Archive for the ‘Global Citizenship’ Category

Data from the World Bank shows that Americans, Chinese and Russians are among the world’s biggest climate change skeptics.  Less than a third of them believe climate change is a serious problem, and more than 20% believe it is not too serious or not a problem at all.  Interestingly, the three together accounted for almost half (46%) of total world emissions of CO2 in 2010 according to the U. S. Government’s own data (Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center – U.S. Dept. of Energy).

China continues to lead the world in CO2 emissions, but on a per capita basis, the U.S. is still the biggest offender among medium and large nations.  On a per capita basis, the average American produced in 2010 50% more CO2 than the average Russian and almost 3 times more than the average Chinese.  The gap is even larger with other emerging countries: Americans beat Brazilians by a factor of 8 and Indians by 10.  Interestingly again, almost 2 in 3 Indians, and 3 in 4 Brazilians believe climate change is a very serious problem.

In what appears to be a dangerous case of cognitive dissonance, the nations that can make a dent in reducing our global carbon addiction don’t seem to have much interest in trying.

AACSB’s magazine BizEd asked ten long-serving heads of business schools to reflect on the evolution of business education since it was founded ten years ago.  In my piece I argue that the last decade has seen some of the worst damages bad management can cause.  But I’m also hopeful that business schools are showing signs that they are taking responsibility and action, including the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME), and The Oath Project.

How much things can change in a decade! In October 2001, we learned that executives of the energy darling Enron had hidden billions in debt through accounting engineering and dishonest financial reporting. The scandal wiped out thousands of jobs and tens of billions of dollars in shareholder value, including the retirement assets of thousands of employees. It handed a death sentence to legendary accounting firm Arthur Andersen and led to the largest bankruptcy case in U.S. history.

Continue reading at BizEdmagazine.com.

On Thursday night, Campaign Chairs Barbara & Craig Barrett announced the successful completion of the Thunderbird Campaign: an effort to raise $65M in gifts and pledges by 2011 (our 65th anniversary) to support Thunderbird’s mission.   In a little over five years, thousands of alumni and friends around the world came together around a shared desire to invest in Thunderbird, to help this pioneering institution created in the heart of Arizona 65 years ago, to continue to educate global leaders who can bring about peace and prosperity around the world.

Like the rest of trustees attending the small, private celebration, I was humbled and moved.  This campaign means much more than $65M for all of us: it means 65 million expressions of commitment to our mission, of recognition of the daily work of our faculty and staff, of encouragement to keep finding new ways to change more lives around the world through education and thought leadership.

I can’t possibly document all that was said over the last three days, the tears, the gratitude, the generosity.  But I will leave you with one story, provided by one of our thousands of donors, an octogenarian, World War II veteran who, without any expectation of personal recognition, signed the biggest check we received.  We asked him why he chose to support Thunderbird.  This is his answer:

When I was a freshman in college, a young man enjoying life, I was asked to join the army to help my country and the world.  And so I did.  I was trained as a pilot in a place just like the Thunderbird field where we’re sitting today.  I flew, I fought and I was proud to make a difference.  As an old man, I want to keep helping my country and the world.  And what better way to do that than by helping Thunderbird train thousands of leaders from around the world who will help build a more secure, more peaceful and more prosperous world?  As an old man, I cannot fly anymore.  So I decided to let Thunderbird fly for me, to let Thunderbird fly forever.

I really enjoyed our panel at last week Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting on the design of technologies for economic empowerment, moderated by Chelsea Clinton.

- Oscar winning actress Geena Davis presented data on how media contributes to perpetuating gender stereotypes in the U.S. and around the world.  Her Geena Davis Institute has found, for example, that male roles in Hollywood movies outnumber female roles by 3:1.

- Neil Bellefeuille, of The Paradigm Project, explained their approach to use market-based approaches to introduce clean stove technology in very low-income communities were traditional cooking techniques are responsible for thousands of smoke-related deaths and heath problems, millions of wasted hours in wood recollection and transportation, and vast deforestation.

- Toshi Nakamura, founder of The Kopernik, described their innovation/aid/market place approach to designing and distributing new technology solutions to meet energy, lighting, or water challenges in underdeveloped environments.  He also praised Thunderbird TEM Lab students for their recent consulting work in Indonesia for his organization!

Read more »

Thunderbird Vision 2020, Global Leadership-Global Impact, asks that we focus outward, not inward and that we find new and better ways to change lives, to empower individuals to bring about opportunities around the world by building good businesses.  Here’s one example.

By Wynona Heim, Program Manager, Thunderbird for Good

The Vital Voices award ceremony was a wonderful event, and Fatema Akbari and her daughter Shahla did a beautiful job at the acceptance speech, and as Ambassadors for the 10,000 Women program, Project Artemis, and their native Afghanistan.  Fatema stole the show when she got up to the microphone at the end of the speech that her daughter had translated for her and said in English: “I want to make a special thank you to Vital Voices, the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women program, and Thunderbird for all of their support of Afghan women.  Next time I come to the United States, I will speak only English.”  She was the ONLY awardee to get a standing ovation at the END of her speech.

Her Vital Voices video, which includes the interview with you, is on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wt6I_KNXUZ0

By J. Oseas Ramírez Assad ‘11

Estimado Angel,
…
I wanted to share with you that this Sunday I just got back from Cambodia where I was participating in a TEM lab for the last five weeks. We worked on a project for DDD (Digital Divide Data), a social enterprise that hires disadvantaged Cambodian youth (from very poor families, landmine victims, etc.) and trains them on basic IT skills to provide digitization services. At the same time, DDD gives them a scholarship to study a university degree so that they can get a better job when they graduate, thus breaking the cycle of poverty they were in. Our project consisted in helping DDD determine whether and how they could offer their digitization services locally in the healthcare and financial services sectors. In the end, we were able to present the client with valuable insight about their organization as well as concrete, actionable items as they required. This will help them strengthen their business model in order to continue furthering their social mission

The reason why I wanted to share this with you is that since I started my studies in Thunderbird a year and a half ago, this is the first time in which I have experimented what it means to enact our mission of creating sustainable prosperity worldwide. The mission is what made me choose Thunderbird above other programs and it was fundamental for me to live it before graduating. This took place greatly in part thanks to the support you provided to me through Mr. Scott to address the IIE to allow a Fulbright to participate in such a program, so I wanted to thank you for your support.

Estimado Angel, gracias: esta experiencia ha tenido un gran impacto en mi vida.

Nos vemos pronto – ¡saludos!

It seems impossible to disassociate Arizona from immigration debates after the most (in)famous law in the State’s history–SB1070–was passed last year.  The AACSB’s Deans Conference in Phoenix this week couldn’t be an exception, and I was given the honor of moderating the panel on immigration and business schools featuring also Kenneth R. Keeley of the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University and Dean Michael Luger of the Manchester Business School at the University of Manchester.

Here’s a summary of my thoughts:

• Immigration can be and has been a driver of innovation and economic growth in the US economy.
• According to data from the Kauffman Foundation (see my posting Connectivity means Competitiveness) immigrant-founded companies generated $52B in revenues and 450K jobs in 2005. Over half of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs were born outside the US. And more than a quarter of all engineering and technology companies created in the US between 1995 and 2005 had one foreign-born founder.
• According to the World Intellectual Property Organization, non-citizen inventors generated 24.2% of all patent applications in 2006 (up from 7.3% in 1998).
• More than half of the immigrants that go on to create businesses in the US originally came to the US to study.
• The #1 discipline of study among foreign students coming to the US is business (21.1% in 2009/10).  Business plus STEM fields account for 67.2% of all foreign students in the US.
• Mainland China, India and South Korea are the main sources of foreign students, each accounting for more than twice as many students as any other country.  Canada, Taiwan, Japan, and Saudi Arabia come next. China and Saudi Arabia have shown the highest growth last year (30% and 25% each).
• Immigration debates tend to center around how to best keep immigrants out, but the future of the American economy requires policies that proactively attract the right types of immigrants, and universities (and business schools) are the best vehicle to do that.
• H1B Visas granted by the US went down dramatically after 9/11, from 163,000 in 2001 to less than 80,000 in 2002, 03 and 04, and not back to 85,000. Not surprisingly, the percentage of foreign students at Thunderbird peaked in 2001 (67%) and declined to around 44% in 2008. Total number of foreign students declined in the US between 2002 and 2006 (and is recovering now).

I asked my colleague Kip Harrell to share his thoughts on this matter and here are some highlights:

• Rankings tend to penalize schools with high national diversity because employment difficulties of foreign students hurt “employed at graduation” and “3 months after graduation” metrics.
• International student employment is not only more difficult in the US market, but also in finding employment at home
• Helping international students develop networks, both in US and their home country is critical for employment success
• International diversity is critical in educating true global leaders, but the complexities of attracting the right students and helping them find employment should not be underestimated

The 10,000 Women Initiative, run by Goldman Sachs, will partner with the State Department to bring Pakistani women entrepreneurs for intensive training at the Thunderbird School for Global Management in Arizona

via Secretary Clinton Provides Remarks With Pakistani Foreign Minister | U.S. Department of State Blog. (includes video of Clinton’s remarks)

The latest edition of the Innovations Journal (pdf here), released during the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative last week, is dedicated to building back a better Haiti.  President Clinton, UN Special Envoy for Haiti, opens the special issue with a hopeful message:

In every nation’s history, there comes a turning point—a moment of opportunity in which the people can choose to build a better future for themselves and for the generations that follow; a moment in which they commit to work hard to realize that future, together. For Haiti, that moment has come.

The journal covers the role of technology and financing, physical infrastructure, women empowerment and agriculture and it includes a contribution by myself and two colleagues on education and human potential.

A letter to my colleagues at Thunderbird

Dear colleague,

I’m writing from NYC, where I am participating in the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative. CGI brings together heads of state, CEOs, philanthropists and social entrepreneurs from around the world to discuss solutions to the world’s most complex development challenges and to commit to specific solutions.  The central belief of CGI is that businesses and entrepreneurs must play a central role in any real solution to the world’s most complex challenges (one of the tennets also of Thunderbird since its inception).

Our colleagues Frank Neville, Kellie Kreiser, and I have worked this year as topic leaders coordinating one of the four tracks of the conference “Harnessing Human Potential”.   Our sessions will take place tomorrow afternoon and will showcase, among others, Laura Bush, Shakira, Alibaba’s CEO Jack Ma, NIIT’s founder Rajendra Pawar and IDB President (& TBird alum and fellow) Luis Alberto Moreno.

In addition to the three of us, Prof. Finney was invited to participate by Exxon Mobil, with whom we’re launching a partnership to provide consulting assistance via our TEM Lab trough their “change makers” program focusing on women.  Our colleague TBird alum Charles Reeves is also participating in a number of side events with Exxon Mobil and Ashoka.

Tomorrow Profs. Bowen and Pearson will join us to coordinate sessions on empowerment of youth, democratizing access to higher education, creating jobs beyond microfinance, and engaging employees in corporate citizenship initiatives. Thunderbird friend and Chairman of First Solar Mike Ahearn is also joining our team. Tomorrow also Prof. Unruh will be moderating a session on Green Jobs.  And Thursday I will moderate a session on bringing connectivity to rural areas to foster entrepreneurship and job creation.

I hope this unprecedented presence of Thunderbird in one of the world’s most influential platforms dedicated to global economic and human development makes you as proud as it makes me.

I leave you with a video which was just released a few minutes ago, during a plenary dedicating to empowering women and girls (one of the four central topics).  Thunderbird has been committed to the economic empowerment of women in Afghanistan, Jordan and Peru, before any other business school did and before the topic reached the center stage of platforms like this one.  This video explains why.

http://www.girleffect.org/video

Best regards from NYC.

–Ángel Cabrera

PS. Kellie Kreiser (@KellieK) and I (@CabreraAngel) are tweeting live if you are interested to follow.