Cornell Business

Issue date: 11/5/00 Section: Johnson News

By now, pretty much everyone at the Johnson School has heard that we’ll be hosting the Graduate Business Conference next spring. But, not everyone knows what the Graduate Business Conference actually is. The GBC will be the largest, and most important, wholly student organized event that will take place at the Johnson School in the next few years. From the proposal stage through the execution, the GBC has been and will be run entirely by student leaders (albeit with a large amount of support from both the administration and faculty). This article will describe how the Graduate Business Conference came to be, what next spring’s GBC will entail, who the current leaders are for the conference, and how you can become more involved.

The GBC first started eighteen years ago when the student president at the Columbia Business School organized a conference for student leaders from various top business schools to share “best practices” with each other. The conference was a major success, and was repeated the following few years. Over time, the conference evolved into what it is today. Each year, a different school hosts the GBC. Delegates are invited from the country’s top 30 business schools (as ranked in Business Week) plus a handful of other US business schools and about fifteen top international business schools. The conference is essentially a two-day event. Students arrive on Thursday afternoon/evening and may have a social event or lecture to attend. On Friday, students attend lectures and panel sessions with leaders from the business world. Saturday, students get together in panels to compare best practices at their own schools, and students leave late Sunday morning. Next spring, the Graduate Business Conference will be held at the Johnson School from March 29 through April 1.

Each year’s GBC has a theme that should be both an important issue in the current business environment and a strength of the school. For example, the 2000 GBC was held at UCLA and entitled “The Net Effect.” The theme for this year’s GBC is “Leading on the Edge.” We’ll examine the importance of leadership in the new, fast-paced, information-driven economy. At the same time, the GBC will only be one of three components (student-focused, business leader-focused, and faculty-focused) of a Johnson School leadership week that will feature the Center for Leadership in Dynamic Organizations and the Johnson School as a whole. Thus, the GBC will be one part of the opening moves to focus our attention on the Johnson School’s competence in finding, developing, and guiding leaders.

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