|
Day 1. We all managed to get here safe and sound... from what I hear from everyone, it really wasn't too bad. One of us has a bad case of the flu in the week prior to arriving and others had had other obstacles to contend with but no one let anything deter them from arriving at 12 Paradise Street... our home for the next 12 days. It's a short walk from our lodgings (as they are called here) to St. Peter's College where most of our in class activities and meals are held and it's through a busy central shopping district so there is always fun things to see as we walk. We are also located just south of the High Street, steps away from the ancient covered market, the Broad Street and most importantly, the sister colleges of Oxford.
After lunch, we reconvened to hear one of our own, an MBA alum from '85 who has since moved to England and worked here for the past 20 or so years. She serves as a consultant to both EU based countries and American countries who basically want to learn how to communicate with one another. She has written two of the best selling books in this area, one of which is called simply Doing Business With Americans. She told us many stories about her various experiences negotiating between her two worlds in order to help her clients do the same. It was a great way to start us thinking in a more global mindset; thinking about how culture and traditions also influences how we do business together...even to the point of how we should conduct conference calls! Monday evening, the first Monday evening is also the day we take the formal group picture. We all lined up by height in this staircase row of people, traipsed on the stairs and were photographed. Each class participant will get a copy of this photo and it is the one that you find on the website for this class. Each Monday evening throughout the summer St. Peter's organizes some type of cultural event just before dinner. This evening it was a lovely husband and wife duo who played us music and told us stories from the middle ages in England to the early English renaissance. They also shared with us the origins of the instruments they played which were almost all, to our surprise, from the Middle East and were brought to Europe over the course of the crusades! As Kees pointed out as he wrapped up the evening, globalization is not a new event in our time; it was part of history, of trade and it's important that we remember that we are not the first to trade and navigate new management challenges, it's just that we are faced with a Scale of globalization never seen before. Dinner was interestingly formal. They have this tradition at Oxford of the High Table. It's considered an honor to be one of the chosen few to sit at the High Table; the table which is set on a dais slightly above those of the student tables. The history of this is simple. Professors or Dons and Fellows and their honored guests were the only ones who were allowed to sit in this honored place. (To give you a visual, picture the table in the Harry Potter movies where the teachers sit, that's what it looks like!) We had a formal dinner with all of the students who are studying at St. Peter's this summer and after dinner it's off to our free time. As one of our students pointed out, the night is young and there is a pub that we need to try!
|
||||||||||||
