How Global Are B-Schools? Not Very.

INSEAD MBA STUDENTS WANTED FRENCH CASE STUDIES.

“When I was teaching at INSEAD in France students said, ‘Why don’t you teach us using French case studies?’ My reply to them was who is your competitor? If the competitor is in France, maybe we should use French case studies, but more likely your competitor is half way around the world. It would suit you much better to learn about that region of the world than to deepen what is probably a fair understanding of what is going on in France already. That same message would be relevant to a school in Akron, Ohio, or Chung King, China.”

Bruner’s task force sees globalization as having the potential to play a truly transformative role in shaping the future of management education. The group, in fact, views the trend as so sweeping as to present itself as another inflection point for business education, as important as the landmark shift by business schools from application to research in the 1950s. “It is likely to overshadow more recent developments such as the rise of rankings beginning in 1988; the turn toward leadership development in the 1990s; and the debates over the profession of management in the 2000s,” the task force said. “Globalization of management education re-opens decades-old debates and layers upon them new complexity, broader scope, and greater scale…For business schools, globalization presents both a challenge and an opportunity. The events of this past decade warrant careful research and adjustment of curricula in an effort to convey a richer understanding of the evidence and impact of globalization.”

What does a truly global business school look like? The group took a stab at a definition. “We think that whether a school is ‘global’ is determined first by the outcomes it achieves, second by the processes it engages, and last by the places it inhabits,” the report states. “Actions and locations are useful means toward the end goal of globalization, but ultimately schools are judged by the outcomes they achieve. A global school of management:

–prepares students to perform competently and confidently in a world of global business competition and inherently global issues.

–generates research insights about trends and best practices in global management.

–leverages diverse cultures and practices in pursuit of innovation and continuous improvement.”

Successful globalization, according to the report, does not necessarily require a global ‘‘footprint’’ of facilities or a network of alliances outside of the home country. “As our findings reveal,” the task force said, “facilities and networks can help immensely toward achieving the learning, research, and innovation-related aspects of our above framework—but only if they exist as infrastructure to support a broader focus on students, research, and culture. In legitimizing a wide range of strategies for schools, however, we acknowledge the difficulty of measuring or ranking how ‘‘global’’ a business school is. Measures that focus on inputs/activities will inevitably ignore highly responsive and substantive approaches taken by schools that do not align well with those measures. Decision makers must measure outcomes, though this process is not easily accomplished.”

The task force also presented nine business schools as “case studies” in globalization, though it goes out of its way in noting that the inclusion of any institution is not “an endorsement of these schools’ approaches.” The B-schools cited range from the Stanford, Chicago and Duke in the U.S. to China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Essec Business School in Paris and Singapore. “Given the incredible size of the global field, we could have stretched the case studies by a factor of ten and still failed to capture the entire breadth of innovation in the field,” says Bruner. “It’s just a glimpse of what is going on.”

Ultimately, the educators who produced the report urge that accreditation bodies of business schools should set “standards of excellence” that impose global perspectives into the curriculum—not merely window dressing exercises that are smartly marketed to give the appearance of a global education. More than that, however, they urge accreditors to examine the “intellectual capital of faculty to keep pace with the evolution of business practices in a global business environment” and for schools to ensure consistent quality across all their programs regardless of where they are located around the world.