Course Overview

Managing Global Operations is designed to equip students who will manage, consult, or analyze global businesses with skills in how to effectively manage global operations in face of global uncertainties such as challenges related to immigration, the outbreak of global pandemics, etc. The course will also conduct a deep dive into the newly emerging operating models of ‘work from anywhere’ and ‘all-remote’ and how these operating models might help managers address these challenges.

The goal of effectively managing global operations is to allocate and optimize the operations' global resources, such as talent, knowledge and intellectual property to best fulfill the strategic objectives of the firm. However, as Microsoft realized in China and India over more than a decade, intrafirm frictions related to moving knowledge, R&D funds and other firm resources across borders constrain the global operation of the firm. You will be also be introduced to challenges of managing operations under temporal distance, i.e. the distance imposed by differences in time zones and we will explore managerial approaches to addressing these challenges. In addition to managing intrafirm frictions, the management of global operations is affected by uncertainty related to regulation and the outbreak of global pandemics. The Taiwanese firm Sercomm, with manufacturing operations in China, Philippines and Taiwan had to decide how to manage global operations in view of the Coronavirus outbreak in China. The course will help you think through approaches to dealing with the management of global operations in presence of such uncertainty.

The course will then conduct a deep dive into frictions related to moving people across borders. For example, uncertainty around the H1-B visa work program in the United States and immigration policies around the world has affected the management of global operations of firms across industries. Beyond immigration issues, as young Associates at McKinsey realized, cultural distances and dual career issues might impede geographic moves. You will learn about the ROPE framework related to the costs and constraints faced by workers experiencing geographic mobility.

Finally, the course will also conduct a deep dive into newly emerging operating models of organizing resources that attempt to mitigate these frictions. We will discuss this work from anywhere model in detail and will discuss how machine learning technologies are facilitating these operating models. We will then extend the model further by examining the all remote operating model being adopted by companies such as Gitlab, where there are no physical offices or no collocated workers and will debate whether this operating model might generalize to other firms and other industries beyond the current pandemic. We will also examine how adoption of these operating models might lead to millennial workers becoming digital nomads and/or experiencing reverse brain drain, returning to countries, cities, and smaller towns of their choice.

Grading will be based on either a final paper or a final exam.