Reminiscences from the Class of 1985

Dominic Houlder

As a business school professor these days, I find it embarrassing that I remember so very little of our classes. I recall marvelling at Dave Larrimore’s luggable Osborne computer on our first day. I can still evoke the feelings of dread at the impending cold call in our early case discussions (I had written out my responses to possible questions on tiny pieces of paper arranged in front of me) and the rising panic at 2:00 a.m. when trying to capitalize the leases of the Sea-Land shipping company for Professor Horngren’s class.

The memories are of people and settings. There was an ill-starred game of Monopoly in which Lorna Parker and I had rewritten the rules so that nobody could go bankrupt, but in some kind of board game regime of administration would continue to circle round and round, passing Go indefinitely to hand over the $200 each time to creditors. I can taste the meals we had in our study groups, meeting Daisuke Matsunaga and Kyoo-Yun Kim for spicy moo-shu pork across the road on El Camino Real. An old friend, visiting from the UK and innocent of the world of business schools, marvelled at the heated debate between BJ Gluckstern and me over the disposable diapers case and reminds me of it to this day.

Of all the settings, our home in the second year at the top of Page Mill Road – Stoney Ridge Ranch – is with me so strongly that as I write I can smell the wild bay trees and feel the warmth radiating off the earth in our hidden valley through which the San Andreas fault line twisted its way. This is where Julio Batista, Ralf Harteneck, and his college friend Bruce lived in one of the most beautiful places I have had the good fortune to know, in an experience which set a benchmark for happiness for the decades to follow. This was a complex of buildings owned by Bob McKim, a Stanford ME Professor I saw merely as a landlord, being completely ignorant then of his ground-breaking work in design thinking and his role as mentor to his student David Kelley who went on to found IDEO. We were in the main house; a stained-glass artist lived in the cottage by the pool; and in the stables, a bunch of Stanford engineering PhD students hung out with a carefully tended marijuana plantation. In the grounds, which seemed endless leading down and then up Black Mountain, was the skeleton of a wooden meditation hall that had been put in place by some previous occupants who allegedly were Tibetan monks.

Up there we were often above the clouds, through which I’d drive on the daily trip to campus. At night the stars were as bright as I have ever known them. There were so many evenings when we were invaded by friends who would sometimes arrive as rescuers – like Paul Dawson rising to the challenge of barbecuing forty forgotten chicken servings at thirty minutes notice. This was a time of extraordinary well-being, surrounded by great peers and above all discovering a freedom that I had never had before, breaking out of my British shell. That time at Stanford was an inspiration which still sustains me, and I am so grateful to all of you for that.

One class that I do recall which planted subversive seeds, sprouting in so many ways over the years to come, was Professor Mike Ray’s course on Creativity in Business. He sent us off to listen to water for an hour and write down what we learned; one assignment was to spend a week making a particular effort to pay attention; we learned to meditate; we met a witch. He taught me to treasure life, and in that final term even the colors seemed more brilliant. This was nothing that I had signed up for, but Professor Ray set me off on a parallel journey as I followed the well-trodden path after Stanford into BCG and then the corporate world, as I told him when we last met. That parallel track took over as I left corporate life to live briefly as a Buddhist monk, become a gay activist, a business school professor, non-profit leader and crofter on the Isle of Skye. I turned round and thankfully sold our family business in Argentina, helped a close friend die, found love and now live with Lukas, my partner of nearly twenty years. I write from our home on the Isle of Skye, in one of the most remote parts of Scotland and so look forward to re-engaging with you as the next chapter in our lives starts to be written.