Main Page | Month Archive | Email Updates | RSS Feed | Print Version

The Public Diplomacy Blog is intended to stimulate dialog among scholars, researchers, practitioners and professionals from around the world in the public diplomacy sphere. The opinions represented here are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School.

WHAT MPDS AND MBAS CAN LEARN FROM EACH OTHER
JUL 29, 2010 - 5:12PM PDT
Posted by Cari Guittard
All posts by this author

Earlier this summer I had the opportunity to teach Corporate Diplomacy and Geopolitics for the MBA School at the University of San Francisco. My students were part of USF’s Executive Program – all working full-time while pursuing their degrees. Unlike my experience teaching this past spring at USC, where I had the luxury of a full semester, here I was given 6 weeks to cover the world. In preparation for the class I delved deeply into MBA curricula, which have surprisingly few global components, as well as current research and writings on geopolitical trends and their implications for business. I also incorporated many PD resources as part of my own hope that some day we will have a cross-disciplinary approach and public diplomacy element as a core part of every MBA program. Through this process, I distilled out several resources and schools of thought that MPD and MBA students alike (as well as public diplomacy practitioners) can benefit from. First and foremost, Ian Bremmer’s work should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand the world we live in today. When it comes to recognizing and explaining geopolitical trends, no one does it better than Bremmer. We used his books The Fat Tail and most recently The End of the Free Market as the basis for many of our in class discussions. For anyone seeking to get a quick read on what’s happening in the world and where the world is going, these are the books to begin with. Bremmer is one of the few experts on the subject of geopolitics whom you can read, absorb and understand readily. Second, I bundled and shared with the students some of the resources I use every day to keep a pulse on what’s happening around the globe. I always begin and end my day with 'Watching America' which has free, daily translations of the world’s news coverage of the US. I am also a Drudge Report junkie, and religiously read my subscriptions of The Week, Economist, Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs. My increasingly favorite resource however is the Harvard Business Review. The HBR has a way of looking at the world that is unique and fresh from a PD point of view and distilling down key facts and figures that provide tools anyone can easily incorporate into their work. One example is this month’s map of social media usage across the globe. Bottom line, HBR is written for a business audience, and is geared towards people with limited time and attention span. For anyone outside of business wanting to understand business, especially as more and more PD practitioners are charged with building public-private partnerships and increasingly being called upon to influence and engage business, this is an essential tool. Finally, I built on the teachings and themes of Clayton Christensen at the Harvard Business School whose work every MBA student has drilled into their psyche. Christensen is famous for his theory of Disruptive Technology and the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma. I…... FULL TEXT
 
Read Comments (1) | Add Your Own

Read Comments:

Add a Comment: