The ART Of Business

A Christmas Message from Ancient Greece

Dec. 20, 2012

The words of Pericles are still pertinent for us 2,500 years after they were spoken.

While I’m sure many of you have read Pericles’ funeral oration to Athens at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War, I thought it might be a fitting way to wrap-up 2012.

With great change and tumult occurring in our nation and world, these famous words might help calm us as we ready the holidays with friends and family:

We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of the enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality; trusting less in system and policy than in the native spirit of our citizens… We live exactly as we please, and yet are just as ready to encounter every legitimate danger…

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

About the Author

Andrew R. Thomas Blog | Associate Professor of Marketing and International Business

Andrew R. Thomas, Ph.D., is associate professor of marketing and international business at the University of Akron; and, a member of the core faculty at the International School of Management in Paris, France.

He is a bestselling business author/editor, whose 23 books include, most recently, American Shale Energy and the Global Economy: Business and Geopolitical Implications of the Fracking Revolution, The Customer Trap: How to Avoid the Biggest Mistake in Business, Global Supply Chain Security, The Final Journey of the Saturn V, and Soft Landing: Airline Industry Strategy, Service and Safety.

His book The Distribution Trap was awarded the Berry-American Marketing Association Prize for the Best Marketing Book of 2010. Another work, Direct Marketing in Action, was a finalist for the same award in 2008.

Andrew is founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Transportation Security and a regularly featured analyst for media outlets around the world.

He has traveled to and conducted business in 120 countries on all seven continents.