My teaching interests have always been mindful of the needs of the professional and business community, both in the United States and abroad. Although now retired, I very much look forward to continuing to contribute to the development of these skills.

My primary academic area of teaching was in international business, which I taught for nearly 25 years in parallel with international teaching and service work.  My courses were both basic international business, and specialized courses on doing business in Europe and the (former) BRICs, the latter developed as the BRICs became important players in global business before post-2008 economic events; appropriate versions were taught to both undergraduate and MBA students.  In addition to these courses, I have also taught many graduate and undergraduate study-abroad courses in Europe, Australia, Taiwan, and China, ranging from one to five weeks in duration.  In other teaching I have given courses for various international Masters programs, including the Management of Technology for the Grenoble Graduate School of Business, and project management for the Burgundy School of Business and the Sorbonne.  This was always very challenging, very educational, and great fun.

In my international service role I made a number of contributions, including writing the 2004 proposal to establish the Sarajevo Graduate School of Business (SGSB), a $10 million, four-year effort.  This was underwritten by the U. S. Agency for International Development, and in this program I taught Business Consulting and New Venture Development with our Bosnian students, in addition to taking on a significant academic administrative role.  I took on similar roles in UD’s programs in Panama in 1980 and Bulgaria in the 1990’s, and served two Deans as Faculty Director of International Programs from 2001 to 2010.

Whether offered at UD or abroad, the MBA course on Business Consulting included instruction on project management, process mapping, and a variety of thinking skills.  I really enjoyed that course, since it required teams of MBA students to work with real organizations on real problems, and come up with workable solutions.  Students had three to four weeks of intensive preparation, and then went out to work with real companies and organizations.  This model was applied very successfully in our program in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and was the basis for design of a sister course on New Venture Creation, which I also taught there.

While on the faculty at UD, I led over 170 sections of professional education through the Division of Professional and Continuing Studies.  I designed and offered both Basic and Advanced seminars in Project Management, and our programs included application of Microsoft Project software;  I am also familiar with Project Libre, the open-source project management software, and have been teaching that to students from the Sorbonne, either in Paris or when groups come from there to Newark, which I still continue to do.

In addition to project management, I offered programs and consulting on workflow process mapping, using my own Graphic Free Style method to capture tacit process knowledge as well as the formal rules and procedures an organization employs.  Tacit knowledge is always found in any flow of work, and is difficult if not impossible for typical Business Process Mapping methods to capture.  I have written a book on the subject which was published through BusinessExpertPress in 2012 and in a two-volume second edition in 2016.

An additional, related, area of expertise is in application of system dynamics using iThink software.  This is a tool that raises the bar for process mapping, since it requires understanding how decision-makers think, and then models the system to explore process improvement, organization changes, and other questions.  Like my method of workflow mapping, iThink captures tacit and intangible variables as well as “hard” variables, and serves as a learning tool as much as an analytical tool.

I have also provided numerous noncredit professional courses abroad, including open-enrollment programs in Bulgaria and a week-long program for Singapore Telecom.  These have focused on the tools described above, and have also included Total Quality Management and Company Strategy.

I would like to end this note on my teaching interests by thanking my many, many students—I have learned so much from them and will forever be in their debt.  I’ll do my best to pass that wisdom along to my future students.