The Stanford Business Reporter

Issue date: 1/30/06 Section: News

As student Co-Presidents of the Global Management Program (GMP), we share a commitment and passion to make the GSB the premier school in training global managers. This was the vision we recently articulated to Dean Joss, and it reflects the spirit of the GMP's founder Leo Linbeck, who in 1994, the same year that he was awarded both the Ford and Arbuckle scholarships, realized that while business is increasingly global in scope, few people truly understand the skills a manager needs to thrive in the global business environment.

The student leadership has introduced a GMP theme for the first time this year. By focusing all our initiatives around "Managing Across Cultures", our aim is to help students understand the opportunities and challenges global managers and organizations face when operating in countries with very different business and cultural norms. We both went on GSB Study Trips over winter break, and our experiences in India, Pakistan and Israel reinforced our perception of how cultural approaches to business differ significantly across countries.

Leo Linbeck's founding vision continues to be at the core of the GMP's work, which is conducted along three dimensions:

• Administering an academic certificate in global management through GMP elective courses. This year, in an attempt to make the GMP Certificate more of a differentiator in the eyes of recruiters, we are developing a required course in International Business, taught by Professor Bruce McKern. The course will see the introduction of a new concept in management education, a Dynamic Case Study. Students will be required to make weekly decisions, in teams, on the choices a company faces in its overseas markets. Teams will decide which markets to enter and by what means (e.g. greenfield project, joint venture, acquisition), and develop regional strategies, including plans to address cross-cultural differences in business norms. Each incremental decision will build on previous decisions made by the group, creating a living case that we strongly believe will encourage further development of an experiential, "learning by doing" approach to teaching business cases.
• Helping students meet their international career objectives, through advisory sessions, the development of an international career database, a series of career BBL's focused on specific regions, and not least our flagship GMIX program. This year, a record number of students spent all or part of their summer on GMIX internships with, among others, an investment bank in the Dominican Republic, a hotel and resort company in China, a media start-up in South Africa, a mobile phone company in Finland, an NGO in Ethiopia, and a venture capital firm in Australia.

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