On his way up the corporate ladder in the fifties and sixties, Bob Stobaugh, trained as a chemical engineer, decided to pursue his true vocation: teaching. This decision led to a prolific and distinguished thirty-year career at Harvard Business School. "As a manager in the oil and chemical industries, I was often called upon to explain complex business problems to my coworkers," Stobaugh remembers. "I found that I enjoyed the educational process."
An Arkansas native who began his education in a two-room schoolhouse, Stobaugh entered Louisiana State University at fifteen and earned his bachelor's degree in chemical engineering in 1947. He spent eighteen years working for Exxon, Caltex, and Monsanto in the United States, Venezuela, Bahrain, and England. While in Texas with Monsanto, he noticed that the top managers had technical degrees but little training in business administration and economics. Sensing an opportunity for advancement, he started attending night classes at the University of Houston. "This proved to be an important experience," states Stobaugh in an accent reflecting his Southern roots, "because I realized how much I had missed the academic world of discussion and ideas."
Encouraged by his professors, Stobaugh decided to leave business behind. Entering the Harvard DBA Program in 1965 at the age of 37, he earned his doctorate three years later and became a tenured professor in 1971. In addition to teaching in the MBA and Executive Education Programs and supervising over twenty doctoral theses, he chaired the School's Doctoral Programs for almost six years. "I am proud of the large number of our doctoral students who joined the faculty during that time," he remarks.
Postings on four continents with multinational corporations had given Stobaugh a practical foundation for his scholarly interests in a broad array of global business issues. In 1971, he led an HBS team who found that investment abroad by American companies benefited the U.S. economy by increasing exports and creating higher-paying jobs in this country. In one of his many appearances on Capitol Hill, Stobaugh shared his insights with a congressional committee. His testimony helped defeat bills aimed at restricting U.S. foreign investment. Later, he served as president of the Academy of International Business, then an organization of some two thousand scholars.
Stobaugh's other research and teaching activities have focused on technology, energy, and corporate governance. He has authored, coauthored, or coedited fifteen monographs and books, including Technology Crossing Borders and Innovation and Competition: The Global Management of Petrochemical Products, as well as over one hundred articles. He gained considerable renown as director of the HBS Energy Project from 1972 to 1983. "In the early 1970s, Dean Lawrence Fouraker had heard from HBS alumni in the energy industries about emerging energy problems," Stobaugh says. "Because of my work experience and my international business research, he asked me to lead the initiative."
The groundbreaking result, Energy Future: Report of the Energy Project at the Harvard Business School, which Stobaugh coedited, advocated energy conservation rather than synthetic fuels as a solution to the energy crisis. "We maintained that conservation could actually contribute to domesticeconomic growth—with less risk from the disturbances in the international oil markets," he says. Published during the 1979 oil shock, Energy Future made the bestseller lists of the New York Times and Time magazine—one of the first books by an HBS faculty member to achieve that stellar status—and it was later translated into French, German, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish.
The most significant response the book triggered, in Stobaugh's view, was a 1979 conference on energy conservation in Washington, D.C., sponsored by Harvard University and the Alliance to Save Energy. Under the leadership of Harvard President Derek Bok, Stobaugh, and several U.S. senators, participants from around the globe agreed that conservation was not a penalty but a business opportunity. Stobaugh subsequently delivered this message to President Carter at a White House conference.
With his wide-ranging expertise, Stobaugh also served on two presidential commissions and consulted to the Commerce, Energy, Justice, State, and Treasury Departments. "I approached each assignment like an educator," he says, "trying to sort out issues, explain them, and move the country forward."
During three decades, Stobaugh was a director of eleven companies in a variety of industries. This extensive experience inspired his most recent research: an examination of corporate governance that aims to improve the effectiveness of boards. He was first to establish a link between company performance and stock ownership by directors. Board members of the best-performing companies, he found, owned substantial amounts of stock in the firms they led, whereas those in the poorest- performing organizations owned only token amounts. Stobaugh chaired the influential 1995 Blue Ribbon Commission of the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD), whose recommendations dramatically increased stock ownership by corporate board members. "We generated a useful and influential guide to corporate governance that treated a directorship as a demanding position responsible for setting corporate strategy in support of long-term shareholder value."
Retired from the active faculty since 1996, Stobaugh continues to write, consult, and serve on NACD Blue Ribbon panels. He is also a trustee of the French Library and Cultural Center in Boston.
Stobaugh became a teacher because he enjoyed delving into difficult issues and finding workable solutions. He went on to share his knowledge with a host of HBS students as well as presidents, government officials, and corporations around the world. "I am grateful," he says, "that my decision to change careers many years ago led me to this extraordinary place."
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