PSU Magazine Fall 1990

Union had showed us that the Russ ians really have no models on how to run local governments, courts, and other admin istrati ve funct ions. The kind of independent , locall y-controlled civic activities th at we're so familiar with in America are new for them. This also goes fo r non-political kinds of activities like their social institutions and especia ll y for their economi c instituti ons which form the cru x of what we focus on through ou r new MBA program. Jn brief, we've moved from just trying to get to know one another better to the point where we ' ve focused ourselves very sharpl y on what we can do, especia ll y in the economic sense, to bring the Soviet peop le into the global communit y. Their economic libera li zation is clearly running way ahead of education, and it was obvious that employed Soviets managers needed a fund amental understanding of how to run a business in a market economy. There simpl y was no time to begin this trai ning with young undergraduate student s. I 'II sk ip a great deal of detail and preparation time, and simpl y say th at by April of thi s year I had joined with my coll eague, Dr. Alan Resnik , a professor in PSU's Department of Marketing, to fly to Kabarovsk and teach our first six-day seminar at Kabarovsk In stitute of National Economy (KINE). To say the least, it was a real learning experience for us, as well as for them! We found they were absolutely unequ ip– ped to learn in the normal give-and-take atmosphere of our executi ve management seminars. We were standing in front of a group of managers who had lots of respons ibilit ies - rangi ng from presidents to international relat ions directors in large companies - and we were tryi ng to in volve them in our process. For us, advanced executi ve training is an interacti ve, case-oriented, hands-on kind of thing. But after a coupl e of days of trying, our translator - who had been a visiting faculty member with us at PSU last fa ll - told us that we really weren't getting through, that our exampl es were "nyet konkretna," not concrete enough. So of course we started giving more exampl es in order to make our presentation more "concrete." But as it turned out, that was not what they meant. In reality, they couldn 't relate to our examples because they had no fee l for the culture of a market society, and no fundamental knowledge about what it means to be in a market system. I would say that of the 50 students we had , probabl y a dozen were getting our message, but we were losing the other 38. Worse, the ones who fo und themselves unable to interact with us began to talk with each other in class. They were being You ' re not going to be able to haul all I 0-million Soviet managers out of the Soviet Union and bring them over to the United States to train them! -Earl Molander rude partly because they didn ' t feel that they could learn from their own colleagues and thei r own experience. You have to understand, that although we were dealing with experienced Russian managerial personnel, the commerc ial and trading end of their business dealings has usuall y been coordi nated some 3,000 miles to the west, in Moscow. Thus, the marketing and financial aspects of business acti vity had been very distant from them. Jn fact, you' re actua ll y closer to Portland when you·re in Kabarovsk than you are to Moscow, although clearly on ly geographica ll y. We ended up changing ou r foc us almost enti rely to a classical educational format incorporating the traditi onal lecture instruction wi th lists of important items projected overhead on transparencies. Happ il y for them and for us, the res ponse turned around very quickly. Our students were comfortable and even exc ited about thi s kind of learning. And amaz ingly, they could sit there for practicall y a whole day writing everything down , virtuall y everything that appeared ove rhead. One manager remarked that they learned this techniqu~ listening to lengthy Communi st Party lectures. We weren 't certain this was a compliment to us! One lesson we've drawn from our experience is that it is difficult to train a Soviet here in the U.S. about our market economy principles and expect him or her to go back and start teaching fellow Soviets. They just don ' t recognize fe llow Soviets as having leg itimacy in thi s area. Our interpreter, fo r exampl e, understood marketing almost as well as we did. It 's going to be some time before Soviets accept their own as teachers of market principles. and particu larly before they accept examples in their own society as examples they can learn from. It 's a "hard sell " to tell Russians you can learn as much from trying to se ll caviar and "Stolich– noya" in their country as you can from selling Pepsi and potato chips in the United States. W hat have we learned? For one thing, to keep trying. By the end of ou r six days of instruction, we were achi ev ing success. Admitted ly, we were giving them more theory than practical examples, but that was what they wanted and needed at thi s stage in their development. We also learned that our classes need to be smaller and filled with students from homogeneous kinds of backgrounds, so more interaction can eventuall y take place. And we're goi ng to have to deliver a lot of fundamentals before we can move on to greater sophi stication and case studi es, and then depend on the instructors to decide when the timing is right to do that. Plainly, our visiting fac ulty members are going to have to be both sk illful and flexible. Fortunately, I think we are. PSU 9