Case study: Global responsibility – business education and business schools – roles in promoting a global perspective

Abstract

This article is based on the author’s experience as head of a leading international business school, with strong embedded values in providing the highest level of quality business education within a global perspective. The scope of the article is one of focusing on a global business school, i.e. one which is able to draw on professors and students to come together for teaching and learning in a “global meeting‐place” from all over the world. The article provides the following results, conclusions and recommendations: first, a distinction is made between local business schools, serving typically a national market, regional business schools, typically serving a number of national markets, but within the same language area, and global business schools, typically serving the entire world community. Then the content of a global curriculum is reviewed, and five items are being identified: a strategic competence, a partnership competence, a staffing competence, a learning competence, and an organizational competence. In order to pursue global growth and to develop the capabilities for this, a conceptual model by Chakravarthy and Lorange is then being introduced, where one’s strength will be the starting‐point/basis for further global expansion, either by leveraging one’s capability vis‐à‐vis new markets, or by building a new business by adding new competences to the existing ones, or as a next step by combining the two leveraging and building dimensions into a transform strategy. Four managerial challenges are then being reviewed for the leading global business school, namely the issue of language, the mix of the student body, the degree of internationalization of the teaching and administrative staff, as well as the global marketing challenge. The article concludes with a discussion regarding an optimal location for the global business school. It is argued that perhaps many of today’s leading business schools, being located in major markets, will not have an optimal location, due to the fact that these major markets can more or less explicitly lead to a nationally based bias of the teaching and research being undertaken, i.e. obstructing the globality focus of the business school. A small country location might therefore be preferable.