Archive for November, 2008

Do languages have economic value?  If so, can languages compete to capture more of it?  What strategies can help a language be more valuable?  And who is in the best position to plan and execute those strategies?

I was invited to discuss these issues earlier this week at an international conference in Salamanca (Spain) on the value of the Spanish language not from a cultural standpoint, but from a business perspective.  My co-panelists were, very appropriately, executives from Telefonica and Santander, two of the most successful and largest Spanish companies that have gone global over the last decade by first dipping their feet in markets that share the Spanish language and heritage.  In many ways, they are the living proof that a language can indeed be a source of economic value.  And I was invited to chair the session because of Thunderbird’s 62 year-long history of teaching foreign languages as part of our global management curriculum.  (Brief summaries of the session have been made available in Spanish by ABC and English by the Latin American Herald Tribune, which is in itself quite telling!… my slides in Spanish can be downloaded here)

Languages are vital to business because businesses are  complex webs of relationships where multiple parties have to reach agreements: buyer and seller, lender and borrower, employer and employee, regulator and “regulee”, etc.  You cannot possibly serve a market unless you can understand your client and can communicate back the value of your product.  You cannot effectively employ anyone unless you can tell them what job you expect them to perform.  You cannot convince an investor to invest or a regulator to provide a license unless you can explain to them what you’re trying to do.

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(From AACBS’s newsletter eNewsline, November 2008, Vol 7-11)

The Sky May Be Falling, but the Planets Are Aligning

By Ángel Cabrera, President
Thunderbird School of Global Management

In July 2007, an academic delegation of business school deans and professors presented the Principles for Responsible Management Education to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in Geneva. In a little over a year, and thanks to the work of the UN Global Compact office, AACSB, EFMD, and several other international organizations, the Principles have come to life, with already more than 150 schools from around the world having signed up and committed to them.

Then, as we were celebrating this remarkable growth and getting ready for our first conference in New York to share our progress, the sky, so to speak, began to fall. It all started in Wall Street (paradoxically just a few blocks from the UN headquarters). Credit markets froze, banks collapsed, and the aftermath sent out waves that toppled markets around the world. One of the pieces of this global domino hit close to home, as a short-term fund that many academic institutions have traditionally used to save short-term cash reserves was shut down overnight for fear of a run.

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My friend Luis Guillermo Plata, Colombian Minister of Trade, Industry and Tourism, invited me to present in Colombia the conclusions of a study we conducted last year with a group of Young Global Leaders at the World Economic Forum.  The presentation took place in Cali during the Colombia Compite conference, a gathering of over 1,000 leaders from business, academia, government and trade associations.

The five trends we discussed (and which are summarized in Spanish by local newspaper El Tiempo) were:

1. POPULATION:The world population growth will slow but regions will differ or decline. Populations will age rapidly with increased shifts to urban areas
2. ECONOMIES:The global economy will grow significantly, shift to the East and toward services. Characterized by increased sophistication and greater exchange
3. CORPORATIONS: Companies will become more global, networked, learning-based and have a greater focus on corporate responsibility
4. GLOBAL FLOWS:The flows of people, natural resources, capital, and knowledge are changing in surprising ways
5. INNOVATIONS: Current technological developments can be extrapolated into life-changing innovations of the future

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Financial crisis. Fuel crisis. Food crisis.  A perfect storm that puts added pressure on the critical problems of our time: poverty and hunger, health, environmental sustainability, security.

A grim picture of the world emerged this morning during the closing of the World Economic Forum Summit of the Global Agenda in Dubai.  There’s a frightening consensus that the current financial crisis will most likely ignite the worst economic crisis of our time, a crisis that will affect all of us: rich and poor, north and south, east and west. Government intervention is not only inevitable but necessary: like a frozen computer, the financial system needs to be re-booted, and only governments can do it.
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After two consecutive overnight flights (the world is neither flat nor small), I finally made it to Dubai, just in time to participate in what World Economic Forum president Klaus Schwab called “the biggest brainstorm on the global agenda in history”: the Summit on the Global Agenda.

The idea is the following:  you bring 700 academics, practitioners and thought leaders from around the world to one location for three days.  You divide them into 68 thematic “Global Agenda Councils” covering a range of topics from economic growth and development, to natural disasters or nanotechnology.  You ask each participant to produce a short essay dealing with the theme of the council and share it with the rest of the council members.  You let each council deliberate about the current state of their field.  You then ask each council to go interact with other councils that may be dealing with a related issue or discipline (after all, all big problems are systemic and multifaceted).  You reconvene, re-discuss, and articulate a set of conclusions about how things stand, and what actions ought to be taken going forward.
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I was invited last night by Arizona attorneys Snell & Wilmer to discuss the result of the U.S. presidential elections in a panel with Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, economist Irwin Stelzer and Arizona Republic columnist Robert Robb. I was surprised by how quickly discussions on taxes, healthcare and financial meltdowns were able to eclipse from the conversation the historic fact that a black man has just been elected president.  Then it dawned on me that this is precisely what makes this whole story so incredibly amazing.

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Opera co-founder and CEO Jon von Tetzchner visited us yesterday, sharing fascinating tales of global entrepreneurship and facing up to the big juggernauts of the Internet era.

For the less tech savvy, Opera is arguably the best Web browser there is.  Created in 1994 by Jon and his former partner the late Geir Ivarsøy when the only widely available option was Netscape, Opera has since been adapted to operate on cellphones and other devices (game consoles, TV boxes), a market it now leads.  The version for PCs has been provided at no cost (and without ad banners) since 2005, but its use still trails Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Apple’s Safari, and Mozilla’s open source Firefox.
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