Internationally Savvy Students Said to Make Better Business Leaders
Contact: Robert Strong, (207) 581-1986
George Manlove, (207) 581-3756
ORONO — A UMaine MBA candidate says the cost of a recent business trip to Germany was money well spent.
“It was my first trip to Europe so it was a cultural experience that I’ll value,” says Hampden resident Joshua Coombs, a civil engineer pursing a masters in business administration, with a concentration in general management.
Coombs and nine other Maine Business School graduate students spent a week in Germany in May with Robert Strong, professor of finance and investment education in the business school, Strong’s wife Kristen, who is familiar with Germany, and German university students, professors and representatives of manufacturing companies.
The students — studying for an MBA or MSA (master of science in accounting) — toured a major bank, a Daimler-Chrysler factory and a science university in the city of Aalen, where they learned about robotics, creating computer-generated holographs of people and cultural differences between the American and German workplace.
In addition to evaluating two marketing scenarios by competing automobile manufacturers, Opal and Volkswagen, Strong says the students experienced several significant cultural differences that were quite striking. Among them was an absence of workplace amenities that Americans take for granted, such as office air-conditioning, public drinking fountains and, in shops and restaurants, substantially different approaches to customer service.
Strong and Coombs say it’s important to understand different cultural traditions, and even workplace rules and regulations, and to learn to adapt when necessary.
“Just because things are different doesn’t make them wrong,” says Strong. Being able to appreciate cultural differences in both etiquette and business will make the students “more astute citizens as well as managers,” he adds. “We have a lot of students who have not traveled much and they haven’t had the opportunity to experience something in a deep cultural environment.”
Coombs says the tour of the Daimler-Chrysler factory was interesting to him for several reasons, mostly because of the organized way the Germans structure their internal human resources — using employee expertise efficiently. Line workers assembling Mercedes Benz engines, for instance, work with a digital board nearby so they can monitor their production rate. If they don’t meet their quotas, the workers review their performance as a team and determine how to improve.
That “empowers the linemen,” Coombs says. “It gives them more say and more responsibility.”
In addition to working with students and faculty at an applied science university, the University of Aalen, the UMaine group also visited the Porsche museum, the walled city of N