Asian Studies Review Lifting our horizons: preparing

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Lifting our horizons: preparing Australians to do business in the global economy Bruce W. Stening

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Griffith University Published online: 27 Feb 2007.

To cite this article: Bruce W. Stening (1993) Lifting our horizons: preparing Australians to do business in the global economy, Asian Studies Review, 16:3, 17-29, DOI: 10.1080/03147539308712874 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03147539308712874

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Teaching

International

Business

Lifting our horizons: preparing Australians to do business in the global economy*

Downloaded by [UNSW Library] at 16:08 23 February 2015

Bruce W. Stening Griffith University In 1853, legislation was passed through the British houses of parliament that sparked an intense and vociferous pedagogical debate on two continents. The legislation required that, thenceforth, positions in the Indian Civil Service be open to all natural-born subjects of Her Majesty Queen Victoria through a competitive examination assessing their suitability for the responsibilities they would have in running British India. While the structures and procedures for administering British India varied over the period of colonial rule, for the most part the responsibility for achieving English objectives was in the hands of the Indian Civil Service, an elite group whose number never exceeded 1,00c).1 Sent to India in their late teens or early twenties, the men of the ICS typically served for thirty-odd years in an immensely different, often oppressive and hostile environment. While their titles were diverse, their functions were essentially managerial. Seen in those terms, the ICS was indeed an impressive outfit: in terms of size and importance it has been compared to the civil services of imperial China and of Suleiman's Ottoman Empire.^ It was arguably more influential than the expatriates of any multinational corporation. Furthermore, the functions its members undertook and the problems they faced, particularly in the days of the East India Company, were in many ways analogous to the functions of and problems faced by managers in companies engaged in international business today. * 1

2

This article is a modified version of the author's inaugural professorial lecture delivered at Griffith University in November 1992. A number of works have examined the history and role of the ICS, including Bernard S. Cohn, "Recruitment and training of British civil servants in India 1600-1860", in Ralph Braibanti (ed.), Asian Bureaucratic Systems Emergent from the British Imperial Tradition (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1966), 87-140; B.B. Misra, The Administrative History of India 1834-1947 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970); L.S.S. O'Malley, The Indian Civil Service 1601-1930 (2nd ed. London: Frank Cass, 1965); Philip Woodruff, The Men Who Ruled India: The Founders (London: Jonathan Cape, 1953). Woodruff, The Men Who Ruled India, p. 15.


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Before the Charter Act of 1853, selection for the ICS had been based essentially on the patronage of members of the Court of Directors. Though training had been provided to servants of the Company since Lord Wellesley, then Governor-General of India, founded the College at Fort William in Calcutta in 1800, the introduction of the open competitive system of entry to the ICS reopened a debate about whether or not the qualities which were necessary for the effective functioning of a member of the ICS could be formally taught and, if so, what form that, education and training should take.3 Views on the matter were polarized. At one extreme there were those who argued that the new system would create a Service made up of competition-wallahs, individuals who, while adept at passing examinations, would not necessarily have the attributes necessary for the Service. What attributes were central was also a matter of divergent views; however, there was the broad fear on the part of many of the existing members of the Service that the new recruits would not have the right kind of breeding as gentlemen and would, as a result, bring disrepute among the Indian population. By contrast, those who supported the system of competitive entry argued that there were specific skills that all members of the Service had to have, skills in language, in law and administration, and many other diverse matters. According to one member of the Service, for example, all members of the Service should have excellent horse-riding skills.4 The debate that followed the competitive-entry legislation pertaining to the Indian Civil Service raises issues of continuing relevance for international business studies today. How best can we prepare ourselves to undertake successfully business transactions with individuals and organisations from countries whose assumptions, values, perceptions, languages and so forth may be quite unlike our own?5 The challenges that confront us as a nation and as educators are substantial. There are a number of important questions to which the answers are not necessarily obvious. Furthermore, they are not likely to be found wholly, perhaps even principally, within our universities; rather, as an essentially professional area of study, international business must forge firm links with practitioners in the field. In examining the context within which international business is currently being undertaken and the way in which it is evolving, it might be worth considering briefly what we mean by the term "international business". In the 3

4 5

Following the introduction of the Charter Act, the Secretary of State for India sought the views of interested parties. Correspondence, notes, memoranda, minutes and the like on this matter were published as Papers Relating to the Selection and Training of Candidates for the Indian Civil Service (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1876). The author used these and other documents during a period spent undertaking research at the India Office Library, London, on broader issues of selection and training for the ICS. The cooperation of the Library's staff is gratefully acknowledged. Memorandum from W. Oldham, dated 26 July 1875, in Papers Relating, p. 210. The issue of Australia's economic strategy options does not fall within the ambit of this article.


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first place, the adjective used is clearly meant to distinguish it from "domestic business". Simplistically, then, "international business" is that which is conducted by parties from different nations. Historically, for Australia, as for most other countries, that largely meant exporting to other nations and importing from them. Australia's economy has always been characterised by a large amount of such activity as a proportion of total economic activity; but for other countries, such as the United States, international business traditionally has been a much smaller proportion of total activity. Even after off-shore manufacturing (where a company whose headquarters are in one country produces some of its output in another country) assumed greater importance, the distinction between domestic and international business was not a terribly difficult one to make. Matters became somewhat more complicated with the rise of truly multinational corporations, but we could usually still discern a particular country-base for the corporation. However, we have moved in the last five to ten years to a vastly different situation, that of the global economy. The term "global economy", while frequently bandied about, is not often articulated. In essence, it conveys the notion of a very high level of interdependency between the economies of nation states. This interdependency has resulted from a number of factors, among them changes in the nature of markets, of competition, of regional economic alliances and technology. In relation to technology, for example, several things have happened. First, sophisticated communication and computing technologies have virtually eliminated the importance of geographical location in relation to many products; as Rupert Murdoch noted in a speech recently, many industries, particularly in the services sector, can be carried on in Alice Springs just as well as any other place in the world. Second, in some industries, inter-country cooperation between corporations is almost essential as the technological capacities and capital required are so immense; this is certainly true in respect of some parts of the electronics industry. Third, since technologies are characterised by increasingly shorter life spans, there is the necessity of recovering the costs of capital faster by expanding the size of the market, that is going outside one's traditional market.6 For individual business firms in almost all parts of the world, the implications of the emergence of the global economy have been enormous, especially in terms of the level of competition now faced. Not only are firms finding that the level of competition abroad is much tougher than it was, from both local firms and other foreign competitors, but at home (wherever that is) the firm is confronted with a much tougher competitive market. As a result, our benchmarks for competitive best practice are increasingly international ones. To that extent, the distinction between domestic and international business is breaking down; while firms may not be directly engaged in business with firms from other nations, the impact of the global economy on them by way of increased foreign competition may be enormous. Where once, in preparing people for international business, 6 Peter F. Drucker, The New Realities (New York: Harper & Row, 1989); Howard V. Perlmutter and David A. Heenan, "Cooperate to compete globally", Harvard Business Review 64, 2 (1986), 136-52.


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we thought in terms of preparing them to do business abroad, we must now think in terms of preparing persons who have never been abroad and whose business may never export or import a thing. Furthermore, in the post-industrial society in which the service sector (including tourism) has come to play an important role in our economy, international business takes on yet a different meaning from its traditional one. Indeed, the largest volume of world trade today is in the form of money, that is, capital movement, not goods. Thus, from the world's largest firms such as those in the American automobile industry through to relatively small firms in relatively obscure countries (like Australia), the business world is a vastly different one to that which existed even ten years ago. The overall ramifications have been even greater: a widely discussed concept these days is Ohmae's "borderless world" in which political sovereignty is largely replaced by consumer sovereignty.7 It is a world in which, for example, a major division of an Australian corporation such as Pacific Dunlop can be headquartered in Melbourne, do its manufacturing principally in Asia, yet sell most of its product in Europe and North America." It is a world in which Honda motor vehicles can be manufactured in the United States and shipped back to Japan. It might be said that McLuhan's concept of the "global village", put forward almost thirty years ago as a description of the impact on the world of sophisticated communications technologies, is exceeding even his grand vision. Such changes which have occurred and which are evolving in the nature of international business imply the need for a complete rethinking of the way business operations are structured. While many of these changes have already begun, we are likely to see an even more pronounced move towards flatter, more responsive structures and a greater move towards international joint ventures and other forms of strategic alliances. Perhaps the most significant changes that will need to occur, however, are changes in attitudes, a major shift in mental gears from a perspective that essentially regards the rest of the world as somewhere "out there" and comprised of people who, by and large, are different in complex, maybe unfathomable, ways and who are, indeed, inferior to us in most respects, to a perspective that, while acknowledging differences, accepts that we are a part of the global village and must be fully integrated with it for our own economic well-being. It will require us to move wholeheartedly to what is called a marketing orientation (in which the customer is king) and away from any lingering notions of a production orientation—that because, in our judgement, we produce the best whatever, people will beat a path to our door to buy it. Examples abound of industries which have gone out of existence based on that type of thinking. It will, moreover, require us as a nation to produce managers, and citizens who are confident and skilled at dealing with organisations and individuals of different cultures. For while there may be some convergence in the way that business is done around the world, important cultural differences 7 8

Kenichi Qhmae, The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (London: Fontana, 1991). Australian Business in Asia: Climbing the Mountains (Melbourne: Business Council of Australia, 1992), pp. 59-60.

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will remain. A prominent Japanese businessman has been quoted as saying that "Japanese and US management is 95 per cent alike and differs in all important respects".9 This will continue to be true. In the face of such changes to the business world in which we live, then, what challenges confront us as educators, particularly those of us who teach business or international business? First, there needs to be an internationalisation of the curriculum. This has certainly been the view emerging from several important enquiries held in North America and Europe into the future of management education.10 In Australia, to my knowledge, the matter has not as yet been addressed at all; in referring to desirable key features of the curriculum in graduate schools of management, the 1982 Ralph Report into management education in Australia11 made no mention of international business. The American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business (the major accrediting organisation for management schools in the United States), by contrast, explicitly recognises that "every student should be exposed to the international dimension through one or more elements of the curriculum",12 though it does fall short of requiring this in order to be accredited. One imagines (hopes is a better way of putting it) that an enquiry into Australian management education today would recognise the need for international business to be given a prominent place in the curriculum of our programs. Within the context of a general MBA designed for graduates in French literature, geology, law, engineering, psychology or whatever, and the need to include liberal doses of accounting, finance, statistics, organisational behaviour, strategy and so on, the most that is likely is some reference to the international dimensions of those subjects and a particular course or two specifically on the subject of international management. The question is whether, from the point of view of the national and organisational needs outlined earlier, this is enough and, if not, what else ought to be provided by way of an education in international business. Let me make several preliminary comments on this matter. In the first place, a specialised education in international business is an essential part of managing well in the global economy. While those who do manage our international 9

A comment attributed to Fujisawa, co-founder of the Honda Motor Corporation, reported in Susan Schneider, "National vs. corporate culture: implications for human resource management", Human Resource Management 27, 2 (1988), 231-46. 10 Internationalizing International Business Education (Report of the Michigan State University Center for International Business Education and Research 1991 Roundtable on Internationalizing Business Schools and Faculty, March 1992); Lee C. Nehrt, "The internationalization of the curriculum", Journal of International Business Studies 18, 1 (1987), 83-90; Lyman W. Porter and Lawrence E. McKibbin, Management Education and Development: Drift or Thrust into the 21st Century? (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988); Clarence C. Walton (ed.), Report of the International Conference, Managers for the XXI Century: Their Education and Development (Washington DC: American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business, 1981). 11 Inquiry into Management Education Report (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 1982). 12 See Porter and McKibbin, Management Education, p. 319.

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business dealings will not all have international business degrees, there is a definite place for those who do have such specialised knowledge and skills. Put another way, persons with qualifications in other areas, including BCom or MBA graduates, would not be expected to have all of the knowledge and skills that are required to be effective in the global economy and are best complemented by those with this more specialised knowledge. Of course, the form that this education in international business takes (for example, formal degree work or inhouse training) will vary from country to country depending upon educational traditions.13 Second, in all but a few fields of academic endeavour, learning is a lifelong process. While it has always been the case that much of one's learning begins after one's formal education has finished, the pace of change is such that, for almost all of us, periodic retraining and updating of a more formal, structured type will be necessary if we are not to be completely out of our depth. That is not to say, however, that all such further education and training will be on an award basis. Indeed, we are likely to see the emergence of a greater number of short programs tailored to meet very specific needs of clients. At the same time, however, there will be a need for specialised graduate degrees in international business that are complementary to the more broadly-based MBA programs. One of the positive aspects of accepting that learning in a field will truly be a lifelong experience is that we are freed to some extent from the compulsion we often feel to cram everything that we can into a three-year undergraduate degree program. A recently published government report14 suggested that there are three types of skill that those completing our undergraduate programs in Australian universities should have obtained. The first category is that of generic skills, attributes and values, "those which should be acquired by all graduates regardless of their discipline or field of study". The second is the body of knowledge that provides the theoretical base and subject-related context of the field. Finally, the third category is the professional/technical or other job-related skills, those "which graduates can apply immediately to their employment". While we will increasingly be required to provide education and training to a broader base of clients (postgraduates, executives and so forth), I will address my comments primarily to this undergraduate level targeted by the DEET report. It is in the balance between the three content categories of the DEET report that different education institutions will define themselves and differentiate themselves from their educational competitors. Furthermore, it is in deciding this balance that important academic arguments, somewhat akin to those which 13 The Making of Managers: A Report on Managerial Education, Training and Development in the USA, West Germany, France, Japan and the UK (London: National Economic Development Office, 1987). 14 Higher Education Council, National Board of Employment, Education and Training, Higher Education: Achieving Quality (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1992).


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followed the introduction of competitive entry to the ICS, will be waged. In part, at least, these are debates about the nature of universities and a university education. In large measure, they focus on the distinction between training (what has been called "knowing how") and education ("knowing why").1^ These debates are not new to professional fields of study in universities; they have certainly surrounded the place of nursing and education, and even law and medicine to some extent, as well as business. Those of us who are employed in such professionally-based schools or departments in universities are frequently left feeling that we are between a rock and a hard place: some of our colleagues in other non-professionally-based schools look upon us far too oriented to the world outside (that.mysterious place labelled in Alice in Wonderland-type terms as "the real world"), and as insufficiently rigorous. At the same time, however, those who operate out there in "the real world" are inclined to regard us a bunch of egg-heads who have little appreciation of how things "really are" and who, therefore, aren't providing "products" (that is, graduates) that are relevant.16 While the rigour/relevance tension will not easily be resolved (at least in an academic environment in which we have a relatively short period, usually around three or four years, in which to do what we can), and while the rigour/relevance issue will be (and, indeed, should be) the subject of regular discussion and debate, let me present my own stance on this matter: If in a field such as international business we remain aloof as academics from the practitioners "out there", we might just as well close shop immediately, for we will be of little use to either the firms that comprise that community or the graduates we hope that they will employ. Largely for reasons associated with the reward structures of universities, business/management academics have tended in recent times to seek the recognition of their academic colleagues at some expense to relevance. But a closer relationship of this type does not necessarily imply a loss of integrity on our part, does not meaning selling our soul. Let me first, though, consider how this broad view about professionallybased schools translates in terms of the skills we should be providing to our graduates in international business. In doing this, I will obviously be taking into account the changed and changing environment in which those graduates will be working, an environment which I have chosen to call the global economy. In view of that rapidly changing environment, one of the most important skills for a graduate in international business to have is flexibility. This is not an an unprincipled pragmatism (on the contrary, an understanding of international business ethics is essential), but rather the ability to adapt solutions to new problem situations, the ability to manage ambiguity. Thus, while there is a core of essential material that must be conveyed pertaining to international business, it 15 E.A. Lynton and S.E. Elman, New Priorities for the University: Meeting Society's Needs for Applied Knowledge and Competent Individuals (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1987). 16 Earl F. Cheit, "Business schools and their critics", California Management Review 27, 3 (1985), 43-62; Harold J. Leavitt, "Educating our MBAs: on teaching what we haven't taught", California Management Review 31, 3 (1989), 38-50; Raymond E. Miles, "The future of business education", California Management Review 27, 3 (1985), 63-73.

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must be presented in such a way that does not imply that it can necessarily be applied straightforwardly. The observation has been made that management education is often designed for paddling canoes on calm lakes, rather than dealing with the problems presented by the white water of the rapids. 17 Given that business in the emerging global economy is likely to be much more turbulent for managers than the exclusively domestic environment which that particular writer had in mind, it is essential that we find ways of introducing our students to life as a white-water rafter. This will necessarily imply the introduction of some new teaching methods. More fundamentally, though, it implies that we should at best be only cautiously prescriptive in our approach, not asking students to believe (or, even worse, believing ourselves) that what we are dealing with is everlasting truth. In the jargon of organisational theory, the environment of international business is not only turbulent but also highly differentiated. Not only is the world "out there" very different in many ways to the world in Brisbane or Sydney or Melbourne or even Australia, but within the world "out there" there are great inter-country and even intra-country differences. Too often we still talk of "Asia" or "Europe" as though the differences between countries in those regions were minimal or non-existent. If, then, our graduates are to operate effectively in such environments it is critical that they should have a second set of skills which I shall call cross-cultural literacy skills. Several years ago, a book entitled Cultural Literacy1* sparked a lively debate in the United States about the meaning of functional literacy. It argued that in order to function effectively in that society (indeed in any society), there is a need for a minimum level of shared background knowledge. The book provided a list of 5,000 names, phrases, dates and concepts which it was said any person living in the US would need to understand in order to be considered culturally literate; the list includes "apocryphal", "doves and hawks", "man Friday (girl Friday)", "logarithm", "one swallow does not make a summer" "split infinitive", "whooping cough" ... and about 4,993 others. Just as one would need to construct a different list for Australia from that provided for the US, one needs to understand yet different concepts again in respect of the variety of countries with which we may dealing in international business. As educators in this field, we have a responsibility for ensuring that those who graduate from our programs have a level of cross-cultural literacy that reflects an understanding of and basic level of competency to function in countries with which we would want to trade. The Academy of Social Sciences in Australia's current AustralianAsian Perceptions Project is an example of an attempt to grapple with this issue. Indeed, my argument in this regard implies an important and continuing role for the social sciences and humanities in international business education. The persons with whom we will be dealing will in many cases know a great deal about our culture and our way of doing business; for strategic competitive 17 P. Vaill, Managing as a Performing Art: New Ideas for the World of Chaotic Change (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1989). 18 E.D. Hirsch, Jr, Cultural Literacy (New York: Random House, 1988).

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reasons, or just out of a sense of good manners, we ought to know quite a bit about them and their culture.


This inevitably begs the question of what countries we should focus on, since it isn't possible to have a high level of literacy in all. Opinions will vary about this, too; my own view is that, while in the global economy we will need to be as broad as we can, for the foreseeable future we should continue to put most of our attention on being Asia-literate, focusing in particular on Northeast Asia and the ASEAN nations. It is these economies where growth is very high and it is these economies with whom Australia is likely to be most closely interlocked. But we should extend our geographic coverage beyond this as much as our resources will allow; the criterion should be not just the relevance of the country or geographic area to Australia but our ability to provide excellent instruction. The issue of cross-cultural literacy leads naturally on to a consideration of other communication skills, especially second-language skills. Indeed, language and area expertise are inextricably linked: a large measure of cultural literacy will be unattainable without foreign language knowledge. We may be able to get by in English but, to excel, some level of proficiency in the foreign language will be necessary. This is now well understood not just by academics but by leading industry bodies such as the Business Council of Australia which, in its recent publication, Australian Business in Asia: Climbing the Mountains, argued for "more substantial resourcing and encouragement of Asian studies and languages".19 Effective managers in the global economy will, then, require a mastery of basic business skills, an understanding of the cultures in which they operate and, in many instances, foreign-language competency. However, even this knowledge and these skills and competencies will not be sufficient. There is now an enormous body of empirical evidence which clearly shows that managers' ability to deal with what might loosely be called the "people" aspects of their job is central to whether they are effective as managers overall. That is to say, individuals can be brilliant technically with all sorts of whiz-bang abilities, but unless they can effectively manage people (not in a manipulative sense, but in a manner beneficial both to the organisation and those being managed) they are probably not going to get very far. In passing, we might note that there is a widely held view in management education circles these days that there has been too great an emphasis on developing analytical skills at the expense of these so-called "softer" skills, with the result that the heavy emphasis on quantitative methods in many programs is being reduced.20 In international management, the people problems are even more complicated than in domestic situations. 19 Australian Business in Asia, p. 66. See, too, a number of papers published in "Asian Studies and Australian Business", Asian Studies Review 14, 3 (1991), 1-42. 20 See, for example, Leavitt, "Educating our MBAs", and Porter and McKibbin, Management Education.


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A number of the skills and competencies that I have suggested are necessary for persons intending to do business in the global economy are not most effectively acquired through the traditional lecture mode of delivery. Rather, where it is appropriate, we should provide students with learning experiences that are as close as possible to the situations that they will face after graduation. Broadly speaking, this means engaging them in simulation experiences of various types. The objective is to avoid the possibility that we will be producing the equivalent of theoretical surgeons. Let me illustrate what I mean by pointing to two recent initiatives in teaching international business at Griffith University. First, there is now more extensive use of the case study method, an approach where students are required to identify and solve real problems which have been encountered by individuals or organisations in international business situations. Second, from 1993 a course will be offered which engages students in the preparation of major business reports for local firms involved in, or contemplating involvement, in exporting. Among other things, the students will spend a couple of weeks in a foreign country (under the supervision of an academic) personally acquiring the information required to assess the viability of a specific product in that market. Thus, in addition to applying the conceptual material they have learned to the solution of real problems, they will get firsthand business experience, albeit of a somewhat restricted type and over a short period of time, in another culture. I expect that their learning curve should be as steep as any businessperson's first fact-finding mission into a foreign market. Depending upon which country we focus on in a particular year, and the language they have studied as part of their degree, students will also get an opportunity to test and improve their skills in this area. Let me summarise the broad skills that those completing an undergraduate degree in international business should have acquired. They should have a thorough understanding of business fundamentals: accounting, economics, marketing, political science, organisational behaviour, quantitative methods, law, and several other subject areas. As a degree which is, furthermore, a degree in international business, they should understand the international dimensions of those subjects where that is relevant: international accounting, international economics, and so on. They should also have as much area expertise and cross-cultural literacy as possible and some level of language proficiency. And they should have an ability to deal with the non-cognitive aspects of the world they will face. More fundamentally, though, they should have the ability to apply this knowledge to circumstances that are changing very rapidly; that is, they must have achieved a certain level of competency as against just understanding these matters. To adopt the criteria used by Macauley, one of those principally responsible for devising the post-1853 examinations for the Indian Civil Service, the object should not be to acquire "a formal and scholastic

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pedantry" but to "train the mind for the highest purposes of active life".21 I think that we would all agree that, viewed in totality, this is an awfully tall order! Besides resolving those issues of what to teach, to whom, when and how, there are several other things which, in my view, need to be done if we are to be able to deliver on our contract as educators adequately to prepare Australians to do business in the global economy. First, we must forge a close relationship with the business community. More concretely, an international business program would benefit enormously from the establishment of an advisory board upon which businesspeople with expertise in international business would sit with academic colleagues; an executive-in-residence program which would attract very senior managers to spend, say four to six weeks on the campus sharing their thoughts and experience with staff and students; a scholars-inindustry program with academics engaging in a reciprocal exercise; an international business student internship program; and other cooperative and mutually beneficial arrangements in which there is a dialogue in which both sides learn something from the other. From our side, we must ensure that Australian firms and governmental organisations with interests in international business are persuaded as to the central importance of having in their organisations graduates of the type that we provide. Second, the selection of staff for academic positions in international business should allow for the appointment of individuals who don't necessarily meet the traditional criteria. Given the emphasis that should be placed in international business education on cross-cultural literacy skills, practical business skills and so forth, it is consistent that staff could be chosen who themselves have demonstrated ability in these areas but who may not have a PhD or an extensive publication record. Realistically, we are unlikely to find many persons who are academics in the traditional mould and who also have these other desirable attributes. This does not mean that such persons will be other than intelligent and academically rigorous, just that their c.v.'s might not be those who have taken the PhD/publications route. (It might be noted in passing that the current director of the Australian Graduate School of Management and his predecessor both came into academia from top management consulting backgrounds and neither has a PhD.) Further, in line with the earlier point I made about a closer relationship with the business community, it might be possible to appoint exceptionally talented and qualified practicing managers as adjunct faculty of the university. As well, we should seek to build bridges across the university among those with interests in international business. Third, we must be prepared to evaluate and reward such staff (who will—or should—exist in other parts of the university as well) on a different basis than that traditionally used, that is to say, with less emphasis on research and more on teaching and relationships with the business community. It is largely a question 21 Misra, Administrative History of India, p. 180.

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of adjusting the motivational levers that we have at our disposal: until we are prepared to reward staff in different fields differently, we will be hard pressed to elicit the behaviour from those staff that will meet the needs of those for whom we are presumably providing our professional services. Fourth, and even more fundamental, universities need to find the resources to fund these various initiatives. Apart from additional staff, there is a need to ensure that adequate infrastructure is provided to forge and maintain professional links with the business community. This will require a willingness to reallocate resources at a time when the higher education sector is already underresourced and to be more efficient with the resources we have already. We all face the challenge of maintaining the morale and job satisfaction of our staff in these tight times, a challenge that requires us to improve our people skills. Not only, then, must we set our strategic path wisely; we must also ensure that we appoint strong, caring and principled individuals to lead us. I began with the debate in nineteenth century Britain surrounding the most appropriate preparation for persons taking up positions in the Indian Civil Service. While the analogy between the circumstances faced by the British in India and those which confront present-day Australian businesses is not perfect, it was meant to suggest several things. In the first place, and in terms of very broad implications, I wanted to make clear the importance of historical analysis in understanding many aspects of the present; history and historians, and other humanities and social science scholars, have an important place in international business education. Second, and related to the first point, I wished to suggest that many of the questions are not new; many of the central questions that confront us as educators in preparing Australians to do business in the global economy were questions that were confronted by the East India Company and the ICS—who to prepare, how to prepare them, when to prepare them and so on. Third, by comparing the challenges of today with those of the ICS we can see, too, how much the world has changed in the past century; for example, today's expatriate (or tomorrow's, anyway) is as likely to be a woman as a man, a prospect that would have been met with incredulity and derision by the men of the ICS. Fourth, the example was designed to focus attention on the fact that, at the end of the day, the business of international business educators is a pragmatic one: to prepare people to undertake practical tasks as managers, as efficiently and effectively as possible. Though the ability to ride well is somewhat less important today than it was for an administrator in British India, as educators we cannot ignore the need to prepare individuals in some of these practically-oriented matters. In fulfilling this role we must be cognisant of the needs of both our immediate clients (students, at whatever level), in terms of both personal development and employment prospects, and the "end-users" (employers). In that respect, our function is somewhat different from those who prepared men for service in the ICS, since the latter were more like trainers for the company and were less concerned with the personal development of those they were training. Fifth, we who are international business educators are not

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here to produce competition-wallahs but, rather, well-rounded, cross-culturally literate men and women who can, to use the popular vernacular, add value to the work of the organisations by whom they are employed. Last, the consequences of not preparing Australians well to undertake international business are potentially very grave in terms of our economic future as a nation, as they would have been, in a much less defensible way, for the British in respect of India. "Oh! How many sailors, how many captains who have gaily set out for long voyages have vanished behind that sad horizon!"22 Unquestionably, there are risks beyond the horizon, in places that for many of us are "foreign" and, for that reason, we, as individuals and organisations, may be inclined not to venture there. However, in light of the emergence of the global economy, unless we decide completely to isolate our economy—a ludicrous proposition—the option of not venturing forth does not exist. Further, while we cannot predict everything that we will find over the horizon (much less how it might change in the future), with good preparation the journey can be made much less hazardous than it once was. Our task as educators in the field of international business is to take our students over that horizon and to prepare them in such a way that they can competently handle the conditions that will confront them as practitioners. Teaching International Business—a commentary Brian Sheehan Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology It is a pleasure to have been asked to provide a commentary on Bruce Stening's article but it is a task that I also find daunting, because I agree with virtually all he has to say. We are both "internationalists" and, within that context, also "Asianists". I agree wholeheartedly, for example, that Australia's major thrust in international business education should be primarily directed at Northeast Asia and ASEAN (but I would also include Indo-China, mainland China, and South Asia, particularly India). This is not to say, and I do not believe that Stening even implies this, that we ignore the UK, the EC or North America (and possibly other areas/regions over time)—these areas will continue to be important to Australia both in terms of trade and investment—but our major focus should be on Asia. As Ross Mouer says, "that Australia's future is somehow in Asia is beyond doubt. The growing economic importance of Asia especially north-east Asia, needs no documentation".1 Further, I endorse Stening's view that we have moved rapidly towards a global economy with all this entails, including much tougher international competition and the need for large areas of business to be able to market their 22 Victor Hugo, Oceano Nox. 1 Ross Mouer, "Moving toward Asia", Ascent Technology Magazine, DITEC, 5 (1992), p. 3.