Friday, March 29th, 2024
Categories
Featured News News

Not Before Coffee

Visiting faculty member offers tips for international studies students.

Dr. Alberto Ibanez

If you’re going to be conducting negotiations in Spain, you need to wait until coffee to even start the business discussion. The same negotiations can be wrapped up before the menu even arrives in Germany. Those are just a couple of the tips that students in the class of international studies visiting faculty member Dr. Alberto Ibañez are learning.

Ibanez, formerly C.E.O. of Millersville’s partner Foro Europeo, is at Millersville teaching a course on international negotiations until February 20. A 1992 graduate of Millersville in computer science, Ibanez is conducting the class for all majors who are interested in working globally.

“The students are developing skills of negotiations and competencies that they can use around the world,” said Ibanez. “We do role playing to provide them with strategies they can use to negotiate. While knowledge acquisition is vital, skills development is critical because it is through these skills how we convert knowledge into action. It’s important to note that in some countries, like my native Spain, you need to develop trust and a personal relationship before you can do business. It’s important to ask about family and not uncommon to discuss personal matters.”

When it comes to business negotiations Ibanez says while people from the U.S. are direct, those from Germany are even more direct.  And, while people in Spain will want to get to know you personally before doing business, people from Argentina will need even more time to develop a relationship before sitting down to business.

Ibanez came to the U.S. for a week and ended up staying for seven years in the late 1980s, getting his bachelor’s degree at Millersville and his master’s in business administration (MBA) at the University of Houston. He then went back to Spain for 17 years, working much of that time at Foro Europeo.

“While I was at Foro Europeo, President McNairy came to visit and signed our partner agreement, the first one in the U.S.,” said Ibanez. “The prestige of having a U.S. partner such as Millersville helped us to sign another 50 agreements with partner universities around the globe.”

Ibanez is now working as a consultant, giving lectures and helping to set up global MBA programs in the U.S., Europe and Asia, and developing internationalization strategies for companies around the world.

In this video, Ibanez talks about his time spent at Millersville University as an undergraduate, and his connection between Millersville’s partner institution Foro Europeo:

please install flash

3 replies on “Not Before Coffee”

I enjoyed reading this because Alberto was a student in several of my Spanish classes while he was a student at MU. At that time, we also had the honor to host Nobel Laureate in Literature Camilo José Cela, and Alberto, among other students, was invited to have dinner with Cela. As a native Spaniard, Alberto very much appreciated the honor and marveled that he would be able to dine with Camilo José Cela in a place like Millersville while probably never having the opportunity even to meet Cela in Spain!
I was “tickled” when MU later signed an agreement with Foro Europeo and my former student was one of Foro’s important administrators.

Leave a Reply