After Deanship

Well, you know, I'd been planning to go to Africa for a long time. I hadn't had a break from Deanship for 26 years, you know I've done 26 years on the trot until the end of December, beginning of January, whichever date you want to date it at. I planned Africa. I got money from the European Foundation for management development, and from GMAC. I persuaded them that was an area that needed to be looked at. My view is Africa is a completely forgotten continent in many ways and really people need educating about it. So I got a research grant. SMU didn't have to pay for my sabbatical, so I've been paying for my own sabbatical. And you know, I've got a book going to be coming out next June for the first part of the Africa Studies. The second one coming out after that and then the Latin American one coming out in-between. And I've got five books planned for the next two and a half years. It's really because traveling in Africa opens your eyes.And so people have got this perception of Africa as it's constantly have wars, constantly have strife. I mean it's not perfect, but a lot of that couldn't be farther from the truth. There's some tremendously entrepreneurial Africans, yearning for people to work with them. But they don't want a repeat of British, French, Belgian, Portuguese colonialism, or North American academic colonialism if you understand what I am saying. They want, and what I've learnt is I have to tell the story completely different from the one I thought I was going to tell, which is ok. I mean, I think people need to know more about Africa then I thought they needed to know. And there are some fascinating projects going on which I'm sure can keep me going for, that's a question about the function of your health and everything. I have got enough work for ten years if I wanted it. So I've been doing that. I am also teaching. I taught the executive MBA course again, I taught it every single year since it has been going. And I taught the PhD course in General Management, which I teach with the professor from NYU. And I also taught the Doctoral course in Strategy for the new DBA program. So I've been a busy boy. At the same time, I have also been teaching an MBA Consulting course, which is a project course with Johnson & Johnson, which is a company I've worked with for a long time. So the students are organized into five projects, which are projects of interest to Johnson and Johnson. And I am mentoring them and tutoring them to develop consulting projects for them. Well you know there are many consulting projects but nevertheless, I'm trying to teach some skills of consulting. That's the most difficult course to teach. Anybody who believes that projects and experiential learning is easy is an idiot. I mean the SMUX initiative, they should be giving a faculty member double the teaching credit for doing that. The amount of time I spent anchoring between people in Johnson and Johnson, the students, mopping the students brows occasionally, is I mean I've done it twice last year, I did it with Phillips, even when I was Dean. And I found that fascinating too but its hard work and I am not sure I am going to do that again even though it goes down very well, it's hard work. So I've been teaching as well but I have been teaching over time since, throughout the time I have been as Dean so nothing has changed. But more graduate stuff now than it ever was.