Hospitality pure as snow & Santa’s reading list!

Pure White by Azizul.

I had never been to Italy, I was saving it for when I retire to Greece with my family (its really close from my in-laws location by ferry.  And yes I still dream this will happen someday).  Yet when I received a conference alert for a consumer in hospitality symposium in South Tyrol I had to look twice as Professor Arch Woodside was a keynote speaker.  I knew some of his work as the CABI series of Consumer Psychology was my pillow for many weeks during the early stages of my PhD.

I had never heard of  CBTS before so I had no expectations and as my travel agent booked me from Heathrow to Rome and then Bolzano and from there a train to Brunico (total of12hours of travelling) my expectations where dropping every minute that I had to run from one flight to the next… but even in the state of chaos one finds something good and there in the midst of chaos I met another PhD from Surrey and a grief shared is a grief halved. From Rome onwards everything bad became a joke and my spirits were lifted.  In Bolzano we became 3 (basically anyone with a dazed and confused face going towards Brunico on a Tuesday had to be attending the conference so it was easy to spot each other).  

When we reached Brunico at 10 pm it seemed like a Ghost Town, everything was closed and  by the time I got to my hotel there was no restaurant or anywhere to grab a bite.  I grabbed a couple of apples from the lobby of Corso Hotel and hoped that breakfast would be a feast.

The morning brought with it, the purity of the snow and right outside my hotel was a Christmas Market everything was so white it was as if I was at Santa’s village.  Trust me when I say the hospitality I received from both my hotel and the CBTS organisers was truly a Christmas gift.  I always thought Greek hospitality was exemplary but the South Tyrolean hospitality I experienced was equal in generosity and character.

I could go on forever about all the experiences of the 4 day symposium but the point of this post is really to share with you the reading list I and others received from Santa who was disguised in the form of Arch Woodside.  There were numerous interesting papers and some excellent keynotes including one  about film tourism that made me want to watch “The man from Snowy River” but if I list all the papers and notes I made I fear this article could end up being far too long (I guess it already is).

So without further delay here comes some learning delivered by Santa himself amidst a symposium of pure hospitality as white as the blanket of snow that covered the whole of Brunico during our stay in December.

1.  Publish or Perish http://www.harzing.com here you can download a little software that will allow you to look up citations by author.  I feel that this could be very useful to students if they wish to get an idea of the impact of an author for a specific field and could also provide leads in their research.  The website has even more resources brilliant for academics, MSc and PhD students (in my opinion).
2.  “The Asshole”  Manning, P & van Maanen, J (red) Policing, a view from the street J Van Maanen - 1988 - Santa Monica: Goodyear Publishing
3. The Long Interview Method by McCracken 1988
4. Case study Research by Arch  Woodside 2010
5. The Structured of unstructured Decisions by Mintzberg 1976
6. Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious by Timothy Wilson.
7. How we Decide by John Lehrer

And here is where I must stop because in reality I have a reading list stretching to more than 20 titles of papers of books I made a note to read, but I think even a couple of the titles I give above will challenge the way you might look at learning and as such provide you a little bit of a push to dig even further.

Who knows in the end you might dig deep enough in the snow to discover a truth that really inspires you.

Special Note:  My sincere thanks to the CBTS scientific committee and the great colleagues that made this experience a most memorable one.