SPEAKER.
Papalii Dr. Tusi Avegalio is Director of the Pacific Business Center Program (PBCP) and former Executive Director of the Honolulu Minority Business Enterprise Center (HMBEC) at the Shidler College of Business Administration, University of Hawaii-Manoa campus. Dr. Tusi has the unique distinction of being a recognized business, economic, and community development expert of Oceania, an academic, and is a ranking Pacific traditional leader from the Samoan Islands. He was bestowed the title of Papalii in 1980 as a senior heir to the Malietoa warrior king line of Samoa in Sapapalii village in the island of Savaii. He is the first Pacific Islander born and raised in Oceania to serve on the University of Hawaii College of Business Administration faculty as a business professor in 1989. Dr. Tusi has worked extensively throughout the Pacific in collaboration with traditional leaders and village councils of Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia. He was raised in a social-cultural context that views the earth as an organic living entity rooted in regeneration, symbiosis, and synergy, a perspective that also embraces man’s kincentric relationship to nature based on balance, harmony, alofa (love), and respect. That perspective helps to reconcile the western mechanistic perspectives led by the industrial/machine paradigm with the organic/living paradigm of indigenous Oceania, a perspective he feels are the keys to effectively addressing Pacific and global challenges that take the best of both worlds and creating a third option with value added.