|  Dear Alumni!
As most of you probably are aware of by now, I have, since September 1st, taken on the duty as Dean of SSE Russia. I take great pride in doing so and I look immensely forward to continuing the meritorious efforts of my predecessor Associate Professor Jan Eklof. Although I am fully aware of the important challenges ahead I see a great potential in this school and what it stands for as represented by faculty, staff and alumni.
For those of you whom I have not yet met with in the class room (I have been teaching marketing and have been holding positions since year 2000 on executive programmes EMBA, GM1, GM2, GM3, GM4, GM1, SM2 and EE4); I’m a 43-old Associate Professor of Marketing at the Stockholm School of Economics. Ever since I returned to academia ten years ago after a professional career mostly in the pharmaceutical industry, I have been engaged in teaching at undergraduate and graduate levels in Stockholm, Riga and Russia. My research is devoted to how markets work, and in 2001 I defended my Ph.D. thesis in the area of competition. In parallel I also serve as an economic expert to the Stockholm District Court in market law and antitrust cases. It is a true privilege to work in and for Russia, a country that in various ways has been close to my heart ever since my childhood when I, as an ice-hockey goalie, had Tretjak as my idol. The strength of what we called The Big Red Machine (Charlamov, Petrov, Fetisov and others) at the time was however too much for Tre Kronor, the Swedish national team although we have caught up a bit lately. In these middleage days ice-hockey has been substituted mostly by crosscountry skiing that I love to do together with my girlfriend Petra (who is studying to become a teacher) with whom I live in Stockholm.
The challenges and rewards of working for SSE Russia are very much tied to staying close to you, our alumni, void of which the school loses much of the value I believe it entertains in 2006 Russia. We are solidly anchored in your appreciation, opinions and ideas, and it is only by forming and maintaining close ties to you that we really have a future. I believe we can do much better in this regard and I will personally make it a priority to stay in touch with you. As a case in point my vision is to tie you closer to the overall SSE alumni community based in Stockholm and I would like to expand our ideas of inviting some of you as adjunct faculty in our programmes. Please feel free to get in touch whenever it is suitable. For the moment being we had better stick to English but my promise to myself, and to you, is to make my somewhat dormant “russky jasyik” come alive one day not too far in the future.
I am currently making a major revision of the school organization and as the fall semester unfolds we will definitively undertake some major changes, a very natural step as we now consolidate and improve our activity pattern. I regret not being able to participate in the summit meeting in Moscow in October but I look forward to inviting you to some kind of social activity as we approach 2007.
Together we will make SSE Russia stand out as the “one-ofthe- kind”-institution it really is.
Thanx to people like yourselves! |
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