Jim Patell
Herbert Hoover Professor of Public and Private Management, Stanford Graduate School of Business
Jim Patell is a Business School Professor with an Engineer’s training. He and his three brothers worked in their father’s tool and die shop as teenagers, and then Jim went to MIT, where he earned a BS in Naval Architecture and an MS from MIT’s Business School. He followed that with a Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon, and then joined the faculty of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. There he has taught several different core courses (Operations, Accounting, and Computer Modeling), as well as electives on Process Design, Quality, and several Design Project courses taught jointly with Engineering School faculty. He also has served as the GSB’s Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, as Director of the MBA program, and as one of the Directors of the Product Realization Network at Stanford.
Together with Prof. David Beach, Jim is teaching the d-School’s course on Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability, in which teams of Engineering and Business students design products and implementation plans for use in developing countries. This course fits well with Jim’s work with the Public Management Program in the GSB, and with his garage workshop. His GSB office is a semi-organized melange of discrete-event simulation software, socket wrenches, and ultra-low-cost drip irrigation systems, surrounded by photos of his daughters and of Alaskan fishing trips with his son.
