Interconnected:
Living, learning and working in a global marketplace
“Burger flipping.” Those were the first two words Jennifer Summers ’05 thought of when Bluffton University business professor Bill Lyons recommended she take an internship with McDonald’s. Summers was interested in gaining experience in marketing and business administration, but she was not overly keen on working in food service. Encouraged by her professors and intrigued by the idea of working for a global corporation, Summers accepted the position. Little did she know her time with the organization would be less about serving hamburgers than it would be about connecting with people and the world around her.
For many of us, imagining the daily lives of those living halfway around the world is difficult. We wake up in the morning, hop in our automobiles (which, incidentally, are mostly foreign-made) and drive to work, stopping at McDonald’s for an Egg McMuffin and coffee along the way. We go about our lives—dropping off the kids, chatting on our cell phones, shopping for the evening meal and making weekend plans—all without giving much thought to what people in other countries are doing. After all, they are in an entirely different country, completely unconnected to us, right?
That is no longer an accurate assumption due to globalization, an umbrella term for a complex series of economic, social, technological and political changes that have been unfolding since the 1980s. According to the International Monetary Fund, globalization is a “growing interdependence of countries worldwide through increasing volume and variety of cross-border transactions in goods and services, free international flows and more rapid and widespread diffusion of technology.” Simply put, globalization is the merging of world economies.
This merging has led to significant changes in the way business is conducted and the way to best educate business students. Thanks to a wide range and depth of professional experiences, Bluffton’s business faculty are providing students like Summers with the knowledge they need to succeed in the global marketplace.
Redefining perceptions
Dr. Hamid Rafizadeh, a native of Iran and associate professor of business, grew up in a multicultural setting speaking Turkish and Persian. His family moved about the country frequently as the government placed his physician father in a different hospital every few years. Each city introduced Rafizadeh to varying dialects and traditions, providing the perfect setting for learning about new subcultures and becoming culturally aware, an important aspect of working in a global marketplace.
Being culturally aware is an integral part of global interconnectedness, says Rafizadeh, who has held business positions in the U.S. and overseas, including president and CEO of MST Machine Tool, a manufacturing company in Tabriz, Iran; vice president of Atomic Energy Organization of Iran in Tehran; and director of business planning for Dayton Power and Light Company in Dayton, Ohio. Globalization promotes markets meshing with one another, but Rafizadeh says while business fundamentals are the same everywhere, a about one another so that they can in turn learn from one another, he says.
“As human beings, we have a tendency to label people by race, ethnicity and ability, and then use those labels destructively,” says Rafizadeh, who came to the U.S. in 1963 to pursue a college education. “We need to learn to look at a human and see the person, not the label.” Looking back to the beginning of her internship, Summers realizes that she labeled McDonald’s in much the same way that individuals label people from other countries. “The McDonald’s restaurants are just the face of the organization,” says Summers. “I had stereotyped McDonald’s as a ‘burgerflipping joint.’ In actuality, there’s a whole backbone of support systems, including technology support, marketing, human resources, consultants and financial officers. These are all positions people with business interests look for but ones you don’t think about when you think of McDonald’s.”
One way Bluffton business students learn to look beyond labels and stereotyping is through its cross-cultural program. Students are immersed in environments either within the U.S. or throughout the world for three weeks to a semester, acclimating themselves to new surroundings while learning about people and traditions unlike their own.
During her junior year, Summers traveled to Chicago, Ill., where she worked with a small Christian bookstore, helping find ways to better reach the neighborhood from both faith and sales standpoints. “Cross-cultural experiences cause students to think outside the box,” says Summers. “We’re encouraged to not only see another culture but to experience it—the different lifestyles, thinking and ways life in general is approached.” These experiences are helpful to becoming more familiar with the unfamiliar—a learning process which Rafizadeh says is essential to becoming sensitive toward other cultures and potential business relationships.
Engaging differences
Canadian-born Dr. Karen Klassen Harder is quite familiar with finding value in differences, having lived and worked in five countries, including Kenya, Tanzania and Bangladesh. As an economist, she has studied resource flows in first and third-world countries and the role resources, or lack thereof, play in defining countries’ economic well beings. She has worked for nonprofit and community organizations, like Mennonite Central Committee and Mennonite Economic Development Associates, to develop strategic plans, goals and relationships that are designed to help first and third-world countries become better partners.
“In reality, the world is growing smaller,” says Klassen Harder, professor of business. “Food, music and lifestyles are more and more international every day, impacting students and providing richer, fuller lives for them. Our job as educators is to engage the differences of each culture to provide more value.”
Summers says what impressed her most about Bluffton’s business faculty is their extensive professional experience and the differences they brought to the classroom. “My professors all had real working experience,” she says. “They knew what the job market was like because they had worked in it. They had learned the material they taught firsthand and were able to truthfully say, ‘In my experience…’”
Klassen Harder adds that students also contribute differences of culture and experience to a business education as they share with their professors and with one another in the classroom. Increasingly, working adult students who enroll in Bluffton’s graduate course, Managing Across Cultures, have worked for global corporations that maintain international connections with people on a daily basis, whether Japanese employees visit Honda plants in Ohio or American Honda employees travel overseas. Classes such as Development Economics, International Trade and Finance and Studies in Political Science also contribute to students’ knowledge of different business cultures.
Developing global competency is important in this day and age, and it is fueled by curiosity and respect for others that require learning and practice. “Too often we make decisions without trying something or learning more first,” says Klassen Harder. “Everyone should learn to golf regardless of whether they want to or not. After learning, a person can then stand back and assess whether he or she wants to continue playing or not.” Students should never shy away from doing something such as visiting a foreign country simply because it’s unfamiliar.
“Whether a student wants to live and work in big-city North America, small-town U.S.A., or somewhere overseas, the decision should be based upon trying something first,” says Klassen Harder. “Students should choose to do something because they want to do it, not because they’re afraid to try something else.”
Appreciating culture
J. Peter Suter, ’94, ’02 MAOM, assistant professor of business, is hardly afraid of trying new things. After all, he was the precocious six-year-old who felt people would appreciate something “dry” to complement their drinks purchased from the neighborhood lemonade stands. Selling toast seemed like a good idea at the time, and although his first business venture did not exactly take off, he did not let that stop him from pursuing future entrepreneurial opportunities.
With a background in accounting and a willing spouse, Suter opened Common Grounds, a coffee house in Bluffton, Ohio, nine years ago and eventually transferred its ownership to the Whole Bean Inc., a group of community investors. He also created an advertising business and is in the process of securing ownership of the local movie theatre.
As a small business owner operating in rural northwest Ohio, Suter is well aware of his participation in the global marketplace and the effects his decisions have on those in this country and others. Recently he found an additional coffee roaster when his customers expressed a strong preference for a roaster committed to fair-trade practices. His decision to add a second roaster affected not only his bottom line, but also the pocketbook of the first roaster and the health and livelihood of those who harvest the coffee beans.
Summers knows that what happens globally impacts her job as well. After graduation, she continued working for Speedy Arches Ltd., as the community relations director, coordinating advertising, marketing, sponsorships and other community-related agendas for 15 McDonald’s restaurants in northwest Ohio. “What happens on a global level trickles down to the local level eventually,” she says. With rising oil prices, Summers has to spend more time planning her driving routes as the extra cost directly affects profits. She also knows that droughts around the world affect the prices of lettuce, tomatoes and apples. “It took me a while to think bigger than northwest Ohio,” she says. “But, the fast food industry runs on a global scale, so I didn’t have a choice.”
This fall, Suter hopes to present scenarios just like this to his students as he focuses on globalization in his section of the senior capstone course, Christian Values in a Global Community. Suter says that while some in the business world see globalization as a “Westernization” of the world, it is a process that is here to stay, and one that is not necessarily evil. “By working with other markets, we have an opportunity to see how others do things and appreciate that there may be better ideas available than just ours,” says Suter.
However, there is a balance that needs to be maintained, says Suter, because of the fear that instead of appreciating other cultures, globalization is actually wiping them out. To counteract that fear, Suter says all professors, not just those in business, need to teach an appreciation of different cultures, something all of Bluffton’s professors are doing in the general education program. “We want students to understand that we don’t live in a vacuum,” says Suter. “As both students and consumers, the decisions they make directly impact people on the other side of the world—even those students born and raised in the same small town who never leave; their decisions impact others.” By helping students comprehend the impact of their decisions, the creation of a heterogeneous culture is avoided and instead, a rich, multicultural world is embraced.
For students such as Summers, being a part of a global organization has given them direct insight into the world’s interconnectedness. Taking classes from professors like Rafizadeh, Klassen Harder and Suter provide students with a glimpse of all the possibilities the business world holds for them. Whether students choose to live and work overseas or remain in Bluffton, Ohio, after graduation, they will be all the wiser and more connected to the world around them because of the global vision of their professors, and ultimately, their Bluffton experience.
by Jill A. Duling
