Building Understanding Across the Walls in a Flat World - a Case Study of Cross-Cultural Leadership Training for Chinese Executives

This paper attempts to partially answer the question of how leadership matters in a Flat World (Friedman, 2006) based upon the experiences of a comprehensive six-month American cultural immersion program at Millersville University in Pennsylvania begun in 1996. The paper examines the social context and its inherent variability for comparing leadership across cultures by using an assimilation framework of analysis. Are American attributes of leadership transferable between broader societies and how will leadership in that context matter? The Flat World defines a new platform of globalization that provides a collaborative interface for civilization. What is the interplay between individual and political ideological socialization and the ability to redefine such for leaders who learn leadership attributes in one culture but practice in another culture? It demonstrates the lens through which these highly educated Chinese view, interpret and analyze the American Experience juxtaposed with their personal ideological constraints. It also presents a good model which suggests that business schools can do much more than educate business leaders by incorporating collaborative efforts to achieve world peace, a recent AACSB International objective. (News Release, March 22, 2006). The paper develops as many questions about cross-cultural leadership as it does answers in examining how cross-cultural leadership matters but in so doing offers several heuristic devices for the further exploration of cross-cultural leadership frameworks