focus
CASI focuses on promoting effective governance mechanisms to ensure that corporations and other institutions serve society. We support teaching, research, events, and other engagements that explore, broaden and deepen the discussion of the complex interactions between corporations, governments, civic society, and the media.
Governance
A holistic understanding of the challenge of effective governance is essential for advancing positive change.
Who makes decisions?
What information and constraints do they/should they have?
What are, or should be, their motivations?
Related Readings
CASI carries the legacy of former GSB dean Arjay Miller. Read more about civic-minded leadership as articulated by Arjay Miller and more recently by CASI’s inaugural faculty director, Anat Admati.
How Business Schools Can Help Restore Trust in Capitalism
Read Anat Admati’s article in the Harvard Business Review on how business education can use a civic-minded leadership model to help think beyond the private sector and recognize the role of governments in making a capitalistic system work.
Other People’s Money
Read Anat Admati’s article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review on how better education about the role of effective governance can help to ensure that markets and institutions serve society.
Our History
Arjay Miller, dean of Stanford Graduate School of Business from 1969 to 1979, created the school’s Public Management Program. As a result of his experiences as an automotive executive, Arjay wanted to educate business on the concerns of government and society, and government on the matters of business. His goal was to prepare leaders to be able to anticipate and deal with social challenges in ways that promote interaction between the public and private sectors for the benefit of society. Arjay believed that business schools should focus not only on teaching private-sector leaders how to increase profits, but also educate professionals who could move fluidly between industry and government — who could read a balance sheet as well as grasp societal issues such as education, poverty, and public safety.
After her experience witnessing firsthand the false and misleading claims prevailing over the public interest in the debate on financial regulations following the financial crisis of 2008, founding faculty director Anat Admati was inspired to review Stanford GSB's role in educating professionals to better citizens of the world and led to the creation of CASI.
The university has two advantages in this respect: first, it has the interdisciplinary talent and intellect to deal with complex problems and, second, university people can be more objective than either business or government people, who are direct parties of interest in most problems.
“Let me urge that academic people, whatever their field of learning, assume a larger role in helping to resolve the critical social problems our nation faces.”
In a 1968 speech to the American Finance and American Economic Associations,former GSB Dean Arjay Miller urged members of academia to use their talent, intellect, and objectivity more effectively to help address the problems of the “outside world.”