Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/62913
say that 37 percent of their MBA students are foreign. To me, that doesn't make them international. What I find more compelling is when a school like ESSEC wants students to speak three languages by the time they graduate from the MBA program. Or when a place like the Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina sends every student—graduate or undergraduate—overseas for a min- imum of several months. When you visit its campus, you find all these people who spent two years in Hong Kong or Spain or South Africa. They speak the language perfectly, they understand the culture, they can Participants gather at a case-writing initiative held in Nairobi by the Graduate Business School Network. function in that country. To me, that is real internationalization. What obstacles do Western schools face in their quests to build truly international programs? I was, for an unfortunate nine months at the World Bank, the head of a research division, and my mandate was to get research- ers to support World Bank opera- tions. It was a total failure. None of the professors I contacted were interested in going to Ecuador to help with an agricultural project, for instance. All they cared about was publishing articles in refereed BizEd May/June 2012 33