UMaine graduate students travel to Germany to study international business, learn about different cultures

ORONO – A UMaine master’s in business administration candidate said the cost of a recent business trip to Germany was money well spent.

“It was my first trip to Europe so it was a cultural experience that I’ll value,” said Hampden resident Joshua Coombs, a civil engineer pursing a master’s degree in business administration, with a concentration in general management.

Coombs and nine other Maine Business School graduate students spent a week in Germany in May with Robert Strong, professor of finance and investment education in the business school; Strong’s wife, Kristen; and German university students, professors and representatives of manufacturing companies.

The students toured a bank, a Daimler-Chrysler factory and a science university in the city of Aalen, where they learned about robotics, creating computer-generated holographs of people and the cultural differences between the American and German workplace.

In addition to evaluating two marketing scenarios by competing automobile manufacturers, Opal and Volkswagen, Strong said the students experienced striking cultural differences, such as an absence of workplace amenities that Americans take for granted – like office air-conditioning, public drinking fountains and, in shops and restaurants, very different approaches to customer service.

Strong and Coombs say it’s important to understand different cultural traditions, and workplace rules and regulations and to learn to adapt when necessary.

“Just because things are different doesn’t make them wrong,” said Strong. Being able to appreciate cultural differences in both etiquette and business will make the students “more astute citizens as well as managers,” he added. “We have a lot of students who have not traveled much and they haven’t had the opportunity to experience something in a deep cultural environment.”

Coombs said the tour of the Daimler-Chrysler factory was interesting to him for several reasons, mostly because of the organized way the Germans structure their internal human resources – using employee expertise efficiently. Line workers assembling Mercedes Benz engines, for instance, work with a digital board nearby so they can monitor their production rate. If they don’t meet their quotas, the workers review their performance as a team and determine how to improve.

That “empowers the linemen,” Coombs said. “It gives them more say and more responsibility.”

The UMaine group also visited the Porsche museum, the walled city of Nordlingen, the George Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmisch-Partenkirchen at the base of the Alps and the top of the Zugspitz, Germany’s tallest mountain.

The theory behind the trip is that internationally savvy graduates will make better business leaders, particularly in a business world that involves foreign offices, global subsidiaries and even foreign nationals working with, under or above them in Maine or nationwide.

“The whole globe is becoming smaller and smaller, so if we’re working for a company in Maine, chances are they’ll have an office in a foreign country, so I understand the value of it,” Coombs said.

In the last year, UMaine President Robert Kennedy, Dan Innis, dean of the College Of Business, Public Policy and Health, and Mahon have visited other European countries looking to establish more cooperative international projects and to expand existing exchange opportunities for UMaine students of all levels.

“China is always an intriguing possibility,” Strong said.