In this Specialization, you’ll learn how to lead and make decisions in global business settings where culture, ethics, and strategy collide. You’ll build a clear understanding of how ethics operates within and beyond organizations, and how diverse cultures and shifting global perspectives shape what “good decisions” look like across contexts. You’ll practice identifying ethical issues in global business and using stakeholder analysis and structured reasoning to reach decisions you can defend.

You’ll also strengthen cross-cultural management skills that matter in day-to-day work: communication, teamwork, negotiation, and leadership across national cultures. Using tools like The Culture Map, you’ll learn to detect cultural differences, prevent misunderstandings, and diagnose cross-cultural issues so you can find workable compromises.

Finally, you’ll connect people and ethics skills to international strategy. You’ll learn how the global economy evolved, why countries and markets behave differently, and how trade rules and politics shape business choices. You’ll evaluate when and why firms operate as multinationals, compare options for entering global markets, and choose strategies based on a firm’s situation and external pressures.

Applied Learning Project

You’ll complete applied exercises built around real global business decisions. You’ll analyze scenarios to spot ethical issues, map stakeholders, and evaluate arguments to reach ethically defensible conclusions from more than one point of view. You’ll practice cross-cultural diagnosis using The Culture Map, comparing countries and planning how you would prevent or repair misunderstandings in communication, negotiation, leadership, and teamwork. On the strategy side, you’ll work through cases that connect global economic conditions to firm choices—evaluating trade regulation effects, deciding when multinational operations make sense, and selecting market entry approaches (small vs. big, fast vs. slow) while responding to political and external pressures.