Talk:GISMA Business School

Edit Request - History

Hello everyone, I am employed by Global University Systems (the holding company supporting GISMA Business School) and I’d like to invite pagewatchers and the wider WP community to help me improve the quality of this article. While I do have a conflict of interest with the school, I would like to make it very clear that I am fully compliant to Wikipedia’s COI policies and guidelines and have always tried to work with the community in a constructive manner. I will shortly declare my COI on the WP:COIN page.

I don’t think this article is particularly problematic, but it requires and update and some expansion. It would be useful to use the structure recommended on WP:UNIGUIDE as a guidance to help editors know where the article is heading (even though we might not be able to fill all the gaps right now). Let me know if you agree to that.

I’m sure other editors have come across this issue before, but there seems to be a very limited number of reliable sources in English to build a more comprehensive article. However, I was able to find a few sources in German that might be worth looking at.

Based on those and on some more recent reports, I’ve written the text below for your consideration for a potential History section and I would welcome any feedback you might have:

Proposed Edit

HISTORY GISMA was founded in 1999 as a private non-profit organisation of the state of Lower Saxony. Among its founders was former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. According to reports, the idea of setting up an international school in one of the industrial regions of Germany came following a meeting with Bill Gates, bankers and CEOs. The initiative was supported by 26 German companies. During the initial years, organisations such as Continental AG, Georgsmarienhütte Holding GmbH and Volkswagen supported the business school through annual grants and by enrolling their staff onto GISMA's MBA programme. GISMA started offering an MBA awarded by Purdue University, delivered in partnership with the university’s Krannert Graduate School of Management. The programme was delivered in two modules: an 11-month full-time programme and a two-year executive MBA programme (run with a consortium of six partners), from 1999 to 2013. GISMA also built an academic partnership with German public university Leibniz Universität Hannover, through which it offered a weekend MBA until 2015. In 2013, GISMA ran into financial difficulties and began a process of insolvency. At the time, GISMA’s former CEO Sonning Bredemeier told the Financial Times that there were a number of factors contributing to the school’s insolvency, including a downturn in student numbers in 2012. In September 2013, it was announced that GISMA had been acquired by Global University Systems. Since the acquisition, GISMA’s partnerships with both Purdue and Leibniz universities have reached an end. In 2014, the school signed an academic agreement with Maastricht School of Management to deliver an MBA and a Masters in Management in Hannover. In 2016, GISMA announced an academic partnership agreement with Porto Business School (part of University of Porto) to deliver Porto’s Magellan MBA in Hannover. In 2016, GISMA announced a new academic partnership with Grenoble Ecole de Management which would see both schools delivering Grenoble’s triple-accredited MBA and Master in International Business programmes at a new campus in Berlin, which is due to open in early 2017. References

Grateful for everyone’s feedback! - BrandDude (talk) 19:12, 17 January 2017 (UTC)

Hello BrandDude, I have expanded the history section based on your suggestions (copyedited for succinctness and flow). I also added material about the school's financial difficulties in 2012/2013 which was in the sources but not suggested by you. Note that the number of references you suggested was excessive. All that is required are a few high-quality ones that verify all the material. The sources I used from the plethora of those suggested were ones in publications which had the most editorial oversight and did not simply regurgitate press releases. Voceditenore (talk) 12:40, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

Hello Voceditenore, thanks for your help and I really appreciate your feedback. Do you think it would be worth adding the names of some of the key people in the infobox?

Dr Thorsten Thiel is the managing director:

http://www.mba-journal.de/gisma-eroeffnet-standort-in-berlin/

http://www.studytravel.network/magazine/news/Grenoble_GISMA

Prof Maurits van Rooijen is acting rector:

http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=2014011517550245 (not sure if this would qualify as RS as this is an opinion feature)

http://www.istoedinheiro.com.br/noticias/economia/20170113/para-onde-vai-europa/449791 (this article is in Portuguese, but there is a quote by van Rooijen stating his position of rector at GISMA)

Dr Steve Priddy is academic dean:

http://www.studytravel.network/magazine/news/Grenoble_GISMA

Let me know your views.

All the best - BrandDude (talk) 15:00, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

• I've added the name of the Managing Director. The others are pretentious and misleading for an institution all of whose MBAs are actually awarded by their "academic partners" (Grenoble, Maastricht School of Management, and University of Porto) and has only one or two full-time faculty members of its own. The GISMA website claims that Priddy is also the "Academic Dean" for Grenoble's programme in London, but there is no such programme. LSBF (like GISMA, owned by Global University Systems) used to have some sort of a Grenoble outpost, but no longer does [1]. However, I presume Priddy is still employed by LSBF in some capacity? Ditto "Acting Rector" Maurits van Rooijen whose real employment is "Chief Academic Officer" at Global University Systems. I'm going to be frank with you here, in their marketing and websites GUS quite deliberately obfuscates the real nature and structure of the various institutions they own. That sort of stuff is not going to be furthered by Wikipedia. Voceditenore (talk) 16:53, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for that, Voceditenore. I appreciate that some of it is still confusing so I agree with your decision to not include Priddy and van Rooijen’s roles until these positions are clearer and until we have sufficient reliable sources. Thanks for taking time to look into this and improving this article. All the best - BrandDude (talk) 17:53, 18 January 2017 (UTC)