David Pyke's Blog

Students at school in Ghana

While I was enjoying the holiday heat wave in San Diego, our MBA students were out changing the world.  From Buenos Aires to Bangkok, and from Rio de Janeiro to Ghana, our students were gaining global business experience in our international business practicums. These are field-based, short-term consulting projects for corporations in other countries to address a current and significant problem identified by each organization.

Dr. Patricia Marquez, Director of the Center for Peace and Commerce, …Read Full Article

Check out this video on WSJ.com. SmartMoney reporter, Quentin Fottrell, comments on why Apple fans don’t get worked up about human rights and ethics violations at the company’s factories. It seems they are more interested in getting their hands on the next shiny new Apple product. He even suggests that young consumers of ipads and iphones who might be activist about other causes are so busy, or even addicted to, using their Apple products that they don’t give a thought …Read Full Article

You may have heard that there are some bad apples among Apple suppliers. The company recently released findings from an annual audit of its suppliers, as reported in the Wall Street Journal. Apple contracts out most of its manufacturing to low cost countries, such as China.  Even though the company performs annual audits and keeps a close watch on its manufacturing facilities, this year’s audit discovered that, of its suppliers:

“62% weren’t compliant with working-hours limits” (which, by the way, are …Read Full Article

I want to welcome two new SBA board members who, along with their business experience and expertise, bring good ideas from their companies about food and entertainment.

F. Bryce Ruiz, President and CEO, Ruiz Foods, Inc.

Bryce Ruiz (MBA,’03), President and CEO of Ruiz Foods, is passionate about the family business. Bryce’s father and grandfather founded the company in 1964. They sold frozen Mexican foods based on Grandma Rosie’s recipes to small local grocery stores in the San Joaquin Valley of …Read Full Article

You would think that snow shovels in Alaska would be as plentiful as the proverbial tea in China and coal in Newcastle. Yet, the news from Alaska in an AP article that ran in the Union-Tribune yesterday goes to show that inventory management is tough even in the product categories that seem most predictable.

After being hit with multiple big storms this winter, the Alaska town of Cordova ran short of shovels. City officials checked with several cities, including Anchorage and …Read Full Article