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Your Turn The Language of Business What's a single skill that will set today's business graduates apart and pre- pare them for jobs anywhere in the world? We believe it's a facility with language. Furthermore, in global companies where managers don't possess deep language skills, we believe there will be severe negative economic impacts. Research shows that lan- guage barriers cost companies more than the money required to pay interpreters or translate documents. The real cost of the language bar- rier is that it "distorts and damages relationships," according to a 2003 article by A.J. Feely and A.W. Har- zing in Cross Cultural Management. Miscommunication can cause com- panies to lose potential clients or fail to deliver products and services. Other experts also cite the impact of language skills in the workplace. "Addressing business issues from multiple perspectives has become a critical mandate in business edu- cation," says Yuwei Shi, Dean of the Graduate School of Interna- tional Policy and Management at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California. "Language is essential to cross-cultural and cross- sector understanding." Language skills are so important to today's business executives that we're convinced business schools need to make language studies an essential part of the MBA curriculum. Linguistic Statistics Supporting our position are various studies on language and business, including one recently commissioned by our organization, The Inter- national Research Foundation for 70 BizEd SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2010 English Language Education (TIRF). "The Impact of English and Pluri- lingualism in Global Corporations" shows that plurilingualism—the abil- ity to communicate successfully in more than one language—helps indi- viduals improve their access to global jobs and the benefits of those jobs. The TIRF report notes that employees with strong language skills are particularly valuable when companies are expanding their poten- tial exports, negotiating contracts, localizing company Web sites, and recruiting new employees in other cultures—all skills that are crucial to global businesses. To identify the language skills employees need to possess, TIRF conducted case studies of seven global corporations. These com- panies comprise industries such as energy (Adriatic LNG), professional services (GlobalEnglish), publishing (Pearson), financial services (HSBC), and information technology (EMC Corporation, IBM Corporation, and British Telecom–Latin America). Representatives of all the compa- nies involved in the case studies indi- cate that, if their organizations are to remain competitive in this global age, their employees have a growing need to communicate in a foreign language. Every miscommunication that is attributable to subpar foreign language skills increases the demand for more capable employees. For many international corpora- tions, the language of commerce is English. Reece Duca, the founder and chairman of the board of Global English Corporation, points to World Trade Organization statistics about non-native English speakers among by Ryan Damerow and Kathleen M. Bailey Global 1000 companies. Accord- ing to data from the World Trade Organization, those numbers have risen from 30 percent in 1996 to 50 percent in 2005; they're projected to be 70 percent in 2011. These figures underscore the reality that English is a necessary communication tool among global companies, Duca says. But other languages can be just as critical in various parts of the world. In 2006, the Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research (CILT) examined the effect of pluri- lingual skills among European busi- nesses by surveying 2,000 small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Respondents noted that their com- panies had lost contracts worth tens of millions of euros due to a lack of language skills among employees. The CILT survey found that businesspeople believe they have to encourage their workers' language skills if they want to increase exports and overall busi- ness performance. Many identified Russian, German, and Spanish as the preferred languages in certain markets. They also indicated that their employees need to live in the countries where their target languages are spoken, in order to improve their language skills and heighten their cultural awareness. In fact, some respondents to the CILT survey state that "investment in language skills represents one of the fixed costs of exporting to cer- tain countries." Programmatic Requirements It's clear that the more globalized business becomes, the more essential it is for managers at every level to possess strong language skills. Fred Thielke, an MBA student at the Monterey Institute of International