News

Executive education goes global 

January 31, 2006

What do you get when you combine executives from New Orleans, Houston, Chile, Mexico, Taiwan and China? A global management experience you can’t get at other business schools.

In an unprecedented international exercise, the Freeman School brought together students in its New Orleans, Houston, Asia and Chile Executive MBA programs, along with guest participants from Mexico, for an intensive week unlike any that had come before. For seven days in January, the far-flung managers took classes together and worked on group projects as part of multinational teams, confronting head on the issues involved in doing business with foreign counterparts.

“Business is expanding globally, and business people are dealing increasingly with international partners,” says Russ Robins, associate dean for executive education. “If you want to learn about cross-cultural issues, the best way to do it is not to read about them in a book but to work on problems with teammates from another country who are sitting next to you.”

“It’s kind of like being a fish in water,” adds visiting professor Daniel Skarlicki, who taught the course Managing People Internationally during intensive week. “You don’t know you’re in water until you start bumping up against something that’s different and foreign. The most important learning comes from realizing you have a culture and seeing how that culture impacts other cultures.”

According to Robins, the exercise was conceived to leverage the Executive MBA program’s international content by taking advantage of an asset most other business schools can’t compete with: Freeman’s longstanding network of international programs and partnerships.

“Our programs around the world are interesting and unique in their own way, but they’re generally isolated from each other,” Robins explains. “I thought if we could find a way to exploit all these programs, we’d have something our competitors just couldn’t match.”

In addition to Managing People Internationally, the students also took Leadership and Ethics. While the content in both courses was global in nature, many participants say the real value added was working with international teammates. “We’re all from different cultures, but the one thing we have in common is that we all embrace change and we all embrace a desire to improve ourselves and the situation around us,” says Chris Cooper, an operations manager with Entergy and member of the New Orleans class. “And then when you hear the different experiences that everybody’s had working in multiple countries, it really opens your eyes to the world of business and what it can mean.”

“We are from Asia and sometimes we have different ways to describe or speak of something,” says Yuan Mei Lin, a marketing manager with Atari in Taiwan and member of the Asia class. “Everybody’s point of view is different, and I think the biggest benefit was learning different points of view and ways of thinking about things.”

With global business an even more prominent part of the newly revised MBA curriculum, Robins says it’s only a matter of time before international exercises such as this are expanded to the Freeman School’s full-time MBA and undergraduate programs. “I think the benefit of having these international programs will reach its peak when we find ways to enhance the MBA and undergraduate programs,” Robins says. “They enhance our name, yes, but the real issue is to enhance our competitive advantage.”