This is the second of three articles in which Tom Park (Tuck MBA 2010) explores the major challenges facing today’s MBA graduates.

In Korea, I was talking to a local MBA student about best practice companies when I brought up the U.S. steel company Nucor. His response: “Oh yes, I know all about them”.

But it wasn’t only my friend in Korea who had read the same case. The same thing happened with MBA friends from Singapore, India, France, China, and South Africa. It wasn’t just Nucor either; we could also talk about Nike, WalMart, the Body Shop, and Southwest Airlines. It seemed that, though having studied in different schools across the world, we had studied the same HBS cases.

This is the essence of modern business education and a manifestation of globalization. Spearheaded by MBA students, we are creating a class of individuals across the world who share a common education and training, a new lingua franca of management.

We speak and apply the same frameworks and principles with slight nuances for the specific cultural and geographical factors. It’s more than just the export of American business education through the presence of foreign students: international professors have increasingly played a pivotal role in thought and academic leadership in these same institutions.

However, like Nucor, business school students will have to find a way to differentiate themselves as graduates of an increasingly homogenized education. They must also ask themselves a broader question: are there negative ramifications to worry about?

The following came from the course syllabus for a financial management class. Take a guess which school:
Company Financial Report Analysis, Company Financial Environment, Fundamental Concept in Financial Management in term of risk and revenue, Portfolio Theory, and Money Value over Time, Strategic Investment Decision, Capital Budgeting Process and Technique, Security and Company Evaluation, Strategic Marketing Decision, Capital Structure and Capital Cost, Tactical Financing Decision through IPO, Lease Financing and Hybrid Financing, Working Capital Management, Derivatives and Risk Management, Company’s Success and Failure

I found the excerpt from the School of Business and Management Institut Teknologi Bandung in West Java, Indonesia.

I could have pulled this from a number of schools, and that tells you something. The modern business education curriculum borrows heavily from the US model and it shouldn’t be a surprise. It began with the dramatic increase of foreign students who studied overseas in the US and Europe. A number of these students returned home and became tremendously successful in their home countries, leveraging their education and intimate knowledge of their local business environment.

With economic growth overseas, demand for MBA-trained managers increased too. From 1997 to 2000, there has been a 310% increase in the number of MBAs awarded in the US. Foreign students currently comprise an average of 40% of the overall student body at the top 10 US business school.

Yet the flow of ideas wasn’t nor isn’t just one way. The passing away of the great management thinker C.K. Prahalad and the appointment of Nitin Nohria as the new dean of HBS demonstrates that not only have foreigners excelled at US schools: they have begun to take on positions of leadership and develop the ideas and theories that underpin the way business is analyzed.

They have also begun to open their own business schools, and it comes as no surprise that many of the younger schools have a faculty dominated by those who have studied in the U.S.

These two competing trends: import of students, export of ideas, speaks to the tremendous success of the U.S. postgraduate education model. No doubt it is a far cry from a complete global meritocracy but the increasing access to an American-style education, whether in the U.S. or in U.S.-style schools abroad, allows more and more people the opportunity to lead US global companies.

Moreover, it has allowed others to leverage this training to make their own domestic firms more competitive: GE vs. Huawei, GM vs. Tata, and Apple vs. Samsung. It has created a growing class of people who understand and can communicate in a common vernacular. Porter’s Five forces, the Balanced Scorecard, and ROIC (Return On Invested Capital) these words are part of a vocabulary that is spoken and applied around the world.

Is this a good thing, though? Sharing a common vernacular has tremendous advantages but bears two distinct risks. First, there is the fear of the commoditization of the business school education model. The top schools are spending enormous sums to remain ahead of the pack, but that pack is getting larger and more diffuse with each passing year. It’s no wonder recruiters are increasingly using standardized test and case interviews during recruitment. It makes it easier to work with people around the world, but it also means firms are competing in the same markets in very similar ways.

Second, from a broader perspective, is there something missing from the model? Vernaculars have a way of trapping mindsets despite shifting factors on the ground. This is no less true with business education. There is the risk that greater globalization results in greater homogeneity. So it begs the question: where will innovation come from in business education?

Tom Park has just completed an MBA at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, class of 2010. He studied law at McGill and public policy at Harvard. Between 2004 and 2007 he worked in the International Criminal Court in The Hague, the OSCE Mission in Pristina, Kosovo and the UN Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Cambodia. Previously he was an associate at McCarthy Tetrault, Canada's largest law firm.