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Current-Affairs | - "Turquía es parte de Europa"

Santiago Iñiguez, Decano del Instituto de Empresa Business School.

Mañana, 3 de octubre, y después de 40 años de negociaciones, se espera que se inicien las conversaciones formales para negociar la integración de Turquía como futuro miembro de la Unión Europea (UE). La oposición manifestada recientemente por varios miembros, explícitamente Austria, ha generado una crisis en el proceso. Esta semana, el Parlamento Europeo ha solicitado extemporáneamente a Turquía que asuman su participación en el genocidio de miles de armenios, hace 90 años, y que reconozcan como estado a Chipre, uno de los miembros más jóvenes de la UE. Para lograr una solución de última hora, los ministros de asuntos exteriores europeos se reúnen en Luxemburgo al tiempo de escribir estas líneas, intentando alcanzar un acuerdo plausible para todas las partes. Nadie puede razonablemente negar que Turquía ha cumplido todas las condiciones impuestas por Bruselas al comienzo de este proceso. Y lo correcto y beneficioso para Europa es continuar como estaba previsto.

Turquía es uno de los países signatarios del Acuerdo de Bolonia. La calidad de su sistema de educación superior ha mejorado significativamente en la última década, y actualmente comprende 53 universidades públicas y 19 privadas. El país tiene todavía pocas escuelas de negocios pero algunas de ellas han alcanzado reconocimiento internacional y atraen cada vez más estudiantes extranjeros. La educación on-line también ha crecido de forma importante en años recientes. Ciertamente, la progresiva internacionalización de las universidades turcas está contribuyendo a modernizar el país y, dada su localización geopolítica clave, puede convertirse en polo de atracción para muchos países del Este de Europa y del Medio Este.

El Primer Ministro Turco ha advertido a los miembros de la UE que se enfrentan al test ácido de probar si Europa es una "potencia global o un club cristiano".

Las palabras son desafortunadas y pueden azuzar inoportunamente el debate acerca de la inclusión de Turquía en Europa. Pero espero que se interpreten como unas declaraciones espontáneas al comienzo de unas difíciles negociaciones.

Current-Affairs | - "Update on Katrina relief efforts"

Paul Danos, Dean Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

Earlier this month I wrote about Hurricane Katrina and the responsibility we share as leaders in the business community to teach and encourage corporate and personal social responsibility. I mentioned that our first-year students, in one of their first acts as a class, rallied together to raise funds for victims of Katrina and issued a challenge to the second-year students to match their goal of $2,500 or more. Today, just three weeks after my post, I am proud to share with you the results of this challenge. Both classes, far surpassed their goal, and with matching donations offered by our alumni, the combined amount raised to support Hurricane Katrina victims has reached $100,000.

The Tuck student body contributed to this effort, and donations also came in from faculty, staff, alumni, and corporations and four separate alumni each matched the total funds raised by each class.

Seeing the community come together on such short notice to respond to disaster on the opposite end of our country has been very moving to me, especially as a native of New Orleans. I have seen in practice many times that the Tuck community extends far beyond the borders of New Hampshire. Our community, our family, extends throughout the United States and abroad.

When one of our eldest alumni, who lives in the Hanover area, heard of our first-year's fundraising efforts by reading the local paper, he made a point to come by Tuck in person to drop off a check. People like this inspire me, and constantly remind me that fortune can turn to misfortune in the blink of an eye and that we rely on our neighbors and should be conscientious of our actions or inactions, as one day we may have to rely on them as they have on us.

When students arrived on campus at universities in Louisiana late last month, the last thing they expected was an immediate evacuation and then to have that extended from a week or two to four months or more. In the aftermath of Katrina, business schools and colleges have opened their doors. At Tuck, we now have two students from Tulane University in our second-year courses. We welcome them to our community and will work to do everything we can to make their work here productive.

Current-Affairs | - "Message to the Tuck Community"

Paul Danos, Dean Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

MBA students must be involved in addressing societal challenges. In a world where the private sector is of growing importance and where the private sector controls so much of the wealth of most countries, business leaders cannot ignore the communities in which they work. Each person must decide how he or she will respond to the world's problems, be it an epidemic such as AIDS, a tsunami, or the destruction left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Being a native of New Orleans and having many relatives there, I have a special connection to this particular disaster. Growing up, I always heard of the dangers of living in a place that was surrounded by water, below sea level, and continuously dependent on pumps for drainage. It was said that a "perfect" storm from a certain direction and of a certain intensity would be devastating. It seems that now such a storm, Katrina, has taken a dreadful toll on many people and on a wonderful culture that played such an important part in so many lives. Many now say that the old city and the culture will never fully recover.

Certainly, our MBA students, who will some day be leaders in the world's great businesses, must view their sphere of responsibility to include the welfare of others in society. At Tuck we often discuss the relationship between business issues and societal issues. Students work directly on long-term solutions through projects and voluntary work. We encourage our students and the entire community to be involved in crises that demand immediate attention, and particularly in this case of the Gulf Coast devastation, to contribute to organizations like the Red Cross, Americares. Our goal is to expose students to business leadership in its broadest meaning, and to contribute to the immediate alleviation of human suffering and despair is a big part of that. I want to let you all know that Tuck will arrange for a limited number of special exchange students from the affected universities to be admitted to the second year of the MBA program.

I am gratified that our first-year students in their first week on campus are mounting a fundraiser for their class and challenging the T'06s to match their goal of $2500 or more. Jim Allwin has pledged to match the students' contributions and I want to encourage everyone in our community to join in. This is going to be a long and arduous road for the people in the disaster zone and I commend our students for taking this initiative.

America v Europe, Current-Affairs | - "Venus and Mars"

Santiago Iñiguez, Dean of Instituto de Empresa Business School.

Venus and Mars; is how some view European society and thinking as opposed to that of America (it’s debatable if that includes Canada or Mexico). This metaphor has been used to illustrate the different general abiding attitudes on opposing sides of the Atlantic vis-à-vis social issues, philosophy and religion etc. Does this same paradigm apply to management education?

Some differing cultural and structural features are at the root of this confrontation between the two different archetypes of American and European business schools. In America prevails a shareholder culture, universities rely heavily on the income generated by their endowments and the MBA market is the biggest and the most homogeneous worldwide. In Europe, there is a dominant stakeholder culture, management education is still very fragmented and there is a coexistence of various business school models. ( A difference of opinion | Economist.com 4/5th paragraph). If I were to choose a word to define higher education in Europe it would be “diversity”. The size of the American education market and the resources available to business schools result in more research-oriented faculties and in a more decisive role of a school’s brand name. As regards sources of revenue, business schools in our continent rely almost entirely on the revenues generated by their activities and, in the case of public universities, on state subsidies.

Let’s give credit to where credit is due: Management Education was invented in America. In fact, the first MBA in history was launched by Dartmouth University, my co-blogger’s stomping ground. However in Europe, the flourishing of business schools only occurred in the late 1950s. Many business examples demonstrate that being the pioneer does not necessarily ensure continuing as the benchmark in the long run. The Wright Brothers first flight heralded a subsequent US lead of the aviation industry for the rest of the century. However, Airbus, the European aircraft manufacturing consortium, has overtaken Boeing in the past years.(Financial Times: Boeing/Airbus)

Analogously, it seems that in the last decade European business schools have caught-up with their American counterparts and have lost their historical inferiority complex. Della Bradshaw, the renowned journalist of the Financial Times and co-blogger, might agree with me having written articles like European schools make a move up the table in her Business Education section.

Despite the two differing models of management education, the trend is, irreversibly, towards convergence: it is a consequence of globalisation. Will the descendent of Venus and Mars take more after its mother or father?