Lyon Day 3

After spending a week frolicking about in the Netherlands and taking a couple of chill days in France, it was only inevitable that UTD would give us some morning classes to “learn from”. Today was our first day to go visit EMLyon which was about a 20 minute ride from where we stayed. Apparently, EMLyon is a relatively hard business school to get into as they only except about 200 or so students per year out of the thousands that apply. They’ve noted that their students are for the most part international and can speak more than one or two languages fluently which is quite impressive although not surprising since Europe has so many countries in close proximity with each other.

Our lecturer was a German expat by the name of Hans Schlierer that teaches mainly international negotiation skills and techniques. While the topic is nothing new, it was interesting to hear it from a foreigner’s point of view of how he views negotiation between different cultures. For example, Russians negotiate as a symbol of power. And if we were to put things into a theoretical perspective negotiation is an act between two or more parties and often time is when one party wants something that the other party has. Well, duh. Quite frankly, in my opinion, having classes such as this one is not very helpful in building skills. People can literally map things out into boxes and squares and/or have arrows pointing this way and that, but it’s only by experiencing the actual negotiation over time do you gain from anything. It’s funny that he had to condense his semester long lecture into the three hours that we were there but only half that information is really useful to learn from unless you actually go out there yourself and start negotiating. End of point.

After the lecture, we were given the choice to either visit Renault (the automobile manufacturing company) or EDF Group (one of France’s energy company). Since Europe is known for using a lot of green energy as well as being able to be relatively conservative in their use compared to Americans, I chose to visit EDF to gain a first-hand perspective on how they view energy. The bus shuttled us off and dropped off the first group going to Renault then proceeded head towards EDF. The office was smaller than I expected as we were led into their showroom where they featured interactive scenarios of using different types of energy (solar, wind, nuclear and water). EDF is not only owned by the French government, but has a majority of the market share in France as well. Nearly 85% of the energy that France produces is nuclear despite our common preconception that Europe runs on green energy. In fact, their interactive scenario allows you to play around with different mixtures of energy and factors in weather to allow you to see how much total output it makes. Not surprisingly, alternative forms of energy is not very effective.