Archive for the ‘Global Mindset’ Category

My latest column, published on Saturday Nov. 26 by Spanish daily ABC (in Spanish), discusses the challenges Spain’s newly elected government will be facing.

For the last few months Spanish citizens, like Italians, Greeks and Americans, have taken to the streets to express their dissatisfaction with the unfair impact of the financial crisis.  They are mad about how the pain of the financial crisis has impacted the bottom 99%, while the top 1% remains unscathed, how governments didn’t hold anyone accountable, or how governments remain in denial and kept wasting resources they didn’t have.

Spain’s new government will need to strike a delicate balance between the austerity that debt markets seem to demand to continue to lend, and the investments needed to transform the competitive model of the Spanish economy as well as the expenses needed to protect the unemployed and the retirees while until the economy kicks back in gear.  Now more than ever it is essential that public expenditures target the key areas (education and research, social transfers) and that efforts are made to reduce barriers to entrepreneurship.

But it is equally important that Spanish democracy be reformed to give a true sense of citizen participation and representation (beginning with party governance) if reforms are to be accepted.

I am still optimistic that Spain can emerge from today’s mess more prosperous and fair.

On Thursday night, Campaign Chairs Barbara & Craig Barrett announced the successful completion of the Thunderbird Campaign: an effort to raise $65M in gifts and pledges by 2011 (our 65th anniversary) to support Thunderbird’s mission.   In a little over five years, thousands of alumni and friends around the world came together around a shared desire to invest in Thunderbird, to help this pioneering institution created in the heart of Arizona 65 years ago, to continue to educate global leaders who can bring about peace and prosperity around the world.

Like the rest of trustees attending the small, private celebration, I was humbled and moved.  This campaign means much more than $65M for all of us: it means 65 million expressions of commitment to our mission, of recognition of the daily work of our faculty and staff, of encouragement to keep finding new ways to change more lives around the world through education and thought leadership.

I can’t possibly document all that was said over the last three days, the tears, the gratitude, the generosity.  But I will leave you with one story, provided by one of our thousands of donors, an octogenarian, World War II veteran who, without any expectation of personal recognition, signed the biggest check we received.  We asked him why he chose to support Thunderbird.  This is his answer:

When I was a freshman in college, a young man enjoying life, I was asked to join the army to help my country and the world.  And so I did.  I was trained as a pilot in a place just like the Thunderbird field where we’re sitting today.  I flew, I fought and I was proud to make a difference.  As an old man, I want to keep helping my country and the world.  And what better way to do that than by helping Thunderbird train thousands of leaders from around the world who will help build a more secure, more peaceful and more prosperous world?  As an old man, I cannot fly anymore.  So I decided to let Thunderbird fly for me, to let Thunderbird fly forever.

I was interviewed by EL PAÍS this past week for a piece on the growing fears in Europe of a potential implosion of the Euro.  Much has been said about the deficiencies of the Eurozone as a “suboptimal” currency area.  But perfect or not, like any marriage, breaking up could have devastating economic consequences for the defector (UBS assessed those costs in a report released this week).

So here’s my thought: rather than continuing to argue whether or not Europe is an optimum currency area or whether it would have been better for Spain, Greece or anyone else to stay away from it, the Eurozone, its member states, and the ECB would be better off acting as though the Eurozone were indeed a decent currency area.  That will require a shift in mindset and actions by today’s struggling periphery and the thriving core.  Spain for example will need to learn to increase its labor market flexibility  and find ways to increase productivity in the absence of short-term monetary fixes.  Germany will need to accept the fact that fiscal solidarity is a hall mark of any reasonably functional currency area.  Being aware of the costs of a potential divorce, or the opportunity costs had the euro never existed, should help carry the point.

Paul Krugman has been making some very interesting arguments lately, including the need for the ECB to actively seek growth-oriented monetary policy and to back Spain’s and Italy’s debt more aggressively to stop the madness of a run on their debt just like the Bank of England is doing (and just like Spain’s and Italy’s own central banks would be doing had they maintained their monetary independence).

Bloomberg Businessweek runs a story this week about Thunderbird’s new mobile app.  The app is not an isolated initiative, but part of our efforts to deliver on one of the four pillars of Vision 2020: to build a professional community of learning and practice.

Thunderbird’s model of effective global leadership includes the notion of Global Social Capital as a core competence.  Successful global leaders, we have found through research and decades of experience, are not so just because of what they know, but of who they know.  They have built relationships across the world that help them deepen their understanding of multiple cultural, institutional and economic environments and open the right doors when needed.

But operating on a global scale makes the development of effective relationships much more difficult, sometimes because of plain  difficulties in crossing paths with the right people but also because differences in cultural backgrounds often become an obstacle to building trust.

Our various master and executive education programs, help participants build this crucial component of their global leadership capabilities by carefully constructing co-horts, learning environments and experiences that induce to the creation and nurturing of global relationships.  But building social capital is a life-long endeavor.  While a Thunderbird program can help many people get started, it takes time and effort to develop a rich global set of relationships that can serve as learning ground and open new opportunities.

Thus our effort to work with our award winning global alumni network to strengthen the opportunities for professional interaction.  And our efforts to leverage the full power of mobile and social networking capabilities to support that work.

By J. Oseas Ramírez Assad ‘11

Estimado Angel,
…
I wanted to share with you that this Sunday I just got back from Cambodia where I was participating in a TEM lab for the last five weeks. We worked on a project for DDD (Digital Divide Data), a social enterprise that hires disadvantaged Cambodian youth (from very poor families, landmine victims, etc.) and trains them on basic IT skills to provide digitization services. At the same time, DDD gives them a scholarship to study a university degree so that they can get a better job when they graduate, thus breaking the cycle of poverty they were in. Our project consisted in helping DDD determine whether and how they could offer their digitization services locally in the healthcare and financial services sectors. In the end, we were able to present the client with valuable insight about their organization as well as concrete, actionable items as they required. This will help them strengthen their business model in order to continue furthering their social mission

The reason why I wanted to share this with you is that since I started my studies in Thunderbird a year and a half ago, this is the first time in which I have experimented what it means to enact our mission of creating sustainable prosperity worldwide. The mission is what made me choose Thunderbird above other programs and it was fundamental for me to live it before graduating. This took place greatly in part thanks to the support you provided to me through Mr. Scott to address the IIE to allow a Fulbright to participate in such a program, so I wanted to thank you for your support.

Estimado Angel, gracias: esta experiencia ha tenido un gran impacto en mi vida.

Nos vemos pronto – ¡saludos!

The 10,000 Women Initiative, run by Goldman Sachs, will partner with the State Department to bring Pakistani women entrepreneurs for intensive training at the Thunderbird School for Global Management in Arizona

via Secretary Clinton Provides Remarks With Pakistani Foreign Minister | U.S. Department of State Blog. (includes video of Clinton’s remarks)

Today’s Thunderbird Global Council meeting in Salzburg has helped push Vision 2020 a step further focusing on two critical issues:

1. How to measure impact.  Vision 2020 calls for a focus on “global impact” and a laser focus in educating individuals who can contribute to a thriving, sustainable and inclusive global economy. This requires that we begin to report publicly on the real impact we have.  The TGC is helping identify a set of indicators of impact to be included on our first “Impact Report”.

2. How to build a global community of learning and practice that will support global leaders throughout their careers and will empower them to create value in various ways through various cycles.  Such community should deliver at least three types of value: inspiration, insight, involvement; it should be both virtual and physical; it should be global in composition and focus; it should be flexible and self-organizing.

Great energy, great ideas.  I feel energized to take next steps.  And ready for the alumni reunion tomorrow in Bad Ischl.

I enjoyed the discussion this week on the prospects of the economy on a global, national and local levels. (Find overheads and other materials here: Economic Outlook 2011 | Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce).

In my piece I discussed economic forecasts by the IMF that place China and India as the motors of world economic growth for years to come.  ASEAN-5 countries too are growing at impressive rates and they too account for a major share of world populations (0.5 billion people altogether).  Africa is picking up its growth too, but even the projected 5-6% won’t be able to make a dent in current standards of living if current population growth continues its course (major investments need to occur in education, early childhood and maternal health as well as combating AIDS and malaria).

According to the WTO, ghlobal trade is growing at an impressive 25%, and it is already back to pre-crisis (January of 2008) levels. As far as foreign direct investment, the UN (UNCTAD) indicates that the declines in flows have bottomed out already (at 2005-06 levels approx.) and is already picking up momentum as well.

The UNCTAD latest poll shows increasing levels of optimism for the next couple of years both among investment promotion agencies (IPAs) as well as multinational corporations.  IPAs are targeting investments from the US, China, the EU and India more than any other region.  And multinationals continue to be focused on the BRICs as well as the US.

Economic trends are proving Goldman’s famous BRIC acronym right, but perhaps the order should have been different–CIBR, for China, India, Brazil and Russia–as this seems to be the ranking of preferences of investors as well as measures of competitiveness such as the recently released Global Competitiveness Report by the World Economic Forum.

In terms of risks, The Economist Intelligence Unit reports “sovereign default”, “deflationary spiral in the developed world”, “double-dip recession as stimulus fades”,  “new asset bubble bursts” and “a new wave of protectionism taking hold” at the top of the list in their latest poll.

While these are definite concerns to keep in mind, I’m much more worried about long-term potentially disastrous risks including climate change, population growth in the poorest regions in the world, and potential new food crises. In less than 10 days, the Clinton Global Initiative will provide an ideal scenario to exchange insights, connect minds and engage in new actions.

Alum Bart Kohnhorst ‘83 shared a fascinating NYT article on how language shapes the way we think (Does Your Language Shape How You Think? – NYTimes.com), and which, in a way, helps explain the reason why Thunderbird emphasizes language learning in the curriculum.

Years ago, when I was in graduate school, I ran some experiments testing a “lighter” version of Whorf’s hypothesis that language determines perceptions of reality. The results, which were later published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, showed that small variation in syntax could influence the way we categorize a series of artificial computer-animated events.

While it is true that Whorf’s theory in its radical form “crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense”, and that no evidence exists that one language forbids its speakers to comprehend concepts and ideas of speakers of other languages, there is a mountain of evidence that language does bias thinking, that shapes the aspects of reality that are paid most attention to.

Since 1946 Thunderbird has emphasized language training as part of its formula to educate globally minded leaders.  The motivation however is not just to add another valuable skill to a future manager’s toolkit–honestly, it is extremely difficult to predict what language will be most useful throughout one’s career–but to help strengthen the cognitive flexibility that is inherent to a global mindset.

Learning a second language is one of the most effective ways to force our mind to look at the world from multiple angles, to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously, to be open to the possibility that others may see one situation differently.  This turns out to be a core competence of global leadership.

Worse than having a problem is not knowing it.  Even worse: being proud of it. A recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (Evan Glodstein: What if English Only Isn’t Wrong? Do Americans Need To Be Bilingual, and Will Technology Smash the Language Barrier For Good? – WSJ.com) toys with the idea that English dominance, the efforts by others to learn English plus the availability of translation technology makes it just fine for Americans to remain mono-lingual.

To learn a new language is to open a window into a new culture, to acquire a new prism through which interpret the world around us.  When the Chinese learn English (there may be more English speakers in China already than in the U.S.) they are also learning English culture, they are reading American media, becoming more familiar with American life-style, understanding the preferences of their largest customer.  When Chinese executives negotiate a deal in English with an American counterpart, they are likely to understand the other party much better than the other way around.  If it were a poker game, it is clear where I would place my bet!

It has always intrigued me how the very same political leaders who defend “English Only” policies are also the most concerned that China is eating America’s lunch.  America’s education policies often seem more focused on “curing” immigrant children from their “bilingual problem” than on exposing all children to at least one foreign language at an early age.  My 8th and 6th graders attending public schools in Arizona are yet to take a single foreign language class.  If it weren’t for our efforts to preserve their Spanish (sorry authorities, we are hoping they will remain “contaminated”) and expose them to other languages in our family travels they would reach high-school without having ever had to learn a word of anything other than English.

Thunderbird has been educating global business leaders for the last 64 years and learning a second language has been a critical foundation of our educational approach.  We are fully aware that most international business transactions will be conducted in English, but we are more concerned that without an understanding of the cultural framework shaping the thinking of the person across the table, a mono-cultural executive would be doomed to making a bad deal.  “English-only” is in fact a terrible deal for America.