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ON WISCONSIN Summer 2009
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than half of its MBA students. And thesestudents are pursuing the experiences forgood reason: the top-ranked Thunder-bird School of Global Management, withits patented Global Mindset Inventory used to measure one’s capacity to con-duct business on a world stage, says that“individuals with a high stock of Global Mindset … know how to manage globalsupply-chain relationships … and under-stand global competitors and customers.”But as international outlooks andskills become integral to core curricula,universities increasingly face the chal-lenge of evaluating their students’ prog-ress. And this means starting by definingthe result:
global competence
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team of UW-Madison faculty,staff, and students recently set outto write that definition. Called theGlobal Competence Task Force, the groupreleased its findings last fall, delineating notonly what the term means, but also howUW students might best acquire it.Randy Dunham, a management pro-fessor who directs the business school’sCenter for Business Education andResearch, chaired the initiative. On hisdesk sits a photo frame that rotates digitalimages of his own travels through the years: animals spotted on safari, a templein Asia, and a ruin in the Middle East.(Interestingly, several iPods sit stackedon the table between us as we talk. I laterlearned that these were prizes for anannual, weeklong competition that drew MBA students from as far away as HongKong, Bangkok, and Copenhagen.)Despite his own global leanings,however, Dunham says the task forcetook a soft-sell approach in its campus- wide proposal.“We are not recommending require-ments or standards,” he explains. “Weknew that if we said [global competence]is this many languages or this many area-studies courses, it would have been toocontentious to be adopted.”In addition, says Gilles Bousquet,dean of UW-Madison’s Division of Inter-national Studies, the group knew thatthere is no one-size-fits-all definition.“Global competence isn’t going tolook the same in engineering, the healthsciences, or the humanities — and it’s alsogoing to mean something different to aneducator, an executive, or the head of anNGO [nongovernmental organization],”he says.Instead, the task force listed the com-ponents or “competencies” that make upa global mindset, hoping that each cam-pus unit would adopt the definition. Pre-dictably, perhaps, they include the ability to work and communicate effectively in a variety of cultures and languages, and thecapacity to grasp the interdependence of nations in a global economy. Somewhatsurprisingly, though, many of the corecompetencies indicate a kind of stanceor attitude — the proclivity to engage insolving critical global issues, for example,and a willingness to see the world from aperspective other than one’s own.What the team doesn’t define, how-ever, is what level of competency is suf-ficient.“Developing global competency isa lifelong process,” says Marianne BirdBear, assistant dean of the Division of International Studies, who sat on the task force. “The university’s role is to makestudents aware that all disciplines —political science, agriculture, health care— have global, cross-cultural aspects tothem. Our job is to provide the trainingand experiences to develop the global skillset necessary … to address a given prob-lem or understand a certain condition.”Accordingly, the team recommendsthat campus units require each incom-ing undergraduate to adopt a “globalportfolio” to record the relevant coursesand experiences he or she acquires whilepursuing a degree. A second part of theportfolio outlines how these activities spe-cifically translate into global abilities that would be attractive to future employersor graduate schools. In developing thisportfolio, the team posits, students will
Far left: Adam Sitte ’08, who studied inCairo, Egypt, in 2007, earned second placein the People and Culture category of theUW’s annual Study Abroad Photo Contestfor his photo, “Ibn Tulun Mosque.” At left: Tyler Knowles ’05 submittedthis photo following his study abroad inEngland. He shot the image of a musicianon the island of San Marco in Venice.
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