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This OneMBA global team was formed during the program's weeklong European global residency at the Rotterdam School of Management in the Netherlands; members will work together from their home coun- tries to complete required projects. Team members, clockwise from lower left corner, are Betsy Roach of New York City, New York; Gabriel Garza-Delgado of Monterrey, Mexico; Horace Hung of Hong Kong, the Republic of China; Theodosis Vassiliou of Oroklini, Cyprus; Roopa Chowbey of Ashburn, Virginia; Marcelo Vives of São Paulo, Brazil; and Rob Asher of Danbury, Connecticut. Bertrand Moingeon, head of executive programs at HEC- Paris, as well as the school's academic director for TRIUM. "One rule of the game, for instance, is that we don't track how students enter the program—we don't track them to any one business school. After all, with a global program, the partic- ipant may read about it in his local newspaper, then call some- one at HEC for information, then eventually send the appli- cation to Stern. We consider all participants to be TRIUM students. It is a very good way to handle the alliance." Sharing the costs of development, implementation, and diverse knowledge about different cultures, business contexts, and political environments than they've ever had to in the past. It's difficult for any one or two schools to offer that range of knowledge," he says. Mathewson of the Stern School agrees. "It's a huge cliché "Businesspeople today need to leverage a larger set of The Global Classroom Although schools that participate in large, globally distributed alliances admit that the effort involved is substantial, most believe that the resulting educational experiences represent a next step for management education. In an era when business schools are expected to offer an international education, super alliances allow students access to several countries and campuses in a single educational experience. It's an experience that would be hard for an individual school to replicate, says Walter of LSE and TRIUM. marketing equally is simply all part of contributing to a single program, agrees Mathewson of NYU's Stern School. "We have a single budget for TRIUM and all three schools con- tribute. And, I'm happy to say, all three schools are profiting. We had a larger inaugural class size than we had expected, so we were actually in the black in our first year of operation." Finally, sharing costs also can help all participating schools weather an economic downturn. For instance, the Monterrey Tech Graduate School of Business Administration and Leadership (ITESM) in Mexico takes part in two super alliances: OneMBA and the Global e-Management Alliance (GeM). Monterrey Tech has seen its student enrollment in GeM decline from its first to its second cohort—from 16 stu- dents down to eight, due to the decline in the technology sector and the struggling global economy. Even so, the col- laboration with the other member schools and the cost of participation in the GeM program is really an investment in the school's own future, says Sandra Gonzalez, GeM's pro- gram director at ITESM. "The attractiveness of GeM, for us, is really not the cost of the program but the great opportunities for globaliza- tion," says Gonzalez. "It's an opportunity to bring a real international experience to the students and establish tight links between the universities. Those links are the seeds for bigger and better things to come." now, but the world has become a global community. Executives and academics must take into account political risk assessment and the cultural norms of other countries," she says. "Several fine business schools have chosen to go it alone with their international programs, putting up facilities in remote locations. I salute them. But we felt strongly that the only way to become truly global was not to be Americans running around the world, but to have local partners who are European, British, Asian, or South American." In the end, however, the real benefit is the creation of rela- tionships. When people have more opportunities to interact with individuals from different cultures—whether they are faculty settling their curricular differences or students collab- orating on a project—their perspectives change for the better, says Smith of ETSU. "When students emerge from this expe- rience, they are transformed. They see the world differently," says Smith. "They come away with a vision of the world as a place of connection, of interrelationships. They come away without the vestiges of xenophobia that many of us who were born in the late 1940s grew up with." The very nature of super alliances may well be building the foundation for a new form of management education. As culturally diverse schools work to combine their strengths, they will create a climate of globalization that is more seamlessly integrated into their curricula than ever before. In the end, today's super alliances are out to prove that the cultural, academic, and ideological differences among institutions may become the basis for, not a barrier to, a global business education. ■ z BizEd SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2003 33