Course: International Business Management

Prof Robert Dalton has been awesome in his first two classes. He was ex-chief economist at Gulf Oil. Gulf Oil was taken over by Chevron in 1984 for several billion $s. Bob later on took on administration at CMU for Exec Ed and in 1991, CMU's exec ed was ranked #1 in the world.

In the first class, he took a case (he like war analogies for strategies) from 1346 when the English forces kicked French butt though they were at a severe disadvantage in terms of numbers. Later, after 10 years, English kicked French butt again. Finally, after 50 years, again French were defeated by the English. The whole saga was good since the excercises we did in class and which revolved around it gave us a different perspective of how history repeats itself.

Finally, he explained us the difference between an indigenous company serving indigenous markets, an exporter, an MNC, and a Global company. This helped me slightly while working on the three cases for yday's class.

He made a nice selection of 3 cases:
1. Philips v/s Matsushita: Philips was highly decentralized and Matsushita(Panasonic and National are the some of the brandnames from their flagship) was highly centralized. Both trying to become a global company. They have been most successful companies in the electronics arena in the 2oth century. Fairly complicated case !

2. Club Med: A services firm facing issues in light of global business.

3. BRLHardy Wines: A wine related company facing conflict during their growth face due to the its key personnel fighting it out for their own sake. This had partially fashion scenario.

The matrix provide by Bob is awesome - for most of the analysis. Each box refers to a different approach to be used for strategies. Each box has its own set of dos and donts.

In between, he was telling us stories about:
1. How a CEO, VP, etc of Gulf Oil had issues in starting the OHProjector !
2. How he and his wife had issues with French lodging where most of the stuff lined up was ultra-modern
3. How one of his super-rich friends served a chilled cheap 2-buck-a-chuck wine to his guests and they didn't realise it since it was cold and numbed their sensation.

He keeps on telling these funny anecdotes and reminds me of one of my mentors !

All in all, it was a great class.
I shall make a presentation on dos and donts in Indian business for his class.

He ended with a beautiful note:
in academic economics ceteris paribus is true .....but....
in business economics mutatis mutandis is true !