There are lots of good reasons to make Regent College spring and summer programs part of your planning for 2013. Our website is full of them.
But here’s one I can commend to you with particular enthusiasm: I get to teach a course on business ethics with a Very Heavy Hitter.
To be sure, Bonnie Wurzbacher doesn’t look like someone who hits—heavily or otherwise. But you can be sure that Ms. Wurzbacher knows things you need to know about how to succeed as a Christian in business. Or, perhaps better, how to succeed Christianly in business. Or, perhaps better still, how to Christianly construe “success” in business—and the rest of life, too.
Bonnie is a Wheaton College (BA) and Emory University (MBA) grad. She started her career as a teacher and then got into business with a little company with which she loyally remained until her early retirement last year. Perhaps you have heard of that company. It’s known here and there as The Coca-Cola Company, and Bonnie rose so high in that firm that she ended her time there with a title so complicated I don’t understand it: “Senior Vice President, Global Customer & Channel Leadership, Global Marketing, Corporate.”
Look, I figured if I was going to co-teach a course in business ethics, I didn’t want to make it too easy—you know, teaching alongside someone who worked for a tiny little nonprofit that made crutches for impoverished orphans. Where is the ethical tension in that? I wanted to explore business ethics with someone who has experienced the very heavy hitting of a major company that has friends and enemies around the world and about which precisely no one has no opinion.
I enjoyed doing the same thing a few summers ago by teaching a course on the ethics of film-making with my friend Ralph Winter, the very fine producer of movies that millions have enjoyed (I am among them) and that also have made many other people shake their heads, such as “I, Robot,””X-Men,” and “Fantastic Four.” No point doing ethics unless there’s some excitement built in.
Well, there’s excitement built in to an intense one-week conversation with a senior VP of one of the world’s most famous companies.
So make your plans: July 29-August 2, 2013, Regent College, Vancouver. Registration is now open!
UPDATE: Alas for Regent and alas for me, but great for many others, Bonnie is taking a new job starting July 1 that prevents her from teaching this course with me. So we’ll have to have her return some other time in some other mode. Best wishes, Bonnie!
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