James Drogan

Your attention is called to Kurt Vonnegut, Joe Heller, and a Great Thanksgiving Message from Bob Sutton's blog.

I entered into the MA in Diplomacy program at Norwich for a number of reasons.  One of which was that I wanted to understand better the forces that impinged upon globalization and subsequently should affect the course of study in International Transportation Management at Maritime (ITM).

Emerging from the Diplomacy was the graphic to the left (I tend to think in diagams and pictures) in which I tried to imagine these major forces, often working, I would suggest, at cross purposes and how they would affect ITM, caught somewhere in the confluence.

ITM considers economic geography, but as the tyranny of geography has been overcome through innovation realized in massive alterations of the geography and a minimization of its impact, other forces are emerging to be dominant.

In particular, relations.

By relations I mean relations at an international, regional, national, state, and local level.  These relations are often political in nature and concern the distribution of power.  My working hypothesis is that graduates of the ITM program need to increasingly understand this force (and these forces) if they are to deliver value in the marketplace.

All the above is to introduce a recent Foreign Policy blog post (Walt, S. M. (2012, October 31). What’s the Foreign Policy Agenda for the Next Four Years? Foreign POlicy. Retrieved from http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/10/31/a_to_do_list_for_obama_or_romney) that is relevant to understanding the context in which globalization exists.

There is a need for us to continually push the boundaries of our education and understanding.  Formal eduction, such as the MA in Diplomacy and the MS in ITM, almost always are behind the curve.

From John Mauldin's Outside the Box of November 2, 2012.

I am going to write about the election this weekend, but not in the way you might think. This election offers a teaching opportunity about one of our biggest challenges as investors, and that is the problem with unreliable models that I have been writing about for the past three weeks. How can very smart people look at the same data and come to such different conclusions? Whether it is politics, investments, or the weather, there is a common theme and one that we very much need to be aware of if we hope to succeed...

That, at least, is how economists generally view things. However, economists do not run for office all that often; and what for the economist is the rational solution can be for a politician a recipe for electoral disaster.

Yergin, Daniel (2011-09-20). The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World (Kindle Locations 11331-11332). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.