"European school change of tactics to beat the US, China and India" was the title of an article, in Portuguese, published yesterday by Valor Economico- one of Brazil's top newspapers focusing on economics. The article was an interview of Santiago Iniguez, dean of IE Business School by Stela Campos, de São Paulo.
Download the interview here! 
PDF(100KB).
"Africa and what business schools can do" was a post I wrote on the 30th May. Maybe I have found something that might help? An idea that might take advantage of the increased number of Internet connections that the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) initative will create.
eLearning Africa 2006, with 832 participants from 80 countries, was the first eLearning
Africa conference held on May 24 – 26, 2006 in the United Nations
Conference Centre in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. It was the largest event on
educational technologies and development ever to have taken place on the
continent.
Is this an opportunity for us business schools - or the private companies out there- to contribute using experience and expertise? Please, this time, add your comments to the blog instead of emailing them.
Tags(clickable): Africa, Immigration
Education can and should be a personal transformation process. Some people sustain that it is not possible to learn or develop basic traits of character after a certain age. This view is based on an outmoded Freudian theory according to which the basic features of personality are acquired and fixed before reaching adolescence –another extreme conception goes further and states that they are formed at mother’s womb. However, many contemporary education theorists and psychologists accept that many skills and traits can be learnt and developed in maturity if the necessary attitudes are cultivated. An example of this current is explored in “Can Ethics Be Taught?”, a very interesting book by several Harvard Business School scholars that deals with the question of whether ethics can be taught and learnt at business school by young managers and responds in the positive. Indeed, at business schools we work on the premise that junior and senior managers can not only update their knowledge on the latest business tools but also perfect their skills and further shape their personality –hopefully for the better- through education.
In this same spirit, Francisco Marin commented earlier in this blog about the importance of cultivating a series of virtues while studying an Executive MBA programme and he specifically mentions curiosity, humility and common sense as basic for good management. I agree with him. In particular, curiosity –in its best possible meaning- is concomitant to wisdom and a necessary virtue for the advancement of knowledge and even for achieving self-fulfilment and happiness.
Virtues are character traits valued as being good or, in other words, operative good habits. They are not innate, but rather achieved by constant exercise. It is never late to start practising or perfect these good habits and management education can be a transforming experience in this way. How can business school professors help their students cultivate these virtues or competencies? This question is related to a previous comment made by Der Chao Chen in this blog. To answer this question, the best analogy I find is taken from sculptor. Michelangelo, the great artist, believed that the job of the sculptor is to free the forms that were already inside the stone. The job of professors could be interpreted in a similar way: i.e.freeing a students potential.
Tags(clickable): Freud, Michelangelo, Harvard, Harvard Business School
“Fire burns both in Hellas and in Persia, but men's ideas of right and wrong vary from place to place”, stated Aristotle in his Nichomachean Ethics. The great philosopher could hardly be accused of moral relativism but supporters of this philosophical stream have frequently used that passage to illustrate their basic tenet: that moral principles are culturally based and, consequently, vary across the board. From this descriptive observation, moral relativists jump into the normative sphere: we should respect the customs of other cultures, whether we believe they are right or wrong.
Aristotle’s quote came to my mind yesterday over a discussion on moral codes at business schools with representatives of Sumaq, the alliance of the leading business schools in Latin America. I found solace in that the attending deans and programme managers said that they encounter similar challenges when designing and implementing moral codes (students’ codes of conduct) in MBA programmes with varied student cultural profiles. The challenge is how to find the right balance of adherence by all students for a clear and defined set of rules -a sort of global Decalogue or minimal moral denominator- and at the same time leave room for cultural diversity and divergence in customs.
In our International MBA, with participants from over 60 different countries and no dominant culture, there occur multiple cultural clashes among students every year. This is to be expected and reflects what happens in the real world. The important thing is how to solve those clashes and learn from those experiences. Certainly, dealing effectively and respectfully with cultural difference is something our students should learn.
I very much oppose moral relativism. We should respect cultural difference but we cannot allow, for example, sexist prejudices in our classrooms, despite that this may be, unfortunately, common practice in other cultures. I suppose that codes of conduct in MBA programmes act as moral equalisers. It is part of the global learning our students can achieve.
Martin Varsavsky (4th from right ) spoke yesterday with members of Sumaq.
