CIMBA Newsletter
                                 
WAKE UP THE
   LEADER IN YOU!

February 2011
In This Issue
CIMBA MBA
CIMBA Undergraduate
Al's Book Club
Meet the Faculty

  
Dr. Paula Fitzgerald,
CIMBA Undergraduate Professor,
Consumer Behavior & Marketing Strategy

Paula Fitzgerald is from, and she quotes, "University of West 'by God' Virginia"! "It's a great day to be a mountaineer, wherever you may be!" She joined us here at CIMBA in the Fall of 2001, and she is back again for this Spring semester. This time around is a bit of a different experience because she is here without her children, now grown and in college. Paula says that "the program itself has grown so much since 2001!" LIFE, LEAP, and the Da Vinci Challenge programs, for example, are completely new to her.

 

Paula taught Global Marketing when she was here in 2001 and says that it was her first real immersion experience and a "jumpstart to grow." She has since started to research many different topics from a global perspective. Paula has an interest in nutrition, particularly in terms of international food standards.

 

Of course Paula fits into the "traditional professor" role at CIMBA, but also "get[s] so much from interacting with the students. Students tend to be more sensitive when they first arrive, because they are far from home and in an unfamiliar environment." Paula enjoys being nurturer and a thought-sparker for them. She won't hesitate to ask a student "Hey, what is up with your eye" -- or offer a friendly ear to students in need.  

 

Funny, memorable stories at CIMBA? Paula's got some. The first time Paula was here at CIMBA, the "mad cow chaos" was getting everyone a bit fearful. Paula was having lunch at a local caf� and was approached by one of her students smoking a cigarette. He seemed a bit concerned that Paula was eating some sort of meat that resembled beef. He said, "Professor Fitzgerald, are you eating beef?! Mad cow is breaking out in Europe" -- as he continued to smoke a cigarette. Paula uses this story to explain risk perception amongst consumers. The odds of getting mad cow disease is miniscule compared to the risk associated with smoking. 

 

The aspect of the CIMBA atmosphere and philosophy that stands out to Paula is the "immersion in a small Italian town and really getting to feel what a town is about: that a town is more than just 'cute.' There are different ways to do things. But also being able to keep an American university abroad is what makes CIMBA unique. It is a great experience for a college students' first international experience; students get an intense travel experience to see how they can navigate, but still get to come back to a stable, supportive university environment."

Alumni Updates
 
The MBA Class of 1994 will be holding a reunion in Montreal, Canada from July 1st to July 3rd. Please contact Derek Kopke via Facebook for more details!

Brigitte Meglitsch and Zoran Radovcic -- both of the CIMBA MBA Class of 2001, are proud parents of Marko, born February 2, 2011. Congratulations, Brigitte and Zoran!

New job? Moving somewhere new? Getting married? Other life changes? Want to volunteer your profile for the Meet the Alumni section?

Keep your fellow alums in the loop! Send your news items to [email protected] and they will appear here the following month.
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Calendar of Events:
March 2011

MBA 
2 Mar.
: Personal Career Strategy Workshop
5, 6 Mar.
: Financial Management, Dr. David Carter
9 Mar.: Exam I, Marketing
12, 13, 15, 16 Mar.
: Marketing Strategies, Dr. Cathy Cole
19, 20, 26, 27 Mar.: Managerial Economics, Dr. Dan Benjamin
23 Mar.: Final Exam, MBA Financial Management
25 Mar.: Leadership Competency Workshop
30 Mar.: Final Exam, Marketing

Undergraduate
28 Feb. - 3 Mar. : Career Week
4 - 6 Mar.: Extended Travel Weekend
7 - 9 Mar.: K.T. for Certification
10 Mar.: 2nd Gourmet Dinner
17 Mar.: Town Hall Meeting
19 - 27 Mar.: Travel Week!
31 Mar.: BCS Trip to Trieste
Save the Date!

CIMBA lion


Please save the following dates for the year-end events at Iowa:

 

Friday, July 15, 2011
 
CIMBA MBA Banquet & Awards
  Ceremony

Saturday, July 16, 2011

  CIMBA MBA Graduation

 

More information will be posted as these dates approach. We hope you will be able to celebrate with our students!

 
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Greetings!  

 

It seems as though we're always reporting this to be the case, but the past couple of months have really had the CIMBA staff putting their shoulders to the wheel. Between the MBA consulting projects, classes every weekend, and an undergraduate class of more than 180, it's easy to say that "busy" is a rather inadequate word for the behind-the-scenes atmosphere at CIMBA.

 

Ultimately, however, the result is a greater breadth of impact for CIMBA students, faculty, and staff alike. The synergies occurring at both of the CIMBA campuses are truly astounding -- all of them resulting in the environment of learning and change and CIMBA genuinely and gladly strives for.

 

This newsletter will catch you up with a few of the events and the learning that has gone on at CIMBA since December: the philanthropic goings-on of the MBA class, a look at one of our returning professors at the undergraduate campus, the experiences of our new undergraduate class with our LIFE program, and the new insights we're constantly building on in the realm of leadership.


Warm Regards,
The CIMBA Staff
CIMBA MBA

The following article is written by Derek Tellin, a member of CIMBA's MBA Class of 2011. Derek Tellin is a graduate from the University of Iowa with a major in International Studies. He comes from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where he gained several years of experience in television broadcast news. Derek decided to join the CIMBA family in order to make the jump from employee to leader and is eager to build on his experiences.


We are mindful, united and committed to growth so that we will achieve our goals, find the strengths in others, and inspire them to be their best.

-Mission Statement of the CIMBA MBA Class of 2011


The mission statement of the CIMBA class of 2011 was finalized on October 20th, 2010. The final product was the result of individual submissions, team meetings, and a gentle nudge from our team coach, Kati. We created this mission statement with genuine enthusiasm, belief in the meaning behind these words, and what we stand for as both individuals and as a team.

 

Just a few short days before this article was written, we reached our halfway point: 140 days from the time most of us arrived here in Asolo and 140 days until most of us leave Europe and venture to the "New World." So what did the mission statement mean to us as a team in the first half of our journey and where will it take us in the future?

 

We are fortunate to have team members with a philanthropic mindset who continually challenge and push us to be mindful about life here at the CIMBA MBA campus and within the surrounding community of Asolo. As a result, we have established an organization powered and coordinated completely by the MBA students. We call this movement CIMBA Pride.

 

Our goal for CIMBA Pride is to return to the community much of the enrichment and beauty that they have so graciously offered to us since we have moved into their home.

 

So far, CIMBA Pride has organized a beautification project for the Rocca, a historic fortress that sits high above the CIMBA campus. Pride organized a group of ten volunteers to pick up litter all the way to the top of the Rocca down to the bottom of the steps leading into Asolo. With one trash bag for every two people, we managed to break into teams and pick up litter that was taking away from the overall beauty of our small mountaintop.

 


Members of CIMBA Pride organize a litter pick-up for the trail to Asolo's historic Rocca

 

In the future, we hope to continue to make a difference and enrich the community by teaching English, volunteering at youth development centers, and partnering with the local churches and businesses in the area. Through these projects, we hope CIMBA Pride will continue to help push us to be mindful and to be united as a team. Most importantly, we want our efforts to help us to grow as individuals, as friends, and leaders.   

CIMBA Undergraduate 

The following article is written by Evan Thomas, a student and resident assistant at the CIMBA Undergraduate campus in Paderno del Grappa. Evan is attending CIMBA through the University of Kansas, where he is a sophomore majoring in Management and Political Science. 

 

After the first week of classes, I spent two and a half days participating in CIMBA's LIFE (Leadership Initiative for Excellence) program. I learned very quickly just what that initiative was. I had found myself in a kind of leadership boot camp.

 

This intensive leadership-training course was a personal and team building commitment that immediately immersed me into the most challenging emotional, physical, and spiritual experience that I have been a part of.

 

I was immediately forced out of my comfort zone and into situations where I had to let my fears go and truly be passionate about who I am as a leader. There was no faking it, playing the part or doing just enough to get by. I had to continuously give 100 percent, be real at all times, and break through my barriers and struggles to see my goals more clearly.

 

At the beginning of the program, we were given a heart rate monitor. A visual tool on a projector screen showed each person on my team's heart rate at any given time. We were taught to understand and better manage our emotions, and to channel our energy into positive actions through a number of exercises.

 

The Neuroscience of Leadership dealt with the inner self and psychology of developing a powerful leadership mind, while allowing us to incorporate our own spiritual methods to achieve and formulate strategies that fit us: it pushed us towards our full potential.

 

Ultimately, we were molded into being leaders with the people, and not to the people.

 

Members of LIFE Team 1020, a team totaling 47 students, form their final reflective circle. 

 

Specific examples would hardly give merit to the experiences that I had, and I will not do it justice through my words. I wish everyone close to me had the chance to experience something like this, as it was truly three of the most unbelievable days in my 19 years of life. 

A-B-C: Al's Book Club 

 

In this month's ABC, I would like to suggest a book to you that makes an effort to apply some of the neuroscience thinking we have been discussing over the past several months. In most cases, the books that I have been suggesting to you have in large measure been either an in-depth presentation of ongoing neuroscience research or a very general application of neuroscience to various topics of interest to you as leaders and managers. With Dr. Henry L. Thompson's The Stress Effect: Why Smart Leaders Make Dumb Decisions -- And What to Do About It, I would like to look at an application of neuroscience that incorporates two very important aspects of CIMBA's Leadership Development System, in Thompson's words: decision-making (within the "process" component of our system) and the management of stress (within the "leadership behavior" component of our system). As in the past, I will use the suggested reading as a vehicle for our alumni to see the progress we are making within our leadership system and to provide insight as to what lies ahead.

 

In his Stress Effect, Thompson does a good job in tying together decision-making and the impact of stress through the lens of neuroscience. In that sense, I am comfortable in recommending the book as a vehicle for enhancing your understanding of applications, particularly as they relate to topics that are of immediate consequence in the workplace. As you read the book, I also want you to understand by comparison some of the refinements we made within the CIMBA Leadership Development System that we believe provide more sustained, long-term behavioral modifications beneficial to the effective practice of leadership and management. The goal is to avoid student "learning" being left (or abandoned) at the classroom door threshold, a concern facing all leadership development programs and one we believe neuroscience and neurobiofeedback is greatly assisting us in successfully addressing at CIMBA.

 

For example, the author does a very credible job of explaining the impact stress has on your working memory from a neuroscience and social psychology standpoint -- more specifically, on your prefrontal cortex executory functioning. Neuroscience research has established that stress subtracts from your working memory and negatively impacts the cognitive resources available to you. Those of you who have had the opportunity to go through our LIFE program within the past 18 months will recall that we specifically test this and show you the results in both the negative and positive engagement environments the program creates by design. Few among us would argue that in those situations where our ability to focus, to provide adequate attention to the cognitive tasks at hand, we are able to make our best decisions and the research verifies that convincingly. At CIMBA, we look at "stress" more specifically than does The Stress Effect by breaking it down into the SCARF (Status, Certainty, Ambiguity, Relatedness, and Fairness) elements that create it, looking to identify the "stressors" of most significance to you. This is an important refinement as with today's neurobiofeedback technology (and more specifically, that technology and the emotion elicitation delivery products we are now creating in-house) we are able to test it, measure it, and use it as the basis for delivering a more-focused personal development plan. Taken in this light, The Stress Effect does provide important insights into the impact of stress on an individual's decision-making whether or not he or she is a leader/manager.

 

In regard to "decision-making" itself, however, the author falls into that age-old trap of confusing "decision-making" with process as a whole (or Doing in the Being-Doing-Knowing model of leadership) -- decision making, problem solving, potential problem analysis, situation appraisal, and other mental "doing" processes find themselves lumped together as "decision making." Increasingly, neuroscience is beginning to sense that such issue resolution algorithms share in common some neural connections in our brains but also each such process has distinct neural connections unique to them. In this sense, I have difficulty with the argument when "concerns" or issues in need of resolution become generally and freely classified as "problems" (which involves root cause) or "decisions" (which calls for choice) -- sorry, those are not interchangeable mental processes. In addition, neuroscience is beginning to uncover the power of express rational process in its ability to provide a vehicle for both managing individual SCARF elements within a team or organization and dampening down organizational emotion before its contagion effects steamroll over any hope of a process-based resolution to the concern at hand. I fully expect to see peer-reviewed research coming from the business schools in the very near future showing that positive engagement companies have significantly higher levels of embedded express process at their foundations -- a culture of process. For those of you interested to explore this topic in more detail, look for a copy of the forthcoming NeuroLeadership Journal where we cite the applicable neuroscience and social psychology research that strongly supports this notion (I remain convinced that in the very important decision-making and problem-solving space within business theory, Kepner Tregoe will be the last, most important "tree" left standing when science finally has its say. Many CIMBA graduates have this advantage in understanding and don't exploit it).

 

With regard to The Stress Effect's "leadership behavior" discussion, it relies very heavily on traditional emotional intelligence definitions. Over the past four or five years I have become convinced that while the notion of Emotional Intelligence is fundamentally important to leadership and leadership development, it needs to be looked at in a different way. In this regard, I begin with a preference to look at leadership as a "social event." In order for an individual to function effectively within this "event," it is important to identify and measure four core psychological components: (1) Self-awareness, (2) Social awareness, (3) Threat/reward circuitry, and (4) Self-regulation. While those of you with a deeper familiarity with Emotion Intelligence will recognize the overlap, this structuring expressly encompasses both the essence of Emotion Intelligence and the neuroscience that drives it. More importantly, it allows us within the CIMBA Leadership Development System to separate the "stressors" -- an individual's SCARF profile -- from the individual's ability to control ("self-regulate") their situational reaction to those stressors. This distinction provides necessary focus on individual differences in ability to self regulate, to control emotions, to control stress. This notion is fundamental to providing the individual with the most appropriate coaching intervention strategy: one size (technique) does not fit all!

 

The Stress Effect finishes with a very good discussion of strategies for managing stress and it is difficult to take issue with the importance of rest, exercise, support, attitude, and nutrition. To some degree, however, this places significant emphasis on symptom modulation as opposed to focusing on root cause, which at CIMBA we believe are differences in ability to self-regulate. More specifically, I am confident The Stress Effects' suggestions will benefit those individuals who find themselves in stressful environments, who have sufficient self-regulatory ability, and need to take mindful action to realign themselves. Without significant support and guidance in the form of an appropriate intervention strategy, those at the other end of the scale, those with low levels of both self-regulation and resilience (Baumeister's depletion rate), are simply not going to get the results they need to be effective at home, work, or in life until they meaningfully address their self-regulation issue.

 

If you find Thompson's The Stress Effect to be interesting and that it provokes your thinking, I would like to suggest two other books that are similar in the manner in that they make us understand the (senseless) power our individual "stressors" have on our performance, health, and well-being. The first such book is Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety. Although it is not a new book, it certainly has maintained its relevancy -- status is one of the most important SCARF elements. The second book is Tal Ben-Shahar's The Pursuit of Perfect, which does a very notable job of explaining that while some level of fear (for me, the root emotional cause of stress) is necessary to get us moving in a productive sense, it is quite debilitating when it goes beyond that level. Again, we are all wired differently on the basis of our individual experiences, with our individual genetic structures also playing a role in allowing our brains to exaggerate that fear and create stress. Many of you who have taken LIFE in the past years will recognize Ben-Shahar's name as we use his definition of "fear" in our development of SCARF.