Time flies, the first month of IMD MBA has already passed! With a lot of overnight studying and laughter, each one in the mighty 90 class feels more bonded with each other.
Today I would like to share with you my favorite class – Economics and Professor Ralf Boscheck. The Economics class is very challenging, you do not need to read cases beforehand, but you do need to put all your attention on each single word the Professor says, otherwise you miss a lot of learning (as well as fun).
In today’s micro-economic class, we did group cultural sharing. Ralf gave us 10 key words that we had to link to a proverb/motto in our own culture, and share with whole class. For example, “Politeness” is “礼” in Chinese, and we have the motto “ 非非礼勿言,非礼勿视,非礼勿听 ”, which in English means “if it’s not polite, do not speak, see, and listen”.
During the sharing, we felt the huge advantage of having almost 40 nationalities in our class, and I heard many interesting insights from different cultures and nationalities. I found that most of the norms are shared globally, and are highly relevant to family and culture.
However, although norms are shared globally, there are still some important differences as to how they are recognized and used.
That is the charm of Ralf’s Economics class, you can not only learn knowledge, but also understand more about the diversity of culture.