Random Thoughts

By Randy Zwitch - August 3rd, 2009 Category: CCMBA 2010D| Pre-reading: London

In the spirit of Thomas Sowell, brilliant economist and Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford who regularly writes a “Random Thoughts” column on the state of politics, here’s what I’ve been thinking about today related to the Duke Cross Continent program:

  • The amount of pre-reading isn’t getting any easier.  But I am making headway, one case study/article/chapter at a time.
  • Fuqua has an awesome level of technology available to the students…
  • …but it’s starting to get ridiculous how much online info, how many social networking sites, and generally how much school information we need to keep track of.  I’m going to need a secretary pretty soon!
  • A classmate of mine went as far as starting a thread on a private message board, just for daily links to check. That’s pretty impressive, given that the program hasn’t really even started yet.  (Thanks for the inclusion of my blog Mark, I appreciate it!)
  • Given our first trip is less than two weeks away, I’m glad I’m an American and that we’re going to London.  Sounds like several of my overseas classmates are still having visa difficulties.  Apparently, there is a difference between student and tourist visas, and only one is appropriate. I’m sure I’ll be able to experience that fun on some of the later trips.
  • Global politics is complicated.

Global politics is complicated.  Yeah, and the sky is blue!

I just finished “The Clash of Civilizations”, an article by Samuel P. Huntington from the journal Foreign Affairs.  In the next several days, I’ll be making my way through the C485: Culture, Civilizations, and Leadership (CCL) pre-readings.  This class will likely cause a bit of cognitive dissonance; I love interacting with people of different cultures, but I don’t like reading about the details.  I also don’t like reading history, or about the mechanics of politics, or sociology overall.

I do look forward to the classroom discussions and group projects for this class…but the reading?  Not so much.

Related Posts:

Tags:   , ,  
«  
  »
Post comment as
twitter logo facebook logo
Sort: Newest | Oldest
Syed Husain

I'm making head way too, but more along the lines of one page at a time :)
I liked the article "Clash of civilizations", It made me see how much we, as human beings, are bound to the idea of the self. It's also interesting that, throughout history, we have kept abstracting our sense of self to higher levels, I definitely think the class discussions will be enjoyable.

share
  • spam
  • offensive
  • disagree
  • off topic
 Like
AJ

Read some of those books during undergrad. Good reads.

share
  • spam
  • offensive
  • disagree
  • off topic
 Like
Randy Zwitch

Exactly. While the sense of self is such an obvious idea, I didn't think about it until it was formalized on the paper. I've always thought of people around the world in terms of country, because over the short time horizon civilization more or less equals country. But really, it's the micro-details of religion and culture that tend to define the country, rather than the country defining religion and culture.

share
  • spam
  • offensive
  • disagree
  • off topic
 Like

Trackbacks

  1. Pre-reading: Culture, Civilizations and Leadership « Duke Fuqua Cross Continent MBA – Class of 2010 says:
    August 5, 2009 at 9:11 pm

    [...] Culture, Civilizations and Leadership In my last post, I talked about looking forward to the CCL class, but not necessarily looking forward to the [...]