Internships & Global Leadership Development in India

The Imperative of Developing Global Leaders

“American companies lose an estimated $2 billion a year due to inadequate cross-cultural guidance for their employees in multicultural situations.  Companies could be spared these financial losses if employees possessed the necessary cross-cultural skills to interact successfully with their foreign counterparts.”

Michael Marquardt, The Global Advantage:  How World-Class Organizations Improve Performance Through Globalization (Houston, TX:  Gulf Press, 1999)

“A 2002 survey of large corporations found that nearly 30 percent of the companies believed they had failed to exploit fully their international business opportunities due to insufficient personnel with international skills.”

“The consequences of insufficient culturally competent workers include: missed marketing opportunities or business opportunities; failure to recognize important shifts in host country policies toward foreign-owned corporations;  failure to recognize important shifts in host country policies toward foreign owned corporations;  failure to anticipate the needs of international customers;  and failure to take full advantage of expertise available or technological advances occurring abroad.”

Ben L. Kedia and Shirley Daniel, “U.S. Business Needs for Employees with International Expertise” (paper prepared for the Conference on Global Challenges and U.S. Higher Education at Duke University, Durham, NC, January 2003), pp. 5,12-14, 17.

“A 2004 survey of graduates from…Thunderbird-The Gavin School of International Management, further demonstrates how important international knowledge and skills are in today’s business environment…Nearly nine in 10 of the graduates said their knowledge of other cultures gave them “some” or “a significant” competitive edge.  They said this knowledge helped them understand the business environment in other countries, earned them respect and credibility with foreign business people, and enhanced their negotiation success.”

Christian Uber Grosse, “The Competitive Advantage of Foreign Languages and Cultural Knowledge,” The Modern Language Journal, vol. 88, no.3 (2004), pp351-367.

The above citations appeared in “Education for Global Leadership:  The Importance of International Studies and Foreign Language Education for U.S. Economic and National Security”  by the Committee for Economic Development, 2006.
Online version available at http://www.ced.org/docs/report/report_foreignlanguages.pdf