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In the summer of 1989, I followed a beacon of scholarship in a journey that brought me from Istanbul to East Lansing, Michigan. The beacon of scholarship was embodied in the person of Dr. Tamer Cavusgil who guided me through my doctoral study at Michigan State University. When I was invited to attend the symposium to celebrate Dr. Cavusgil's contributions to marketing and international business and write an essay reflecting on my career, I immediately knew what the focus of the essay would be: the processes Dr. Cavusgil put in place at MSU to develop scholars who can push the boundaries of their fields in the Innovation Age. This chapter uses my academic career as the context of describing that process.

I am proud to be joining the many colleagues who appear in this volume, many younger but some more experienced in the marketing and the international business disciplines, honoring S. Tamer Cavusgil's retirement from Michigan State University. I am proud for many reasons, but mainly because throughout the years I have observed how Tamer's contributions to our professional and personal lives have shaped our growth as a fraternity of business scholars and teachers. I feel very fortunate to have grown as Tamer's colleague through the many papers we have published, the many doctoral students we have mentored, and the many service contributions we have made to the international business field during the past 30 years. I feel luckier, however, that I have come to know this remarkable person as a friend.

This study analyzes trends in analyst forecast properties from 1987 through 1998 in the United States and seven Pacific Rim countries: Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and Thailand. Analyst forecast properties in the United States have become less dispersed, more accurate, and less optimistic during the sample period. Similar trends exist in Australia and New Zealand, but not in the other sample countries. In contrast, the forecast property trends of most Asian countries are the exact opposite. For example, in Japan and Korea, forecast dispersion, forecast error, and optimism all significantly increase over the sample period. The results suggest that Asian firms do not play the U.S.‐style earnings game in which managers guide analysts toward a certain target number and then report earnings that beat the target.