Archive for the ‘Global Finance’ Category

Our first Global Cohort was a resounding success! Thunderbird for Good hosted 28 women entrepreneurs from Tonga, Samoa, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Papua New Guinea, Kiribati, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Palau. The women have since returned home and continue to share incredible stories of success, growth, and the many ways they are sharing their knowledge.

Goldman Sachs launched 10,000 Women in March 2008. It is a $100 million, five-year campaign to foster greater shared economic growth by providing 10,000 underserved women around the world with a business and management education. The program is founded on research conducted by Goldman Sachs, the World Bank, and others which suggests this kind of investment can have a significant impact on GDP growth. Research also suggests that such an investment in women can have a significant multiplier effect that leads not only to increased revenues and more employees for businesses, but also healthier, better-educated families, and ultimately more prosperous communities.

These culturally appropriate programs are intended to help open doors for thousands of women whose financial and practical circumstances would normally prevent them from receiving a traditional business education. Thunderbird is a proud partner in this initiative!

We are excited to host the 2nd Global Cohort of women entrepreneurs June 9th – 24th. Women from Latin America, Central America, and the Caribbean have been submitting applications with our US Embassies in countries such as Bolivia, Paraguay, Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Argentina, Colombia, Jamaica, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Trinidad, Ecuador, Chile, and more. We are thrilled to be working with the Arizona Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and other local business leaders to make this program a robust and fun learning experience.

We will officially welcome this new class of entrepreneurs to our campus on Monday, June 11th, so save the date! More details to follow. Immediately following this Welcome Reception, the women will sell their goods, handicrafts and cultural items during the 10,000 Women Marketplace. It is the perfect opportunity for these women to practice the 30-second elevator pitch Professor Steve Stralser will have just taught in class. Come eat, shop, mingle, meet, and welcome these entrepreneurs to Thunderbird!

Did you get involved as a volunteer during the 1st Global Cohort program in January? We are asking for volunteers once again to join us for an hour or two. We especially welcome all you Spanish speakers! Join us for off-campus dinners, working one-on-one with the women in the classroom, site visits to local businesses, sightseeing excursions and more. If you would like to get involved, please contact Cheri Roberts at 602-978-7742 or cheri.roberts@thunderbird.edu .

We are grateful for any time you can generously give. These programs are enriched by your efforts, and you will be in turn edified and inspired by these driven women entrepreneurs!

By Sherbahadar Himmat, Afghan Media Management Program Participant

From September 11 – 16, a media management training workshop was executed at Thunderbird School of Global Management for the executive directors of radio and TV stations in Afghanistan, Eastern provinces. I was one of the participants who attended the workshop and would like to express my feelings about it.

In this workshop at Thunderbird, which was a 5 day long program, we covered 6 different subjects which were taught by different professors. Their teaching methods were organized in a very professional way. Besides their teachings, we were also given the opportunity to express our thoughts and perspectives.

The subjects we were taught during the program were: Negotiation Skills, Marketing, Accounting, Multi-track Diplomacy, New Media for Business Development, Advertising, Commercials and Social Networks. In fact, studying each field separately could take several years to cover all the material. But the way the professors taught us, at the end of each day, I felt I majored in each of these subjects.

Students might not remember every single word of what he or she learns at the university while studying for several years, but they do understand several things about that field such as; what the field covered? What is the position/value of such majors/fields in the social life? How can he help his community and people? Why studying this field is important?

By studying each day at Thunderbird, we have learned the value of such fields in our social life,  and I now have an idea how to use these fields in my life.

There are the changes I have seen in myself after participating in this program, even after my 18 years of education and 8 years of work experience:

1: On this day we learned about Negotiation skills. I was provided with the keys to successful communication. I learned to take into consideration the points that are very necessary while communicating in a group, or the points to remember while I’m trying to achieve objectives. Basically, how to communicate.  How to present my suggestions/requests so I can persuade the listener, and I can achieve my goal or get a positive result. I might have handled meetings very professionally before, but the self-confidence that I have now, I didn’t own it before.

2 : Marketing is a very important step/process toward achieving your goals, not only in business, but in fact it is important in politics, culture, society, religion, economics, and other ways to achieve one’s goals. For example: to find market for a political goal, one has to work to attract more followers. But in business, it’s to attract more customers to sell your products to. The Marketing class at Thunderbird, taught me lessons in persuading and convincing others to do advertising, using my radio station. If I am told to explain this field in once sentence, I would say “If I don’t benefit others, they won’t benefit me.” Meaning if I want to receive something from someone else, I also have to give him something. What I should give that person was taught to me in Thunderbird on that one day.

3: Financing – It’s the most important part of keeping an organization moving and sustainable. I have run an organization for 8 years. My financing was somehow good, but Thunderbird showed me ways in which I can forecast my future. With the formulas and charts that Thunderbird provided us to manage our finances, I can clearly forecast my organization’s existence, strengths, and weaknesses in the upcoming years and I can easily say where I will be standing after five years.

4: Multi-track diplomacy: Before I used to think that only countries use this diplomacy for developing their relationships but now I understand that this diplomacy can be used to increase the network and relationship of two organizations. I learned how can we attract the attention of different people to our stations and use them in terms of achieving our goals.

We were offered very useful and wise advices and guidelines for receiving advertisements for our radios. Beside that we also learned “If we don’t make our programs based on our audience’s interest, we won’t find any listeners or audiences. If we don’t have any listeners/audiences, we won’t receive any advertisements, and if we don’t receive them, we can’t continue our business.”

At the end I want to thank Thunderbird from the bottom of my heart. I am very impressed with their management style and appreciate it. They taught us A LOT of things in so little time. If I don’t get success in my business from now on, that would mean that I didn’t follow the lessons and guidelines of Thunderbird and haven’t embraced the advice and guidelines which were taught to me there. If I had the possibilities and chances, I would pursue my higher education at Thunderbird again and then would return to serve my countrymen and women.

By Amy Scerra
Thunderbird for Good, Program Manager

Sharon Lechter comes to Thunderbird representing the CPA, entrepreneur, philanthropist, educator, international speaker and Mom genres. As if this wasn’t impressive enough, she’s also a best-selling author (Rich Dad, Poor Dad; Three Feet from Gold) and a board game creator and innovator. She has a well-rounded knowledge which Thunderbird for Good knew would resonate with our Artemis Pakistan group of women. Sharon spent the first half of the day teaching the women basics of financial literacy. She bounced into the room with her vibrant personality, can-do attitude, and passion for helping women become independent entrepreneurs. This caught everyone’s attention and made it much more fun and easy to commit to learning finance, which so many of us professed as their “weak spot”.
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By Kellie Kreiser

It’s been a few days since the women of Project Artemis left Thunderbird.  After a few days of getting caught up on sleep, different experiences from their visit keep coming back to me.  With the news filled with economic doom and gloom and 24-7 election coverage, there is one particular conversation that keeps popping into my mind.

We had taken the women to the mall.  Everyone had their special goals in mind… face cream, baby shoes, a nice suit, gifts for the family back home, a splurge at Victoria’s Secret.  As we were walking past store after store, Sediqa turns to me and says, “I can see why Americans buy all the time… you are shown so many wonderful things.” She swept her arms out to all the shops and displays.
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The story keeps getting more interesting by the day. This time it was AIG that was heading down the cliff … except that this time the government did step in. Leave Freddie and Fannie aside, given their particular role and mandate, why save AIG and Bear Stearns, and why not Lehman?

Is it a question of size? Not really. AIG was indeed an enormous company (close to $200B in a not so distant past). But at the most recent peak, Bear Stearns was worth less than a third of Lehman’s market cap.
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What is surprising to me is not that Lehman wasn’t able to keep the ship afloat since the Bear Stearns warning six month ago, but that they would be forced to try emergency surgery in the first place. Let alone fail at it.
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