AUGUST 2006
About This Issue
Tasting Reality in Class
Kathleen O'Toole
Editor
The perks of working at the Business School include an occasional
opportunity to sit in on a course, seminar, or lecture that broadens your
perspective. This spring I carved out time to observe several sessions of a
seminar where students improved their abilities to manage risk in
multinational businesses.
“One of the hardest things for a global company to get right is adapting its
behavior to the diverse countries in which it operates. In the past,
misunderstandings of a country’s culture and institutions have resulted in
blunders, to the cost of both the host country and the company,” Professor
John McMillan wrote in the introduction to the syllabus. “This course is
about how to develop an understanding of a country’s political, business,
and economic climate and how to convert that understanding into sound
corporate policies.”
Approaching the general from the specific, the class looked in depth at the
operations of a particular company, BP (by revenue, the world’s
second-largest company), in a particular country, Venezuela (the world’s
fifth-largest oil exporter and a nation that is undergoing substantial
political change). Using a range of sources, including their own pre-GSB
experience, the student teams fleshed out a range of scenarios for
Venezuela’s future. Then, with input from BP executives, they assessed how
those scenarios might play out for BP. The end product was a class report to
the company proposing how it should evaluate the benefits and risks of
different courses of action. The students I observed and spoke with loved
the challenge of applying their skill sets in teams to these problems.
In this issue of the magazine, as in the last issue, we show you some of the
experiences the School has created for MBA students to learn in the field.
Students worked in Brazil and Myanmar and traveled to New Orleans on spring
service learning excursions (read story). Other students went to China and
hosted Chinese counterparts in an initiative sponsored by the Global
Management Program (read story). A new Career View program allowed still
other students to shadow alums for a week or more (read story). In our last
issue, we featured two other programs (see Letter to the Editor), in which MBA students spent their summers in internships in
organizations outside the United States.
With all that attention on experience-based learning in the field, it
occurred to me that we might be creating the impression that innovation at
the Business School is all off campus. That would be misleading. McMillan’s
seminar on assessing country-specific risk is just one example of innovation
in the classroom. In another course last spring, students acting as managers
of a fictitious U.S.-based furniture company are required not simply to
discuss what the company should do (as happens with most case study
discussions) but to make decisions which then trigger consequences—scenarios
devised by the course development team based on real-world international
events that affect furniture companies.
Such courses remind me of my all-time favorite—a high school history class
in which we students were transformed for one week into diplomats at the
1815 Congress of Vienna. If you are trying to understand political action,
it probably is useful to visit your state legislature, and we did that too.
But I can tell you that as France’s Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, I learned
something deeper about politics and myself than I did observing legislators
from the gallery. McMillan and other professors who understand that can turn
our classrooms into heart-thumping reality.
