As spring inched toward summer this year, milestones kept accumulating. Births, deaths, graduations, anniversaries of events resounding with joy or grief, all piling up like the mountain of prayer stones left at the Iron Cross along the French way of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela.
In March, John R. McIntyre, a friend and mentor who served as professor of international management at the Scheller College of Business at Georgia Institute of Technology, passed away at the age of 78. The founding executive director of the Georgia Tech Center for International Business Education & Research, the French and American dual citizen originally came on board at Georgia Tech via its Technology and Science Policy Program — subjects at the heart of lifelong endeavors by Site Selection and Conway Data Founder and Tech graduate McKinley “Mac” Conway.
John was always curious, always connecting. He was a caring, wise person and a gentleman in every sense. I am fortunate to have known him and to have drawn sustenance from our shared sense of viewing things through a global lens, including sustainability (see p. 80), a topic on which I speak every year to the global executive MBA program John founded in 1998.
Before I knew him, John was close to the family of Max David Bouchet, a former research director at Conway Data who moved on to international policy work in Washington, D.C. Max got married in June in a church along the Camino de Compostela in France, where he grew up.
One of the wedding guests was journalist, former Site Selection colleague and mutual friend Patty Rasmussen. After I received a higher education journalism fellowship due in part to a recommendation by John McIntyre, I was fortunate to serve as Patty’s mentor and then fellow advisory committee member in the same fellowship program. One of my favorite workplace memories is the time Patty, Max and I left the workplace behind for a daylong data journalism workshop.
June also saw the arrival in our offices of summer editorial intern London Dinh, a rising senior at Marist School. In one among many of the daily barrage of notes I send her about working in our field, I said if she leaves her short time with us with nothing else, I hope she learns that we never stop learning. It’s woven into us like DNA.
Things weaving together are intrinsic to the concept of kakezan (invention through multiplication) behind the Woven City by Toyota pictured on our cover. “Weaving together different fields and different cultures gives rise to new ideas and value,” Woven by Toyota Senior Vice President Daisuke Toyoda said. “As everything weaves together, it represents new possibilities and the collective impact we strive to have on the world.”
Here’s to the impact our mentors have had on the world, and the spiraling impact the next generation is weaving together as we speak.
