People, Culture, and Performance: Strategies from Silicon Valley

Talented people are your company’s most valuable asset and, bottom line, your key to success. Silicon Valley companies have proven this again and again. People, Culture, and Performance: Strategies from Silicon Valley helps you rethink, reinvent, and retool your approach to talent management, using a startup mindset and models for scaling up performance.

There’s no better place to learn about innovative talent management than on the Stanford Graduate School of Business campus, in the heart of Silicon Valley. Apply design thinking principles and processes to re-imagine how jobs and organizations can be structured. Learn how to create an ownership culture that drives top performance and innovation. Explore how diversity can be leveraged as a competitive advantage. And discover how data and people analytics can impact everything from hiring to incentives.

This one-week people-centric program brings world-class Stanford GSB faculty together with Silicon Valley leaders, founders, and funders. You’ll also collaborate with other senior executives like you who are inspired to improve their company’s talent strategy, culture, and performance.

Immerse yourself in all aspects of talent — from hiring, growth, and performance to design thinking, data analytics, and diversity.

People, Culture, and Performance is academically packed with experiential learning, design thinking, cutting-edge research, guest speakers, and panels. Stanford GSB professors also collaborate with Stanford’s Clayman Institute on diversity, and with Silicon Valley founders and funders on best (and worst) practices. At the end of each day, the capture-your-learnings sessions will help you develop a personal action plan to implement what you’ve learned.

The curriculum focuses on five key themes over the course of five days, all with the goal of giving you informed perspectives and a broad set of tools to implement change:

Program Highlights

Below are just a few of the sessions you’ll attend as part of the program.

Companies compete in markets for customers … and talent. In both cases, they have a brand. Unfortunately, the connection between the customer brand and the talent brand is missing at many organizations. Using a real-world business case as a springboard, you’ll evaluate whether or not the company organized its talent to execute on a customer value proposition.

Stanford is one of the principal educational institutions driving the paradigm shift in the design field today. This session offers the chance to learn design thinking: a human-centered, prototype-driven process for innovation that can be applied to products, services, and business and organizational design. Participants will have a hands-on experience with the design thinking process and some practical discussion of its application to talent management.

Leaders are in a race to build organizations that are not only bigger but better. A problem, however, is how does one restore the soul of a startup in large companies. We draw on award-winning research and Silicon Valley case studies to present practical tools to avoid scaling traps, and to create domino chains of excellence in organizations as they strive to sustain scale.

Many organizations — maybe most — recognize the importance of culture, know that people matter for success, and see the crucial link between employees and customers in the service-profit value chain. But very few somehow manage to translate that knowledge into action. In this session participants will consider some of the barriers to turning knowledge into action and how to overcome them.

The Valley is data driven, and the discipline of data based decisions extends to people operations. We provide tools from research and from leading exemplars to help you think through the people analytics relevant to your firm.