April 15, 2006: SFO to Sardinia
I am off on a three-week journey that attests to the globalization of business education. We are well aware that the products we may buy in Wal-Mart come from around the world, but many are less aware of the impact that globalization has had on higher education.
Our students, our faculty, our research topics and our collaborators can and do come from nearly anywhere. A group of UC Davis Graduate School of Management students just returned from a study tour of Argentina and Brazil. Our student services staff routinely recruits MBA students in Latin America and in China and India, and this month I am contributing to the global exchange of ideas and opportunities in management education.
My first stop is Sardinia where I will teach in the Organization Science masters program at AILUN, an acronym for an institute supported by the local chamber of commerce and the government. This is actually a common way to fund business education in Italy.
I've taught in this program before and have found it enormously rewarding. Sardinia is an island province, like Sicily, off the coast of Italy. The southern part of Sardinia is developed and has some industry, and the far northern coast is a Mecca for wealthy Europeans. The yacht harbors actually get traffic jams in the summer. I teach in Nuoro, an inland town that is tucked into a hillside in the mountainous north. The region feels a bit as though the world has passed it by. The local industries are rooted in agriculture - small scale farming, vineyards of an acre or two, olives, and small herds of sheep and goats. Indeed, the program I am teaching in is designed to develop management skills among the next generation in aspiration of greater economic development in Sardinia. The obvious - to me anyway - path to development is increased tourism in the interior. Beach tourism in the north is controlled by major international hotel chains and the benefits do not trickle down very far to the local populace. I see real opportunity for wine tourism, trekking (there are the Barbagian mountains, the Supramonte) bicycle tours, cooking schools (the local cuisine is rustic and delicious) but there is little confidence among young Sardinians to develop these businesses.
This is a traditional society and the entrepreneurship I see in many of our UC Davis MBA students cannot be taken for granted here. Perhaps that is my primary role - to encourage them to see what is around them as valuable economically, and to realize that they can be part of an ownership and managerial class.
I am writing this from the Red Carpet Club in Charles DeGaulle Airport in Paris. I have already had something of an adventure getting this far. My flight from SFO was to take me from California to Washington D.C to Paris en-route to Sardinia, but we had an aborted takeoff when an engine failed. I was sent via a new plane to Chicago but my bag is in Frankfurt.
Onward . . .
Our students, our faculty, our research topics and our collaborators can and do come from nearly anywhere. A group of UC Davis Graduate School of Management students just returned from a study tour of Argentina and Brazil. Our student services staff routinely recruits MBA students in Latin America and in China and India, and this month I am contributing to the global exchange of ideas and opportunities in management education.
My first stop is Sardinia where I will teach in the Organization Science masters program at AILUN, an acronym for an institute supported by the local chamber of commerce and the government. This is actually a common way to fund business education in Italy.
I've taught in this program before and have found it enormously rewarding. Sardinia is an island province, like Sicily, off the coast of Italy. The southern part of Sardinia is developed and has some industry, and the far northern coast is a Mecca for wealthy Europeans. The yacht harbors actually get traffic jams in the summer. I teach in Nuoro, an inland town that is tucked into a hillside in the mountainous north. The region feels a bit as though the world has passed it by. The local industries are rooted in agriculture - small scale farming, vineyards of an acre or two, olives, and small herds of sheep and goats. Indeed, the program I am teaching in is designed to develop management skills among the next generation in aspiration of greater economic development in Sardinia. The obvious - to me anyway - path to development is increased tourism in the interior. Beach tourism in the north is controlled by major international hotel chains and the benefits do not trickle down very far to the local populace. I see real opportunity for wine tourism, trekking (there are the Barbagian mountains, the Supramonte) bicycle tours, cooking schools (the local cuisine is rustic and delicious) but there is little confidence among young Sardinians to develop these businesses.
This is a traditional society and the entrepreneurship I see in many of our UC Davis MBA students cannot be taken for granted here. Perhaps that is my primary role - to encourage them to see what is around them as valuable economically, and to realize that they can be part of an ownership and managerial class.
I am writing this from the Red Carpet Club in Charles DeGaulle Airport in Paris. I have already had something of an adventure getting this far. My flight from SFO was to take me from California to Washington D.C to Paris en-route to Sardinia, but we had an aborted takeoff when an engine failed. I was sent via a new plane to Chicago but my bag is in Frankfurt.
Onward . . .
posted by UC Davis at 5:39 PM
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