Guest Lecturing at La Universidad de Guayaquil

October 30, 2014 — IBM's Corporate Service Corps (CSC) program requires all participants to perform a small number of hours of community service. My CSC Ecuador team accomplished this by delivering seminars at the La Universidad de Guayaquil (UG's). We delivered five sessions:

• Marketing and sales;
• Consulting;
• Career development; 
• Project management; and
• Social media.

Information about UG's total enrollment was not easy to find. But it contains most of the schools that a U.S. university usually contains, including medicine, business, and engineering. Students attend UG at relatively little cost. In this manner, Ecuador pursues policies that resemble those in Europe.

Guayaquil is also home to several other universities. Pyxera Global, a non-profit organization through which IBM administers CSC in this region, is well-represented by graduates of Universidad Especializida Espíritu Santo (UEES). UEES is a private university. Representatives of Universidad Católica de Santiago de Guayaquil were inviting us to deliver a similar workshop for their faculty.

La Universidad de Guayaquil is a public university located in the heart of Guayaquil, Ecuador's largest city.

I participated in the session on Marketing and Sales. I never would have anticipated a few years ago that this would be my first choice. Marketing however was one of the business-school courses I enjoyed most. Most of my time at IBM has been spent in business development. Our comfort zones can migrate in surprising directions during our lifetimes.

Our session was well-attended. Our classroom started out at two-thirds full. It was nearly full by the end. The attendees were attentive throughout. They asked us thoughtful questions. Omar Valero, one of the business school professors, translated for us. 

Instructors from the business school at La Universidad Guayaquil participate in a Sales and Marketing seminar conducted by members of IBM's CSC Ecuador team.

I led a discussion that described how foundational concepts from marketing have practical consequences in our industry. I started with the Marketing "4P's." I then linked that concept to a very useful paper on software-industry business models. I concluded with describing how apply a model for sales transactions to craft messages tailored to specific stakeholder points of view.

Explaining how fundamental concepts from marketing apply to the software and IT industries.

Learning what IBM colleagues do was perhaps the most-interesting part of the exercise. Su Young Seo, IBM colleague from Korea, studies potential new clients for our outsourcing business. She examines their financial statements for hints about how IBM's services might provide strategic benefit. This resembles work I did during a business-school residency in Istanbul. IBM India colleague Suprio Kar talked about data mining of social networking traffic to develop maps of influencers.

The team that conducted the Sales and Marketing seminar for Universidad de Guayaquil (UG) business school faculty (l-r): Supriyo Kar (IBM India), Omar Valero (UG business professor and translator), Su Young Seo (IBM Korea), and yours truly.

We held a side discussion with the Dean of the Business school. Ecuador has a national policy that university students must perform a total of 400 hours of community service and pre-professional internship in order to graduate. This is a potential source of human capital for our CSC client E.dúcate. We also asked him for his perspectives on technology use in the university, and students' preparation for university study.

I found the university visit very rewarding. I got to observe first-hand a challenging environment within which to deliver higher education. Improving access to education is a national priority for Ecuador's development. Universidad de Guayaquil represents an important contributor to that goal.