Rishi who? Sunak says Stanford business school changed his life, but few remember him
Rishi Sunak has said going to California’s Stanford business school changed his life. Stanford “teaches you to think bigger”, he told a venture capital podcast last year. In place of a “more incremental mindset”, studying at the heart of Silicon Valley encouraged him to embrace “a slightly bigger, more dynamic approach to change”, said the former UK chancellor.
While Stanford clearly made its mark on him, it’s less clear whether Sunak made much of a mark at Stanford, one of the highest-ranked business schools in the world. After receiving a Fulbright scholarship to study in the US, he graduated from its two-year MBA programme in 2006.
Stanford is a busy place, and a dozen professors and lecturers from that time told the Guardian they had no memory of teaching the man vying to become the UK’s next prime minister.
These included teachers on some of the school’s signature courses: Irv Grousbeck, an expert on entrepreneurship; Andy Rachleff, who holds classes on innovation; Charles O’Reilly, who runs courses on leadership; and Carole Robin, one of the teachers of interpersonal dynamics, a popular elective students refer to as “touchy-feely”.
When he delivered a prestigious business school lecture in London last year, Sunak, now 42 and also a University of Oxford alumnus, cited one of his “inspiring” Stanford professors, the Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Romer, and described the impact of Romer’s lecture on innovation. “I have no recollection of ever interacting with him,” Romer told the Guardian.
Jeffrey Pfeffer, who teaches a renowned course called The Paths to Power, posted on LinkedIn that Sunak had been among his students and that he hoped they learn lessons about power to “rise to positions where they can have the
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