14 DAY TRIAL // Steve Ballmer has recently purchased his very own NBA team and decided to retire from Microsoft’s board, but it appears that the company’s former CEO has pretty big plans for the next 12 months.
A report by Business Insider reveals that Steve Ballmer will soon become the teacher of an MBA class at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, while also holding a class at USC’s Marshall School of Business in the spring.
Helen Chang, assistant director of communications at Stanford’s Business School, has confirmed that Ballmer is going to hold a class this fall with help from faculty member Susan Athey. Ballmer’s strategic management course will be called “STRAMGT588: Leading organizations,” she has confirmed, while also adding that negotiations with the former Microsoft CEO began last spring.
What’s interesting is that Ballmer had several universities to choose from, but the most important factor was his relationship with Stanford in general and Athey in particular, as he hired her as an economics consultant in 2007.
Athey in her turn has also confirmed the class that she’ll be holding with Ballmer, pointing out that his experience as a CEO will help provide students with real-world examples.
"It's a course Steve and I are designing together. It's a new course, original content. We're looking at how you create value in organizations from a variety of different perspectives — different managerial functions and providing a theoretical conceptual framework and filling that in with real world examples and experiences. It's a course that looks at lots of different perspectives on a CEO's role on creating value in an organization,” she says.
Ballmer, who stepped down as Microsoft’s CEO in February this year, decided to retire as board member earlier this week, citing a busy schedule for the next 12 months as the main reason behind this decision.
He however confirmed that he would remain the largest individual shareholder of the company for many years from now, but that the limited time he had due to university classes and NBA matches didn’t allow him to be very focused on Microsoft’s business.
“I had not spent any time really contemplating my post-Microsoft life until my last day with the company. In the six months since leaving, I have become very busy. I see a combination of the Clippers, civic contribution, teaching and study taking a lot of time,” Ballmer explained.
Ballmer however expressed his support for Satya Nadella’s mobile-first, cloud-first approach, pointing out that the existing leadership team at the company has what it takes to continue the growth in all markets, including mobile and cloud services.