Thunderbird for Good

Welcome to Thunderbird’s Global Citizenship blog! I’m quite excited to begin this conversation on what I hope will become a stimulating, thought-provoking conversation on some of the most complex issues surrounding the management of global corporations.

Thunderbird’s mission is to educate global leaders who create sustainable prosperity worldwide.  These are definitely big words for a self-defined “school of global management.” According to common business-school orthodoxy, a manager’s topmost (dare I say sole) responsibility is to maximize value for shareholders.  Yet Thunderbird’s seemingly heretical mission places society’s greater good first. Have we lost our minds?

Not surprisingly, I would argue we have not. The reason modern society has invented, perfected and extended the concept of the business corporation is that corporations have outperformed by a wide margin any other form of arrangement in making our lives better.  Business corporations can allocate capital more effectively, deliver more innovations, do more with less, and produce better and cheaper products and services than any other type of organization we know of.  They can do all those things, that is, under the right type of leadership.

In the wrong hands, corporations can create or perpetuate social injustice, misuse or ruin natural resources, exploit individuals, misallocate capital and destroy value.

Which is why global citizenship is a core component of the Thunderbird equation for global leadership. Global managers must act as global citizens because global citizenship means good business. But most importantly, global managers must be global citizens because that’s their professional mandate, their moral compact with the rest of us.

But what does this mean in practice? What are the right theories and frameworks to help managers deal with global citizenship challenges?  What case studies can help illustrate what global citizenship is all about?

That’s what I hope we will be able to explore in the postings to come… let’s blog away!

– Ángel

Posted: 09|8|08 at 9:23 pm.
Filed under: Business Education.
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