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From Editors the 'Global Village': Before and After A geologist quoted in a recent Newsweek said that, in cosmic terms, the 9.2-magnitude earthquake that caused the devastating South Asian tsunami was a mere blip on the radar. "The Earth shrugged for a moment," he said. That was all. In human terms, of course, it was much more than that. It showed us, in starkest relief, what globalization really means. Before this cataclysm, business schools certainly embraced globalization, but often had only glimpses of the world to offer students through student exchanges, video conferences, and guest speakers. After, we have a massive, comprehensive working model of globalization unfolding before our eyes. Before the Asian tsunami, the central focus of globalization seemed to be primarily on progress. It implied that when nations work together, they rise together. Human suffering was a concept often left on the periphery: Think of the genocide in Rwanda, or the AIDS crisis in Africa. The world's collective of nations has acknowledged these tragedies, but has rarely owned them. Afterward, we see that globalization works both ways. It encompasses not just com- mon progress, but also common catastrophe.Was there a country left unaffected? At this writing, the tsunami's death toll had reachedmore than 289,000 people. Countries on each populated continent have established a count of their killed ormissing. And our comparatively small community was touched when a group of Stanford business students was caught in the disaster. James Hsu, a 25-year-old student from Stanford Business School, is among the lost. We have seen the issues we've been covering in this publication, so inherent to glob- alization, magnified hundredfold. Corporate social responsibility has been expanded to include national social responsibility and personal social responsibility. Funds raised or pledged from all sources—from governments, businesses, and individuals—have reached more than $10 billion. The phrase "What you can do to help" is echoed on hundreds of commercialWeb sites, from Amazon to Google. The same technology now on state-of-the-art b-school campuses is the technolo- gy that allowed tsunami survivors to post amateur videos and personal accounts online at Internet speed. The same global team-building skills business schools teach are now imperative as organizations mobilize teams from all corners of the world to coordinate the most massive international relief effort in history, or as gov- ernments respond to the international call to fund and implement a tsunami warn- ing system for the Indian Ocean. Many have asked why this disaster has struck such a worldwide chord, when so many others have not. I think the answer lies in its scope. Before this, we often evoked the term "global village," but I'm not sure we considered that phrase much more than a metaphor. After December 26, 2004, however, that term transitioned permanently from metaphor to reality, generating lessons of globalization that will take most busi- ness schools years to study and teach. We can only feel sorrow for the tragic manner in which those lessons were learned.■ z 6 BizEd MARCH/APRIL 2005 PETER BECK/CORBIS BILL BASCOM