2009 India Study Tour

The India Study Tour team includes Tammy Leland from Crooked Trails, a faculty representative, and the assistant director for MBA Global Programs in the Global Business Center (GBC).

Faculty Representative: Study tour faculty have several roles:

1. Create educational content for IBUS 570 and award academic credit for the course.
2. Serve as official UW representative on the tour.  Having a faculty member lends credibility to the tour to overseas companies, especially in countries where a social hierarchy is an important cultural value.
3. Work with student tour leaders to coordinate and implement an emergency response plan should an emergency of any kind occur.  This includes alerting GBC staff.
4. Learn alongside graduate students.  Faculty are often selected for tours because they have no previous experience with the destination.  What they learn on a tour provides invaluable educational insight that they pass along to their future students.
5. Provide program continuity through long-term institutional knowledge.  The Study Tours have been around for over a decade, during which time hundreds of students and a handful of staff have left UW while faculty turnover is much lower.

Jane George-Falvy is a faculty member at the University of Washington Business School. Jane earned a B.A. in Psychology and Philosophy from Whitman College and M.B.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Human Resource Management and Organizational Behavior from the University of Washington. After three years as a faculty member at the Australian Graduate School of Management in Sydney, Australia, she returned to Seattle to join the Department of Management and Organization.  She is an expert in work motivation and performance management, social cognitive theory, skill acquisition, training, managerial skills, group dynamics, negotiation, and compensation. She currently teaches courses in organizational behavior and human resources management. Her research interests lie primarily in the areas of motivation and performance management. She is a member of the Academy of Management, the American Psychological Association, the Society of Human Resource Management and serves as the faculty advisor for the SHRM student chapter at the University of Washington. She also served on the Board of Directors of the Northwest Human Resource Management Association. She is the Faculty Director of the Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition which draws teams of students from around the world to Seattle to present plans for social enterprises. She also selects, prepares, and coaches student teams that travel to international case analysis competitions. Jane provides consulting services to clients including Boeing and Microsoft. When the sun is shining, she will head either to snow or lake to ski. During Seattle’s lengthy shoulder seasons, she spends free time trying to keep the dandelions from overtaking her yard.

The study tours are an amazing experience on a variety of fronts: you have the opportunity to blend your business education with exposure to a foreign culture. You will make new contacts while strengthening relationships with your classmates. You might learn a little bit about yourself in the process. You can even earn academic credit for this! I served as advisor for the tour to Australia three years ago that capitalized on my experience having lived in Sydney. The India tour will be a new challenge for me as I’ve never been there before. I’ll be reading books on modern India in the months ahead to complement my history lessons, as well as conferring with other advisors from previous years to capitalize on their experiences. This tour’s focus on CSR dovetails nicely with my interest in social entrepreneurship; India is a hotbed of ventures that not only return economic profits to investors but also deliver a social benefit. I look forward to seeing firsthand modern India’s remarkable transformation into a global player and its emerging CSR initiatives. Is CSR an integral part of India’s successful transformation, in other words, is it a value that drives the country towards betterment, or is it a byproduct of success?

Crooked Trails Representative: Tammy Leland