Читать книгу Being Global - Gregory Unruh - Страница 7

Both of us have worked in businesses that were drawn into the global market. We, too, have been woefully unprepared—at different times in our lives—to tackle the global challenges we faced. Fifteen years ago, it wasn't clear how an organization that was successful on a local scale could parlay its capabilities to the world marketplace.

That same lack of direction was also common in the universities we attended and where we later taught. It was not that these institutions did not know that the nature of global engagement was changing. They just didn't know how to prepare students to be global. Professors and students alike had difficulty escaping the cultural norms, limited mindsets, local practices, and conservative nature of the academic institutions where we worked. There were efforts to recruit international students, but those efforts were not enough to help those students increase their cultural understanding of the local context or help local students benefit from the increasing diversity on a campus dominated by faculty and staff with little to offer in the form of a global mindset.

In our individual ways, we have each spent the past two decades struggling to learn to be global. Neither of us had a particular advantage in this effort. We did not grow up in multilingual or multicultural environments. Our parents did not move us around the world as children. We had to start on our own. As adults, we have both spent significant time in countries that are not our native homes, acquiring language skills and developing a deeper understanding of the practices and rhythms natural to those countries. We have worked to develop deep relationships with people around the world, people whose experiences and opinions are different from ours. We have looked to identify new sources of value in our work and find ways to share it.

Easy is not a word either of us would use to describe this path, but we are traveling it because we are convinced we must. We believe it makes us better at the things we care about and allows us to better help the people who reach out to us. Greg's deep commitment to environmental issues drives him to continue to learn, cultivate relationships, and attempt to influence the way companies choose their materials, manufacture their products, source their energy, and fulfill their social responsibilities to the communities in which they operate. Ángel's dedication to improving management education, and particularly to promoting ethics and integrity in leadership, drives him to seek connections with academic and business leaders all over the world. Integrity, in his mind, does not stop at the border and in fact is only fully tested when dealing with communities that are distant and different.