Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/58916
Your Turn Going Global? Go All the Way On a recent trip to the Pudong District in Shanghai, I walked down the side- walks eyeing signs from Citigroup, AT&T, and Morgan Stanley, and I was struck by the sheer normalcy of their presence in a market that once was closed to Western busi- ness. I realized that, unlike business students ten years ago, our students today are more likely to land their first jobs in Shanghai or Dubai than in New York or London. Those billboards are just one indication of how global the business world has become. But as business schools, are we adapting our programs aggressively enough to reflect these changes in the industry? I don't think so. Many schools are introducing a course or study focus in globaliza- tion, announcing a partnership, or adding a student exchange. But to a large extent, business school admin- istrators and faculty are reluctant to make globalization a fundamental part of their programs. That hesitation, to some extent, is understandable. Global programs require a significant commitment of financial and human resources. Schools must have faculty willing to travel and teach abroad. They are under great pressure to allocate just the right resources, make just the right curricular changes, and form just the right partnerships. Under such pressure, schools often adopt a "little-bit-at-a-time" mentality in the belief that small steps are better than no steps at all. Such a mentality may have worked a few years ago, but not today. Adopting globalization on 56 BizEd MAY/JUNE 2006 By Melvin T. Stith a piecemeal basis is not enough to keep up with the needs of global business. Business schools need to integrate globalization throughout their curricula to immerse students in the global economy and prepare them for survival and success. At Syracuse University's Whitman School of Management in upstate New York, for example, one-third of our MBA students now work during the summer as interns in cities such as Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Cyprus, Shanghai, and Tokyo. This year, a company in Cyprus even asked us if one of our students could stay in her internship through the fall semester, while continuing her MBA program long distance. We were happy to accommodate the request, and we hope for—and even expect—more like it. Even so, as we discussed the redesign of our own MBA program, Whitman faculty and administrators realized that we, too, could go fur- ther in our attention to globalization. From the cases used, to the speakers invited, to the topics discussed, to the travel experiences offered, to the stu- dents accepted, we decided that we needed to reevaluate our programs and integrate all, not just a few, of the following initiatives to view every aspect of our programs through a global perspective: Make every course global. We decided that we first must ensure all of our courses incorporate a global view- point. Whether our students are studying entrepreneurship, market- ing, or accounting, they should know how that topic relates to the world at large. They should know that the New York Stock Exchange is branching out overseas, seeking to list foreign companies to capture new markets; that the Bank of New York recently reported that the trad- ing and investment value of shares of foreign companies surpassed $1 trillion in 2005; and that, according to the Wall Street Journal, nine out of every ten dollars raised through new company listings was done in London or Luxembourg instead of New York. Stdents should know there are six times as many consumers in India, China, and Malaysia as there are in the United States. They need to know that, with this inevitable change in purchasing power, corpo- rations will rely on them to under- stand those markets and know what it takes to sell to those customers. But students will only come to this understanding if we present these realities to them in every course they take. Invite guest speakers with globaliza- tion in mind. Our students must have face-to-face interactions with execu- tives who know business on a global scale. It is much different merely to read about offshoring and outsourc- ing, for example, than it is to speak to an executive from, say, JPMor- gan, a company that has announced plans to have 30 percent of its global workforce in India by the end of 2007. What are the implications of this trend? What is the cultural impact of taking a customer service phone call in India from a consumer in the United States? Students must be given the opportunity to learn answers to these questions from a person, not a textbook. Use technology to bring the world to the classroom. We know that executives cannot always make a personal visit to our campuses to speak to our stu- dents. We need to maximize our use of video conferencing to bring exec- utives into the classroom from all