Thunderbird for Good

Thunderbird Professor Christine Pearson, Ph.D., talked May 12, 2011, about Project Artemis Pakistan. She and other Thunderbird faculty hosted nine Pakistani businesswomen May 2-15, 2011, as part of a management training program sponsored by the U.S. State Department and the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women initiative. Pearson led a Project Artemis Pakistan classroom session on communication strategies May 11 and also helped other Thunderbird faculty prepare the women for final presentations on their respective businesses. Pearson took time before departing for a research project in Peru to talk about her impressions of the Artemis fellows.

Q. What most impressed you about these Project Artemis fellows?
A. Our Artemis participants from Pakistan have tremendous desire to succeed. At the same time, they remain mindful of their fellow students who have enabled them to take part in this Artemis program and to succeed back home in Pakistan.
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Thunderbird Professor Mary Sully de Luque, Ph.D., talked May 12, 2011, about Project Artemis Pakistan. She and other  Thunderbird faculty hosted nine Pakistani women business owners May 2-15, 2011, as part of a management training program sponsored by the U.S. State Department and the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women initiative. Sully de Luque led a Project Artemis Pakistan classroom session on management and leadership on May 3 and also helped other Thunderbird faculty prepare the women for final presentations on their respective businesses. Sully de Luque answered questions about the Project Artemis fellows and the program itself following the business presentations.

Q.  Is this your first experience with the Artemis Project, or were you also involved in the Afghanistan project?
A. I guess you could say that I’m a seasoned veteran of Project Artemis. I taught in the very first Artemis program in 2005 and have been the academic co-director in all subsequent Artemis cohorts from Afghanistan. I also have worked with women entrepreneurs from Jordan, Peru and Pakistan. In the process, I have learned much about the women, their business challenges and their cultures.
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Syeda Marriam Shafi Ahmen is one of nine Pakistani women who are fellows in the Thunderbird School of Global Management Project Artemis program, an entrepreneurship training partnership between the U.S. Department of State and the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women program. Syeda and the Artemis group spent two weeks at Thunderbird in May 2011 learning from faculty and local businesswomen, while sharing their own experiences as a group.

Syeda, 28, is the owner of 360M, a multifaceted consulting business offering services such as event management, management consulting, management training, IT products and HR training. She has been in operation less than a year and currently counts four employees. 360M is located in Karachi, a city of more than 20 million that is the largest in Pakistan and is the country’s financial capital.

Syeda was recently with the Artemis Project fellows when they visited My Sister’s Closet, a consignment store offering high-end apparel and owned by Thunderbird graduate Ann Sider ’85. The visit came at the end of an in-class session with Thunderbird Professor Mary Sully de Luque, Ph.D., on leadership, strategic vision and decision making. Here’s what Syeda had to say about one of her first days as a Project Artemis participant.
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Ann Siner graduated from Thunderbird School of Global Management in 1985. After a stint as director of marketing for Pet Food warehouse (before it became PetsMart), Siner teamed with her sister, Jennifer, to open a small Phoenix store selling consigned clothing. Today, 20 years later, the sisters control a 10-store empire that includes four My Sister’s Closets and four My Sister’s Attic locations offering home furnishings, and a pair of Well Suited Men’s Resale stores.

For the second time in as many years, Ann opened one of her Closets to Project Artemis fellows. On May 3, 2011, the nine Pakistani businesswomen who came to Thunderbird for entrepreneurship training under the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women program, met with Siner at her My Sister’s Closet location in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Siner shared startup secrets and business advice with the group and then escorted them across the shopping center to one of her My Sister’s Attic locations. The Pakistani participants asked lots of questions, shared their own experiences, and generally soaked up the opportunity to observe a U.S. retail outlet in action.
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From what leaders do to how they communicate, a group of nine women business owners from Pakistan received the low-down on entrepreneurship May 2-15, 2011, at Thunderbird School of Global Management as part of a new partnership between the U.S. Department of State and the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women program.

Following kickoff sessions focusing on financial literacy and accounting, Project Artemis participants joined Thunderbird Professor Mary Sully de Luque, Ph.D., in a discussion centering on management leadership. Sully de Luque, a research fellow at the Garvin Center for Culture and Languages, covered a variety of topics that encouraged the women to share experiences.

“These are women who have great potential to be able to learn the curriculum being taught here and take it back to their home country and make a significant economic impact on their businesses,” said Wynona Heim, program manager for Thunderbird for Good, the school’s philanthropic arm that includes Project Artemis. “A great lesson for these women is that they are not alone; that there is a network of entrepreneurs all over the world, facing many of the same problems. They can draw from this network.
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On Monday, May 23, 2011, five Thunderbird MBA students will begin their 12 week internship working with Proyecto Salta in Lima, Peru. Proyecto Salta is part of a larger project called “Strengthening Women Entrepreneurship in Peru” or SWEP as we like to call it; in which Thunderbird is working with our partners to train over 100,000 women entrepreneurs across Peru. SWEP is a four year public-private partnership project funded by the Multilateral Investment Fund of the Inter-American Development Bank, the Australian Government (Hence our branding for Salta that looks like a Kangaroo, or even better yet, what I like to call the llamaroo; which really blends the two cultures of Australia and Peru!), Mibanco (the #1 micro-finance institution in Latin America), and Goldman Sachs.
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Ettore Rossetti, director of Internet communications and marketing at Save the Children, views his job as a personal mission. The social sector organization works to inspire breakthroughs for disadvantaged children around the world, and Rossetti thinks about his own family when he goes to work. “I have children,” says the father from Westport, Connecticut. “They are symbolic of the children around the world who might not have the chance to thrive and survive.”

Rossetti was among 27 emerging social sector leaders who participated May 2-6, 2011, in the American Express Leadership Academy at Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Arizona.

The academy, developed at Thunderbird in partnership with American Express, included high-potential social sector managers from 10 organizations: Action Against Hunger, Clinton Global Initiative, Endeavor, FARM-Africa, Global Giving Foundation, International Federation of Red Cross & Red Crescent Societies, Save the Children, UNICEF, Un Techo para mi Pais and Women for Women International. Meet 10 of these participants in the videos below:

By Teresa Wolfgang, 2010 Project Artemis Mentor and Lt. Colonel, US Army

A few weeks ago, my colleague, Dr. Lisa Brooks from Bagram Human Terrain and Analysis Team, and I hosted our third class of female engagement team training to 33 Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Civilians.  Conducting female engagements has been recognized as an important endeavor in building trust and enduring relationships with the Afghan population.  Afghan women make up 51% of the population and yet they continually are denied the most basic freedoms that are afforded to them by the Afghan constitution and the Quran.

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by Kamlesh Rishyur MBA ‘11

The CGI-U meet was a fantastic networking experience as I had never imagined I would get a chance to connect with a lot of like minded individuals from across the world with a passion to create a meaningful impact on the world through their brilliant ideas. I found some excellent insights to further my project on environmental sustainability from student partners and entrepreneurs who were already doing wonderful work in the area that I was working on.

The handshakes with Mr. Clinton made me feel that America is indeed a great land of opportunities and if you are talented, you will be rewarded and also engendered a sense of responsibility on my shoulders that I must do something big. My advice to all my fellow T-Birds is to think big, think global, and start taking some action, as merely having ideas is useless and most of all don’t be discouraged by others because it is your idea.

You will face lot of criticism, oppositions from many but guess what ….you are better than them! so protect your ideas and make a persuasive and a unique proposal to draw peoples attention to your project. Let your creative adrenalin flow and make a business case out of your imagination that would punctuate your MBA education and cross cultural learning at Thunderbird.

A sneak peak at my idea : Magic Cart…. Like it! share it! and I almost forgot ……….Start thinking about your idea!

Kamlesh Rishyur is a ‘11 MBA canidate at Thunderbird. His entrepreneurial venture is Magic Cart, which seeks to achieve massive reductions in global plastic bag usage. You can connect with him on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Military leaders and others have studied the art of war for centuries. Australian entrepreneur Steve Killelea thinks it is time to study peace. His organization, the Institute for Economics and Peace, measures the financial and social benefits that countries achieve when their citizens live without violence or fear of violence.

“If you look at the world today, you will find that there is a lot of study on violence but very little study on peace,” Killelea said April 12, 2011, during a visit to Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Arizona. “We spend a lot of time understanding how much violence costs, but we don’t do enough on understanding the economic value and extra prosperity that can be associated with peace.”
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