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Perspective: Same Countries Different Decades
Same Countries, Different Decades
BY LIZA ROBERTSON
INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL SEMINARS
CLASS 15 / 1986:
SOVIET UNION, POLAND, GERMANY, EUROPE CLASS 29 / 2000:
CHINA, MONGOLIA, RUSSIA, UKRAINE, POLAND CLASS 41 / 2012:
GERMANY, POLAND, CZECH REPUBLIC
No matter where they traveled, all alumni are connected by the lasting impact of their international seminar. As the fellows of Class 50 returned from Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic, alumni from classes 15, 29 and 41 found themselves reflecting on their own experiences in those same countries. For Diane Friend (15), Tess Dunham (29) and Matt Fisher (41), the international seminars were more than an opportunity to travel; they changed their perspectives on the world, leadership and history.
Diane Friend (15)
Assistant Professor, Agribusiness Texas A&M
What were some of the most impactful moments of your time in Poland and Germany? One of the things that really struck me as being most impactful in Poland was the fact that the Polish farmers we met with still talked about World War II as if it had happened yesterday. We met with a pork producer in Poland who was doing some pretty innovative things back then. I’m going to Poland soon and will be meeting with the same farmer again. At the time of our international seminar, Poland was under communist rule and farmers were rising up. This particular farmer had been persecuted by the government and put in jail for a few days. We could see there was a movement within the farmer community against the Soviets. The Polish people, but the farmers especially, would rather die than be oppressed. There was a fine line in those days – the Soviets needed Poland because they were producing most of the food, but the government would oppress them by limiting the supplies they had access to. This farmer was quite outspoken and we thought he had a lot of guts to go against the Soviets. We visited a university in Germany and met with students who gave us a tour. After somebody mentioned the war and that we had been to Auschwitz, we got into a debate with the students over what had really happened in World War II and the Nazi occupation. They completely denied the fact that the concentration camps actually existed and claimed it was a conspiracy campaign. It gave me the sense of how governments can control the narrative and what people know. In this moment we went from a communist country to a free democracy. It was a dichotomy of government control in a different way than in Poland.
Is there a lesson learned during the international seminar that is still meaningful to you today? I was in my 20s during this trip and it really set my views on the way I live my life. It showed me that being a leader is not always easy, and not very popular sometimes. Being a leader does mean from time to time you’re going to get crosswise of the political wind and you need to be willing to sacrifice for that. At that time, we were still in the Cold War, Ronald Reagan was president and Gorbachev had just come in. It was a very interesting time in history to be in a communist controlled country. I didn’t realize what an impact that made on my life back then, but it really makes me look at where we are today and think about the sacrifices those Polish farmers were making.
What is your advice to Class 50 fellows now that they’ve returned from their international seminar? I think they should write. They need to write articles, editorials in some form or fashion on social media or blogs. When you first get back, everyone wants to know about your trip – it’s all fresh and novel and neat and then the years go by and it fades. The urgency to continue leadership needs to go on. The things they’ll see and experience are what the world needs to hear a lot and frequently.
What is your advice for leaders? We think of leadership as holding a position, but every day we have a responsibility to be a leader. You need the skills to be an everyday leader. We need to use our leadership skills to influence people and make change, and we can do that at the smallest level without ever holding a title or position. The advice I would give is don’t use your place in society, be the leader at the smallest times, all the time.
What lesson do you carry with you from Ag Leadership? The love to learn. Ag Leadership really did plant a seed in me of lifelong learning. Don’t ever be satisfied with what you know today. Even though I had a degree, it put me on a trajectory of lifelong
learning. There’s always more knowledge out there, and that’s what Ag Leadership should do for everyone. I thought I’d be a farmer for the rest of my life and now I’m a professor in a tier one research university. I would’ve never dreamed of this ever. But Ag Leadership makes you believe it’s possible to be more than you are.
Tess Dunham (29)
Attorney at Law Kahn, Soares & Conway, LLP
What was the most impactful experience in Poland for you? That would be going to Auschwitz. When we went to Auschwitz, it was such a moment of silence and I got an eerie feeling about the atrocities that happened during the war. It is something that has never left my heart. I had read about it my whole life and studied it as a history major, but nothing compares to walking through there and seeing the showers and the mountains of shoes from those who were brutally killed. It is one of the most impactful places that someone could tour because it really does bring home just how horrible humanity can be against people they don’t like. That has never left me.
What lessons did you take away from that experience? Making sure that we as leaders never allow something like that to happen, but yet it does. We see genocides throughout the world in different countries and that’s not ok. It also gave me a continued awareness. It was a reminder that the law and order freedom system that we have in the U.S. is truly unique in what it does provide. I learned that just saying you’re a capitalist country doesn’t necessarily mean it happens in the same way it happens in the U.S. During the trip we still saw tremendous corruption as these countries were trying to transition to capitalism. It doesn’t happen overnight and doesn’t happen just because there’s a new regime in place; it’s a longterm transition.
Is there a lesson learned during the international seminar that is still meaningful to you today? One of the biggest components to me is being open. We need to be open to different cultures and societies and understand how they come to the different decisions they come to. Don’t look at things through our U.S. perspective, but look at things through the historical perspective of where others have come from.
What is your advice to Class 50 fellows now that they’ve returned from their international seminar? Keep it in your memory. Journal it. Maintain those journals so you always have that memory. Our memories do fade and we need to be able to have that continuation to look back on.
What lesson do you carry with you from Ag Leadership? The whole experience in its entirety – the development of leadership and interpersonal communications and learning to better communicate with people from different life experiences than my own.
Matt Fisher (41)
CEO Fisher Bros. Logistics and Crop Management Company What was the most impactful experience in Poland for you? Auschwitz by far was the most impactful. It’s hard to wrap your mind around what you’re going to experience. You can read about it all you want, but then when you’re actually standing there, it’s a whole different experience. We went in February and it was cold and we were told stories about some of the punishments being related to standing outside in the cold. It made it very real for us. Walking through the gas chambers and experiencing everything in person, there are no words to describe what people went through.
Is there a lesson learned during the international seminar that is still meaningful to you today? There’s good leadership and bad leadership, but it’s still leadership. It really sunk in with me that Hitler was a very effective leader with a very bad purpose, but he was effective either way. I think about that a lot in business. When I’m observing leadership, it helps me to identify good leadership in bad situations. It’s very evident in our politics today. On both sides of the aisle you see very effective leadership leading people down a very bad road. I would not have been aware of that had I not gone through the international seminar experience.
How has that realization influenced your own leadership style? It keeps me on edge to be very clear with my staff or whatever organization I’m involved with. I want to be very clear with the purpose of what we’re doing. I think if you’re not really clear about your objective, it can get lost in the emotion or cause. When you’re not clear with the objective of what you’re doing, that’s where leadership goes sideways. I try to take those lessons from my experiences during the international seminar and be very clear in my objectives What were some other highlights of the seminar for you? We started in Moscow, then we went to Ukraine and Poland and we could really see how Eastern and Western cultures met. Just to understand that segment of the world helped me gain an incredible perspective into geopolitics. I really saw a cultural difference in the temperament of the people. It was like people were more subdued the further east we were. We saw different innovations within the cities and people were allowed to try new things and do things differently the further west we went. It was expressed in the arts, culture and food. That was fascinating.
What is your advice to Class 50 fellows now that they’ve returned from their international seminar? The international seminar is very overwhelming. It’s sensory overload on so many levels. Don’t try to quickly process everything you just went through. It could take several years to process what you experienced. I remember when I got back, I didn’t even want to talk about it. That’s ok, because when you’re in the program and things are intense, it’s ok to walk away for a while and allow the emotion of it all to come down. Nine years later, I’m still synthesizing and processing what we went through.
What lesson do you carry with you from Ag Leadership? One of the biggest things I carry is the ability to truly listen to the other side of a position or an argument. It’s one thing to say you’re open to listening, but it’s another thing to really listen and try to understand what the opposite position is and find the compromise to whatever you’re working on.
