Christopher Robertson wants developing countries, particularly those in Latin America, to succeed on the international-business playing field.

That’s why, in March, the assistant professor of general management spent two weeks at Peru’s Universidad de Lima on a Fulbright Senior Specialists grant, offering professors and managers his expertise in cross-cultural management and international business strategy.

“It’s tough for the small players in places like Peru,” says Robertson. “For one thing, they have to deal with cultural differences. The other problem is strategic. Countries like China just squash them on cost. And more sophisticated economies—like Japan, or Singapore, or Korea, or the United States—are leaps and bounds ahead as far as quality goes.”

He often advises companies in developing countries to avoid the “low cost” game. “So many countries are competing at the low end,” Robertson explains. Last year, when Ecuador’s Davila-Bond sweater company wanted to sell its products in Mexico, he suggested it compete at the middle-to-high end of the market. The strategy worked; the company’s Mexican sales are now 12 percent of the company’s total sales.

Robertson, who’s taught at Northeastern for five years, also counsels Latin Americans on understanding the business culture in the United States. “Building a relationship before doing business is much more important there than here,” he notes. “In the U.S., we like to talk numbers very quickly, before we even meet somebody.”

He adds, “Americans are fairly future-oriented—they’re planning two, three, five years ahead. In Latin America, the planning horizon is not too far in the future.”

Though information like this isn’t foreign to many Latin Americans, Robertson says, “coming from the gringo from Boston, I guess it carries a bit more weight.”

El arte Judeo

Hebrew words dancing across a bold palette of blues, oranges, and yellows. Several men drinking around a table, illuminated by candlelight from a menorah. Sepia-toned snippets of old photos, maps, and ghostly, faceless figures—a haunting homage to Holocaust victims.

Fanciful, religious, somber—the full range of emotion in Jewish Latin American art is in evidence at <www.jewishlatinart.neu.edu>, a website launched late last year by modern languages professor Stephen Sadow.

Sadow, who has studied Jewish Latin American literature and culture for twenty years, got interested in the visual arts around two years ago. “To my knowledge,” he explains, “there hadn’t been a single piece of writing on this topic.”

So he began searching. He scanned the websites of individual artists and galleries. He enlisted the help of Buenos Aires teacher and writer Miryam Gover de Nasatsky, who tracked down artists in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay.

The pair found oil paintings, watercolors, sculptures, ceramics, and installations by more than eighty artists from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

Senior graphic arts major Josh Shapiro helped set up the website. Several Northeastern departments and programs, including the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, the Jewish Studies program, and the Latino, Latin American, and Caribbean Studies program, contributed their assistance as well.

Sadow says he hopes the site, written in both English and Spanish, will appeal to North American viewers as well as Latin American artists themselves, who may use it to learn more about their colleagues’ work.

According to Sadow, ideas for expanding the site include pairing each piece of art with remarks by established writers, adding other critical interpretations, and creating a chatroom for artists.

"Mirror Health"

WA significant lack of diversity within the U.S. health-care profession presents an urgent health hazard for millions of Americans, says a report coauthored by Ena Vazquez-Nuttall, associate dean of the Bouvé College of Health Sciences graduate school.

According to the report—issued by the National Academies’ Institute of Medicine—African Americans, Hispanics, American Indians, and Alaskan natives, as well as some Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, are grossly underrepresented within the health-care workforce. And, the report’s authors conclude, the lack of diversity is directly correlated to problems in these groups’ health care.

Vazquez-Nuttall says scientific evidence suggests that the presence of practitioners whose backgrounds are similar to their patients’ results in greater access to care, a higher level of patient comfort, an increased understanding of providers’ instructions, a greater readiness to confide medical symptoms, and more patient choice and satisfaction.

In addition, the report states, a diverse population of health-care workers-in-training leads to a more effective educational experience for all students.

To reverse the lack of diversity, the report recommends that health professions schools make changes in their approach to admissions, training, financial support, and professional accreditation. In particular, school officials are asked to focus not just on students’ grades and standardized test scores, but on professional and “humanistic” factors such as leadership, commitment to service, community orientation, and previous experience.

The report further proposes that health professions programs be evaluated to determine their effectiveness in attracting and graduating minority students. It also urges that accreditation bodies develop standards for encouraging health professions schools to recruit minority students and faculty.