By Simon Taylor, Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Business School
Amid shifting global dynamics, business education must evolve beyond a Western focus to cultivate a genuinely global mindset. Nottingham Business School’s Global Executive MBA illustrates this shift, preparing leaders to navigate diverse business environments and fostering a broader understanding of global challenges, opportunities, and cultural nuances in today’s complex marketplace.
Three years after Brexit, the media gave us a new word: ‘Bregret’. Yet, despite polls showing the majority of Brits now think leaving the EU was a bad idea, most recognise that reversing the clock is not a realistic option. Nor is pretending Brexit didn’t happen.
Regardless of individual feelings on the matter, introducing new barriers between the UK and its nearest trading partners means British businesses need to start thinking more globally. By extension, the universities and business schools that are equipping graduates to go and join these businesses also need to adopt a more global mindset.
But what exactly does it mean to ‘think globally’?
In some ways, business schools are, by nature, global institutions. They typically attract large numbers of international students and offer very culturally dynamic learning environments in the classroom. The Chartered Association of Business Schools (CABS) reports that around 73 percent of postgraduates in business courses in the UK are international students. Furthermore, 98 percent of respondents to CABS’ Annual Membership Survey in 2023 suggest their parent universities were reliant on income from these international postgrads, highlighting how the global aspect of business education is a crucial driver of value creation for the higher education sector at large.
International faculty also play a prominent role, with the Higher Education Statistics Agency reporting around a third of academic staff in the UK higher education sector were of non-British nationality in 2022. Roughly 17 percent of these international staff were from non-EU countries, bringing global perspectives to UK universities through their teaching and research.
At the same time, it is common across schools for the standard bread-and-butter case studies that form a core element of course curricula to focus on European or North American organizations. This can be particularly true for large flagship programmes like MBAs. Thus, students learn to view the business world through a decidedly Western perspective.
So, adopting a ‘global mindset’ means broadening the range of learning experiences students are exposed to, allowing them to interact with a wider range of business models, cultural and ethical considerations, and logistical challenges.
How to teach a global mindset
The Global Executive MBA (GEMBA) programme at Nottingham Business School (NBS) demonstrates what this looks like in practice. The programme was developed as an evolution of NBS’ online MBA and incorporates a collaborative element with two international partner schools: Stellenbosch University in South Africa and Brazil’s Insper Institute of Education and Research.
Learning is impact-based, with 70 percent of assignments focusing on the application of knowledge and theory in different environments. This enables participants to explore how their actions can have a global impact, viewing challenges from multiple perspectives.
As this programme is offered at the executive level, participants also work full-time during their two years of study, enabling them to implement what they have learned in their careers in real-time. To maximise the applicability of the programme to their professional roles, the curricula is designed so that course content can be personalised to cover the areas they are most interested in.
80% of the course is delivered online through structured discussions, with three week-long on-site modules allowing participants to immerse themselves in contrasting local business ecosystems in Nottingham, Cape Town, and São Paulo. A key objective of these on-location learning experiences is to encourage participants to consider the needs and challenges facing entrepreneurs and SMEs in parts of the world that may operate in very different ways from what they are used to.
In Cape Town, they work with entrepreneurs based in townships to explore the needs and challenges faced by SMEs in these communities and create a business plan to support growth. In São Paulo, the context changes and they work with SMEs and mid-sized organizations to explore the challenges of delivering ethical and sustainable practices in the Latin American context. Both projects expose participants to particular social, cultural, and economic ecosystems they may not have experienced before. Lectures by academics from Stellenbosch and Insper provide context and insight, resulting in a truly global teaching experience for those on the Executive MBA course.
SMEs receive special focus because these organizations are where different global perspectives are most sharply defined.
For example, compare launching startups in London and rural South Africa. Entrepreneurs in London will likely have greater access to potential investors and a more stable economic context with limited fluctuation in economic factors. As such, they may focus more on tapping into existing business networks than a South African entrepreneur, who may have to focus more on building these networks from the ground up. Thus, each forms a distinct approach to business shaped by their local environment.
By comparison, large multinational companies tend to be less influenced by regional cultures and diverse approaches to trade. They are typically large enough to drop their existing business model into new markets and spend more resources onboarding people. As such, the markets often adapt to them rather than vice versa. So, interacting with smaller companies in the process of scaling up their operations affords more opportunities to learn about the unique perspectives of local businesses.
What are the practical benefits of ‘thinking globally’?
Building global cultural capital and awareness of the need for change in a turbulent world in this way is just as important for senior business leaders as mastering an understanding of finance, business law, or technology. Developing a global mindset will help executives predict and manage international crises, improve the resilience of their supply chains, navigate geopolitics, and act upon their ethical and sustainable commitments.
In addition to improving their awareness of how external factors may impact their business ventures, learning to see the international business landscape from diverse perspectives gives executives additional context to reflect on their own impact. This self-awareness fosters authentic and resilient leadership.
Through self-examination, executives can ensure they are delivering on their commitments to responsible corporate behaviour as well as identifying skills or knowledge gaps that may help them boost productivity or further reinforce the stability of their business operations. Their enhanced understanding improves their adaptability and agility to confront complex issues.
It also helps them to forge relationships with organisations in other regions of the world by making it easier to navigate cultural differences. To many Western companies, parts of the world that emphasise different values or approaches to business can seem impenetrable. With this way of thinking, it is easy to simply work around these regions instead of effectively engaging with them. This is a limiting attitude. Teaching a global mindset prompts graduates to examine cultural differences in their economic and geopolitical context, demystifying them and creating opportunities to spark dialogue. This enables these leaders to reach new markets and scale up their operations.
These capabilities are vital in the context of an international business landscape often called ‘VUCA’ (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous). While the merits of applying a term coined nearly 50 years ago in a military context to modern-day business is debatable, it is no understatement to say companies are constantly having to brace for shocks that are often difficult to anticipate.
In recent years, businesses have had to steer a course through the COVID-19 pandemic, conflict in Ukraine, the emergence of Generative AI, and conflict in the Middle East, including Houthi attacks disrupting commercial shipping. On top of this, there are slow-burning issues, such as climate change, ageing populations in parts of Europe and East Asia, and high unemployment among young adults in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The earlier businesses can foresee challenges like these, the more that can be done to strategically mitigate their impacts and find solutions. A global mindset fosters an understanding of the world as a diverse yet interconnected marketplace, a global ecosystem, illuminating how seemingly distant crises may cause ripples that affect a much larger swathe of organizations.
Yet, more than this, it is about recognising and valuing the differences that characterise regional markets. In this way, leaders can work with these differences in positive ways that enable them to forge and deepen connections, rather than seeing them as inexplicable or insurmountable obstacles to doing business.
The technology and infrastructure to build a more closely connected world already exist. All that remains is to develop a mindset to match, and where better to start than Nottingham Business School and its Global Executive MBA?
About the Author
Simon Taylor is a Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Business School (NBS), part of Nottingham Trent University. He is the Course Leader for the Executive MBA and the Level 7 Senior Leadership Apprenticeship qualification.
This post was originally published on here
