Thunderbird for Good

A new group of women entrepreneurs will arrive from Afghanistan next week for Project Artemis, a program designed to give women from the war-torn country the tools they need to succed. These 15 women will receive two weeks of intensive business leadership training in Arizona and then return to their homeland to launch new ventures or expand existing businesses. They are models of courage. Lima, a 2007 participant in Project Artemis’ second cohort, provides an example for women everywhere. Watch the video below to learn more about her story. — Kellie

Here’s a quick lesson on sustainable manufacturing. Grab a handful of Legos and start playing. The interlocking building blocks can be snapped together to form just about anything — a dog, a tree or maybe a crocodile. When you’re done, the Legos can be pulled apart and used again. You can build the same sculpture twice or create something bigger and grander from the same basic materials. That’s because Legos come in a limited number of sizes and shapes that fit together easily.

Nature works pretty much the same way. Although the periodic table includes dozens of elements, Nature decided to focus on just four — carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen — to build 90 percent of every living thing in the Earth’s biosphere. This materials standardization makes recycling easy. At the end of an organism’s lifespan, the elements that formed the organism can be used again to form something similar or completely different. Watch my Knowledge Network video to learn how humans can apply this same principle in their own sustainable manufacturing. — Greg Unruh

Innovation is the engine of business value creation. And sustainable innovation is the name of the game for business leaders committed to global citizenship. Social and environmental concerns cannot be left as an afterthought to business innovation but need to be incorporated into the design constraints from the very beginning.

With the support of Johnson & Johnson, EcoLab, APS and BillMatrix, Thunderbird students are once again calling their peers around the world to participate in a global competition, the Thunderbird Sustainable Innovation Summit, to bring sustainability concerns to the heart of business innovation.

I encourage any current MBA student to sign up (registration ends Oct. 5).  I have witnessed the intensity and amazing creativity displayed by prior participants.  It’s been inspiring to see how sustainability turned out to be a catalyzer for new thinking, and a source of out-of-the-box solutions which have led to real-world applications.  A learning journey, not just for participants, but for sponsors and judges as well.

I for one won’t miss it.  – Ángel

President Cabrera’s point in the previous post about the proactive role global citizens can play in the global economy is right on target. Today we are focused on the poor decision making by the supposedly most astute financial Wall Street minds. The ramifications for society are only beginning to unfold. But around the world similar economically devastating decisions are being made every day. Collectively we call these decisions corruption.
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Enough on corporate failures and governement intervention.  The whole point of global citizenship is in fact to avoid failure, to create sustainable value by acting responsibly, by reaching out to society while we can make a difference. Congratulations to my colleague Mary Teagarden, editor of Thunderbird International Business Review, for her Sept-Oct issue dedicated to global citizenship.  I’m sure she didn’t plan it this way (unless she had extra sensory powers to anticipate this dark week!), but the timing of this issue couldn’t be any better!
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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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Welcome to Thunderbird’s Global Citizenship blog! I’m quite excited to begin this conversation on what I hope will become a stimulating, thought-provoking conversation on some of the most complex issues surrounding the management of global corporations.

Thunderbird’s mission is to educate global leaders who create sustainable prosperity worldwide.  These are definitely big words for a self-defined “school of global management.” According to common business-school orthodoxy, a manager’s topmost (dare I say sole) responsibility is to maximize value for shareholders.  Yet Thunderbird’s seemingly heretical mission places society’s greater good first. Have we lost our minds?
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