Globalisation and leadership should go hand in hand, and in today's business environment, executives are increasingly required to work outside their country of origin or the region they are familiar with, and it can sometimes take months for them to adjust to a new working environment.
As well as giving instruction on economics, finance and accounting, MBA courses should provide students with guidance and learning about cross-cultural scenarios, different languages, and doing business in various societies.
Some do better than others, according to Gordon Redding, Euro-Asia and Comparative Research Centre (EACrc) director at the Insead business school in Paris, but for the most part, MBAs are not doing well at imparting the necessary skills that will help students be successful managers.
Professor Redding said most MBA programmes were failing their students in the soft skills - such as teaching them how to adapt to different cultures and operate as managers within them. He said because most academics preferred to focus on the quantitative skills such as finance and economics, the skills that would help MBA graduates to hit the ground running in different countries were being neglected.
'It's usually given low priority,' said Professor Redding, of these soft skills. 'It's difficult to teach; there aren't many people who specialise in it and it has to compete with the big disciplines, which are deeply entrenched, such as accounting, economics, strategy, leadership and organisational behaviour, on which there is a huge amount of literature, highly organised textbooks and a heavily established set of faculty who know what to do with those subjects. Most MBAs are structured around those principles.
'And that teaching is almost mechanical, in that you get people to work through a textbook, then you test them, and they go away and they say 'I know economics, strategy and so on'. The cultural, international stuff is much more subtle than that.'