Partnership

Most Reliable Partner

Dr. Elena Kalinina,
President
Woman and Management International College

        Business contacts are established in different ways, and this time, we hope, this will be done with the help of our edition.
        New East is very popular at the Women's College of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain. Spanish women are writing that they have, , learned a lot about St. Petersburg from our magazine and would like to establish contacts with businesswomen of our city. That is our correspondent, Natalya Odintsova, visited 147 Nevsky prospect where the Woman and Management College is located. It opened in 1992, and today it is one of the twenty best business schools in Russia.
        - What role do international contacts play in the College's success?
        - When our College was founded, Russia was making its first steps in the free market, and so such words as integration, world market, and international division of labor were in vogue. Everybody saw that we need specialists able to make these words a reality. We needed professionals to become reliable partners for western businesspeople and promote mutual understanding. We never prepared such high-class managers in Russia. Russia had recently rejected its traditional forms of government and had not yet found new ones. We understood that top Russian managers must receive a first-rate education that dovetails with the best national achievements and with foreign experience as well. Our task was to create such a system of education at our College, so we began to cooperate with the world's leading educational centers.
        Of course, this was not an easy task and not all our partners stayed with us. We greatly value stable business contacts. One of our partners is Naestved Business College (Denmark), which was the first to work with us. This College gave us necessary information in method studies, which were translated into Russian and adapted to our reality.
        This is the fourth year now that our college has realized its International Management Program. This program is implemented together with Stockholm University, which helped to develop it, as well as with SIDA (Swedish International Development Agency). It is intended for women who encounter difficulties while trying to compete in the market.
        When some time ago the Finnish Ministry of Labor was looking for Russian partners in the field of training specialists for joint ventures, it decided to cooperate with our College. Today we offer such educational programs as Manager of Small Business and Manager of a Joint Venture, both of which were requested by this ministry. Both Russian teachers and teachers from the Helsinki Economic Institute's Center for Support of Small Business are participating.
        We hope that our colleagues at Women's College of Catalonia will also regard us as reliable partners. We will definitely establish contacts with them.