Tuesday in Buenos Aires (6/24)

After our exhausting and full day yesterday, we were ready for a change of pace. This morning we travelled for an hour by bus to the campus of the IAE Business School at the Universidad Austral.

WOW, what an impressive campus the Austral Business School has…it is gorgeous!! It would certainly be great for SCB to have a facility like this one. The classrooms are large, there is plenty of meeting space and break-out rooms, a wonderful library and a beautiful cafeteria where we were treated to an excellent lunch.

Our speaker was Professor Patricio Fay, the director of their EMBA and International Exchange Program (and also an Organizational Behavior (OB) professor). In a highly interactive presentation he spoke with us of the cultural considerations of doing business in Argentina. He started from a fascinating case, An Amercan Gaucho in Argentina (prepared by Charles A. Rarick at Barry University) in which an American businessman from Iowa experiences significant cross-cultural difficulties in his negotiations with an Argentine beef-processor.

Here’s a site where you can download and read the case:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1112277

Our discussion included issues of language, relationship, basic cultural assumptions and a summary of some excellent research that compared various cultures along multiple dimensions. All in all, I think that this added a lot to our understanding of Argentina and the Argentine people.

When we arrived back at the hotel, many of us went on a two-hour tour of Buenos Aires. We had a fine tour guide, Andrea Grossetti, who shared the highlights of her city – we heard history and culture, and we saw lots of this beautiful and energetic, European-like city.

Hopefully others will add pictures, as we saw the Plaza de Mayo, the Presidential Palace, the Obalisk, and many of the fascinating neighborhoods of the city.

What impressed many of us the most, however, was the visit to Recoleta Cemetery, where Eva Peron and others from the wealthy families of the city were buried. The cemetery was a small city of streets that were full of stone buildings that were each decorated with spectacular sculpture and monuments, and contained tombs, prayer chapels and other memorials to loved ones and family members. While I was looking to go to a museum, this cemetery truly was one – it was an extraordinary home for fine art.