Forging Stronger Bonds SOM strengthens educational ties in Europe by fortifying travel studies in France and Germany By John H. Ostdick UTD's innovative executive-degree programs forge international bonds. Trips that Executive MBA (EMBA) and Project Management Program classes take to cap off their School of Management studies offer broader and more complete insights into global business strategies. French lessons In the spring, fifty EMBA students - an entourage of classmates in diverse disciplines that ranged from consumer-product industries to financial concerns, from healthcare to telecommunications - spent four days in Grenoble, France. They attended European business briefings and visited with local company executives, then proceeded to similar functions in Munich, Germany, and Paris before returning home. In Grenoble, the students visited Caterpillar, Alma Software, STMicroelectronics, Xerox, and the French grocery store chain Carrefour. Munich sessions included Siemens and General Electric Deutschland. The international experience is intended to give students an understanding of how business is conducted in each country. Because dining constitutes an integral aspect of doing business in France, along the way the group had a meal at Château de Sassenage, a 17th century castle. They also lunched at a restaurant in the French countryside and took time to explore another major feature of the region, the Caves of Choranche, an hour outside Grenoble. An international trip concludes the EMBA Program; it is an opportunity for students to see the disciplines of management they have studied applied in an international context. Dr. Jasper Arnold, director of the Executive MBA Program, identifies five learning objectives of these trips: To appreciate cultural differences of the United States and other countries and how they affect business decisions; to understand political and economic environments of nations and their effect on business; to identify critical factors that must be understood before making financial commitments in or exporting to these countries; to understand management strategies of companies visited; and to broaden the students' views from domestic to global. "One of the things that struck me was how the students took note of things in both countries that had business significance," Dr. Arnold says. "I saw them applying what they had learned in the classroom in very real ways, especially the differences in marketing and selling to consumers. They noticed that people drove small cars in Paris relative to the cars in Germany, for example, and made the connection that a marketing message would need to be very different in each country." Combining resources in Grenoble Grenoble - an industrial center on the Isère River, surrounded by three ranges of the Alps - serves as a leading center for French technology. Its urban population of 415,000 includes about fifty thousand students at its university, Groupe ESC Grenoble, which dates to the 14th century. About 10 percent of those students are foreign. The city is perhaps best known internationally as the 1968 host city for the Winter Olympic Games. "For about six years now, ESC has been hosting U.S. executive MBA programs, basically doing a turnkey trip that includes hotels, sightseeing, meals, company visits, and campus lectures," Dr. Arnold says. "In the past, we've made all those arrangements ourselves, but a local source is much more effective at arranging the type of management contacts needed for useful company visits. ESC also provided academics who were well versed in the European business culture. The combination of resources made for an excellent quality learning experience for our students." "The UTD students were fun to be around," says Christopher Cripps, associate dean of international affairs and executive education at the Grenoble Graduate School of Business, a part of Groupe ESC Grenoble. "They asked well-informed, excellent questions. The local executive hosts told us how pleased they were to have been able to receive such a group." Mr. Cripps, an American living in France for thirteen years, has been associated with the Grenoble business school since 1989. Opening different doors The trip opened different doors for each of the students, who kept detailed travel journals, which Dr. Arnold reviewed once back home. Rosemary Aguilar, who is director of development services at GTCI, Inc., says she gained a much better understanding of how the European Union works and some of its inter-union struggles and challenges - especially intriguing for her, as she currently concentrates on Asian markets in her job. Just seeing the culture firsthand is helpful, Ms. Aguilar notes. "Where we tend to work at a very fast pace in North America, the atmosphere is very different over there," she says. "If the shopkeeper has to run an errand, he or she simply closes up shop. You seldom see that here in urban areas. Understanding the mindset is important." Grenoble provided a marvelous snapshot of French culture, says Dawn Schomer, an environmental safety consultant manager at Texas Instruments. "The city was easy to get your arms around, and the people were extremely open and friendly," she says. Ms. Schomer cites a session with Allen Bouveret of Alma Software, a French technology firm, and the European Union briefing as being particularly inspiring. Although Larry Solomon, senior vice president of human resources at Dr Pepper, had a different perspective and experience than many of his classmates, the EMBA sojourn brought him valuable lessons just the same. Originally from South Africa, Mr. Solomon lived in Paris for two years and spent three years in London in a job that called for worldwide travel before he came to Dallas. Hence, the international exposure was not new to him. "What was most intriguing for me, however, was taking some of the program materials and thinking of them in the context of different cultures, businesses, and environments." Next year's EMBA trip also will utilize the ESC connection, Dr. Arnold says. Stops in Geneva, Barcelona, and Paris are under consideration. Managing Germany A casual lunchtime discussion last winter between student Suzanne Greever, special project officer at the Lake Granbury Medical Center, and Project Management Program Director Jim Joiner gave birth to an international component in the SOM's Project Management Program. Before coming to UTD in 1997 to help organize the innovative program, which blends technical, leadership, and general business training to help team leaders in corporate environments, Mr. Joiner held managerial positions across the globe during a thirty-year career at Texas Instruments. He understands well the importance of international perspectives in shaping the scope of the program's curriculum. As Ms. Greever recalls, Mr. Joiner called her a few days after they had lunch. "He said if I could get unanimous consensus from the students in the class, we could do it," she says, laughing. "That wasn't a real hard sell for me. It took all of about five minutes." Months later, Ms. Greever and her classmates became the first seventeen UTD Project Management students to close out their studies in Landshut, a sociable, attractive city of about 59,000 in the German state of Bavaria. They spent two weeks visiting companies, attending joint classes with German students, getting in-depth briefings about the evolving European Union, and managing some sightseeing sojourns into Munich, about an hour away. Rather than hopping from one location to another, Mr. Joiner says he specifically wanted to find a local partner university that could help organize pertinent lectures and company visits. "We wanted to give our students a concentrated cultural experience and a different classroom perspective," Mr. Joiner says. "The University of Applied Science [at Fachhochschule Landshut, a public institution of about twenty-five hundred students] offered us that opportunity." Landshut is a "picture postcard town" and provided a good base for the program, Ms. Greever says, noting that the joint sessions with German master students' strategic management classes proved academically fruitful. "You had to check some preconceived notions at the door, slow down, and listen," she says, "and realize there is more than one way to go about your work." Glenn Graves, a director of business operations for Nortel Networks' wireless products group hoped to gain cultural insights into German-U.S. business practices and structures, and learn how each introduced products and identified customer demographics. Mr. Graves, who previously had been stationed in Germany for two years, noted that his expectations were fulfilled especially by sessions with chief executives of Sedlbauer AG "who offered a no-nonsense approach," and Texas Instruments Europe, who "outlined intriguing product-to-market and general manager models"; a European Union presentation by instructor Dr. Jorg Sonnabend; and an overview of the German banking system. Mr. Joiner plans to foster the Landshut relationship. "The biggest surprise of this enterprise was the way my students, even those who already had significant international experience, bonded with their German counterparts," he says. In a reciprocal program, German students visited UTD in September, getting a taste of American corporate culture and business theory. Next year, Mr. Joiner's class will visit a French university. Then alternating-year visits between the two countries will begin. Final lesson Forging such ongoing European educational relationships will strengthen both curriculums and further enhance UTD's global standing, both program directors say. The world may indeed be getting smaller, but that just means the scope of the global manager's perspective has to become broader, and the challenge for academic programs is more formidable. Last spring, participants agree, firsthand application helped lower some of the hurdles for both these classes of executive students."