Business Schools
Mar
You can disregard the underlying conclusions of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s book Manufacturing Consent. But you have to admire their ability to delineate between systems and conspiracies.
The media, from my layman perspective of Chomsky and Herman’s central point, is a business. Like any business, it operates to generate a profit. Anything that acts against that fundamental premise isn’t tolerated within its system. Like an ecosystem that works to destroy a threatening virus, stories that dissent against the media’s main drivers of profit (thus the elite that gain the most from its prosperity) simply aren’t tolerated.
Chomsky and Herman are saying that it’s simply a systems issue with the media: resources are funneled toward their prime purpose. It creates a set of filters that allow or disallow stories to be told. Again, disagree with their findings. But the idea that there isn’t a backroom group of people that make decisions based on political agendas is helpful when looking at governing systems in general.
Like any enterprise, business schools are governed by a system. We can split hairs about the exact nature of their system, but one thing is certain. For many business schools, rankings help define it.
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Apr
It’s a strange concept to get your head around. What could a mining company—a gold mining company—possibly teach anyone about sustainability?
If you want some gold today, you don’t settle in a quaint mountain town in the Rockies filled with scrappy boot strappers singing Colorado My Home Sweet Home in hopes of discovering a nice little vein you can claim.
Too many people have done that already.
continue
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Apr
We’d just spent a day in the hot and humid forest and small villages in and around Akyem, Ghana. It’s the “before” site: Newmont is going through their stage-gate process of due diligence to determine if its worth opening a mine here.
The task is ungraspable. Items on an endless to-do list: Energy needs. Relocating multiple villages, maybe 10,000 people. Roads and access concerns. NGO buy-in. Still not sure if local Chiefs will give their approval (despite not having de facto governance, politicians and enterprises must have their buy-in). Locations of sustainable farm training facilities. Evaluation of available and competent labor. Evaluation of available and competent ex-pat labor.
Oh — and is there enough gold in the ore samples to be profitable.
What also struck me was the water needs. One Newmont engineer told me he’s struggling with a solution to re-routing rivers and streams for the water supply. You need a lot of water to mine gold. A fresh and plentiful water supply for two lakes: a clean one for the water needs of the processing operations, and another to mix with the used cyanide and sulfur dioxide in the destruction process.
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Apr
Extreme… part II
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There appears to be very few international travel classes like this in higher ed. Amanda Pollock, Daniels executive program staff member and the co-brainchild behind the program, is the person who actually makes it all happen. Sold it to Daniels management. Promotes the program. Helps create the curriculum and on-the-ground integration. Books the buses. Brings the gifts to our hosts.
She’s worked in other Universities coordinating travel abroad programs. And she agrees.
“Most travel abroad programs are tourist courses. They’re ineffective in delivering any kind of sense of culture, and what its like to do business abroad.
“The goal of this class is create value on multiple levels: a more valuable learning experience for students. Valuable deliverables for partnering enterprises. Valuable research to bring back to Daniels faculty. And sustainable development practices that add value to Africans.”
Ever been on a University international travel course? What’s been your experience?
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Apr
When you go to fancy-pants MBA school, you learn a lot of fancy-pants terms. It’s nice at first to throw them around and sound smart. Kind of justifies the expense of the degree.
But pretty soon you realize they aren’t that meaningful if (a) they really aren’t communicating anything other than you’re a snotty MBA with some fancy-pants terms, and (b) you really don’t know what it means in the first place.
And by means, I’m talking about the experience of driving through the barely-settled hills of Ghana and happening upon a working gold mine.
Towering processing machinery clustered together, the size of ten, maybe twelve city blocks. Caterpillar’s repair facility four stories high, two football fields long. Security check-points like NORAD. Vehicles zipping about in some presumably rational way, creating traffic like the town square of a small Midwestern town. Compounds of mess halls, pool parlors, the bar, and decent motel-like barracks.
And we haven’t even seen the mine. Or its haul trucks. Or drillers. Or excavators.
Maybe this is what my finance professor meant by Capital Intensive.
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Apr
Machetes and mowers
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When you’re anxious to go on a tour of an African mine site, sitting in a florescent lit room listening to presentations makes you a little jumpy and inattentive. Even so, when Jay Bastian started talking about the mowing operations at his mine, my ears perked up. continue
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