For the first half of 2009, Prof Lauterborn was at Hong Kong Baptist University, where he was named a University Fellow. He taught an IMC course and a creative course, the latter structured around the book he co-authored last year, “Print Matters: How to Write Great Advertising.” In January, he made a short trip from Hong Kong to the Mainland China resort city of Sanya, Hainan to do a three-day IMC program for the Cheung Kung Graduate Business School. In February he and Mrs. Lauterborn (Sylvia) took a five-day break to go to Bangkok. (Sylvia hadn’t been in Bangkok since she had her wedding dress made there 46 years ago!)

Professor and Mrs. Lauterborn also visited several other Mainland China cities from their Hong Kong base: Shenzhen (which was only a half-hour train ride away), Chengdu (where he’s been invited to join the faculty of a new joint-venture business school), Qingdao (where they enjoyed the fruits of his ancestors having built the first brewery in China during the time of the Opium Wars!) and Guilin (where the lumpy mountains you see in so many Chinese paintings are).

The International Summer University of Macedonia (where he’s taught a course in July for several years) lost its funding from the Dutch government and so took a hiatus this year. In August, Prof Lauterborn taught a three-day IMC exec ed course at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, after which he and Mrs. Lauterborn toured South India for three weeks. They finished their trip to India in Delhi where he did a consulting project. In October, he went back to Beijing and Shanghai for three weeks, again for exec ed teaching. From mid-November to mid-November he taught a marketing course at the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management in Frankfurt, Germany. They were home for the holidays before going back on the road in early January, first to Sanya, Hainan (China’s Riviera) and up to Shanghai briefly before going on to Perth, Western Australia to teach an Advertising Management course at Edith Cowan University for the spring (their fall) semester.  On the way home in mid-June, they stopped off for ten days in Shanghai to see the Expo.

This summer has been more of the same.  Home for only ten days, Prof. Lauterborn went back to Beijing, Hohhut, and Kunming on assignments for the Cheung Kung Graduate School of Business.  June 20 he’ll go back to Chapel Hill, but again only briefly.  August 3 he’ll go back to Beijing again to do some IMC training for CCTV executives (CCTV is China’s primary television company), then head back to India to do another program for the Indian School of Business.  After that, Mrs. Lauterborn will join him for a ten-day tour of Nepal, after which she’ll come back to Chapel Hill but he’ll go back to Shanghai for a few days to do a program for InBev under the auspices of China Europe International Business School (CEIBS).   In October he’ll go back one more time to Shanghai to do an IMC session at CEIBS, after which it looks like he and Mrs. Lauterborn will actually be home for two months!

Asked about his extensive travel schedule, he says, “As long as the wheels stay on, you’ve got to keep rolling!”