The President's Exchange

When Nell Hartley called me three years ago and asked me if I would consider running for OBTS President, to tell you the truth, I didn’t know a whole lot about the current board and its work. Having served on the board for one term and having been a regular conference attendee for many years, I had recently taken a 12-year mommy sabbatical from all but local conferences. In fact, in recent years I had attended our own conference only three times. All along I had been reading and contributing to The Journal of Management Education, and my appreciation for our uniquely innovative philosophy and our community of teachers had only grown.

Which brings me to the subject of this post:  Who will be the next president of the Society? My question to you is, might it be you?  In my mind there are three fundamental qualifications for the job.  First, you must have an appreciation of the OBTS culture. This means that you have attended the conference fairly regularly, and you read and probably contribute to, or review for,  The Journal of Management Education, and you value the role that developing community plays in our mission. Second, you have demonstrated an interest in serving the Society. This interest could take many forms, including reviewing, editing, serving on committees, working on a conference, or serving on the board. Finally, you should be a tenured professor, or, if not, then working in an institution in which achieving tenure is unimportant.

The Society is run by a working board of 15 people, each of whom has a particular charge, plus two ex-officio conference coordinators. In addition to guiding the strategy of the organization, the president is mainly responsible for coordinating these folks, and has such additional functions as site development and chairing the Bradford Award committee. The president works closely with the Executive Committee of the board, and our half-time administrator, Brandon Charpied, who is a tremendous asset in all aspects of our daily work, from conference management to website development.

If you have the predilections I have mentioned, please consider running for President of OBTS. You will love the role, as I have.

-Rae

Today, March 20, 2012, many OBTS members are feeling the effects of climate change.  Here in Boston we are having June weather in March.  In the Western mountains, snow packs have changed drastically  from 2011. In the Midwest the number of tornadoes has been setting records.  Sure, scientists cannot attribute any particular weather event to global warming; measuring  natural phenomena in real time is just too hard for that. Yet, as we experience them in the moment, many of us now believe that the recent weather anomalies  are at best unusual .  And sometimes we experience our lovely warm day with apprehension, as a harbinger  of change we do not understand, control, or predict. We begin to understand  that with exceptional climate changes, global sustainability is at risk.

So it is not surprising that this year Program Coordinator Ken Rhee chose sustainability as the OBTC conference theme.  Or that the OBTS  board voted recently to give you a choice about whether to buy a conference  t-shirt.  (This year I will be sporting an oldie but goodie.)

And what about our collective carbon footprint? Curious about this, I made a couple of simple calculations.  First I checked the carbon impact of my own flights between Boston and Buffalo.  At  http://www.terrapass.com/carbon-footprint-calculator I figured out that I will be flying round-trip 788 miles, and injecting 412 pounds of Co2 into the atmosphere.  (Were I to take the train, I would inject 331 pounds.)  I can offset this—for example, by contributing to Terrapass projects that capture methane or promote clean energy—for $5.95 per 1000 pounds.  Then, using higher math, I figured that if 250 of us do approximately the same thing, collectively we emit 103,000 pounds (51.5 tons) of CO2, and at $5.95 per thousand pounds, we can offset this for about $600.  Of course, I am simplifying a lot here and not accounting for all the carbon costs I and we incur. But isn’t this an interesting beginning  to a sustainability conversation for future OBTC’s?

In the face of climate change, we all hope to dig deep and find resilience…resilience in ourselves, in our families, and in the young people we teach. One way to start building that resilience in our own arena would be to make teaching global sustainability—not  only operational sustainability—a requirement  in every business school.  See you at Brock!

REFERENCES

For a thoughtful examination of carbon offset practices see:

Elizabeth Rosenthal, Paying more for flights eases guilt, not emissions. The New York Times, November 17, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/18/science/earth/18offset.html

What does a ton of CO2 look like?

http://www.energyrace.com/commentary/what_does_a_ton_of_co2_look_like/

For more on 2012 snowpacks:

http://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/individual.php?db_date=2012-03-11

For more on 2012 tornadoes:

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/2011_tornado_information.html

Dear friends,

OBTS is run by volunteers, academics who realize its value not only for themselves, but also for the future business managers whom we all teach.  As you plan your academic year, please consider what OBTS has meant to you and your students, and think about how you might give back to the Society.  You will not be surprised to learn that I have here a short list of service opportunities…

• Volunteer to be Program Coordinator for the 2013 or even the 2014 national conference. Contact me directly to learn more about this appointment. We also need sites and Site Coordinators. Although the 2013 deadline is impending (September 30), beginning now we are actively interested in proposals for the 2014 site.
• Run for a board office. The board meets twice a year, for a long weekend in October and several preconference days in June.  This year our full membership will elect a Conferences Chair (which organizes preconference activities like the doctoral consortium) and Professional Development Chair (in charge of such initiatives as podcasts and teaching bootcamps).
• Volunteer to review for the Journal of Management Education. Contact the Editor, Jane Schmidt-Wilk, at jschmidtwilk@gmail.com<mailto:jschmidtwilk@gmail.com>.
• Volunteer to review for the annual conference in June, at Brock University in 2012. Look for the call for papers and reviewers this fall.
• Share your best thinking about teaching and learning in an article for JME.

Speaking of important service, I want to take this opportunity to recognize the hard working committee that was so instrumental in the selection of John Billsberry as the new editor of JME. Our sincere thanks and praise to Tracey Sigler, Chair, and Kathy Lund Dean, Charles Fornaciari, and Jeffrey Mello.

Have a great semester,

Rae

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In these days of troubled economies and threatened ecosystems, I find myself wondering how our Society’s values will survive. I am particularly heartened by recent and planned special issues of JME, issues that focus on such topics as implementing service learning, understanding management education in relation to conditions of poverty and disadvantage, learning from indigenous cultures, and implementing the principles of PRME (Principles of Responsible Management Education). Article by article, JME, most recently under the editorship of Dr. Jane Schmidt-Wilk, has done a fine job of integrating the content (values, data,  management  theory, pedagogical theory) and process (professional sharing, teaching innovation) that sustain innovative management education.  In the same way, I anticipate that our upcoming national conference at Marquette University, run by Drs. Kathleen Kane and Bonnie O’Neill, will be a model for building community among scholar-teachers…

In this era of budget cuts and travel restrictions, of publishing pressures that both help us and hurt us in our role as educators, I urge you to stay engaged with our Society’s ongoing conversation. Our values include fostering trust, mutual respect, personal growth, and a community of innovative educators. Will these values survive? How can you and I make that happen?

Rae André
President