Leadership and international skills are key ingredients for all talented senior executives and managers working in today’s international corporate business environment.

Focusing on developing these skills aims to contribute to a better understanding of business challenges, to perform business negotiations more successfully, to meet business goals and to develop a strategic approach adapted to a multicultural context.

The internationalisation process is a daily reality for every organisation. Its influence has expanded from large corporations, to governmental agencies as well as to a growing number of SMEs.

Today’s reality

• Only 13% of the managers’ population has multicultural skills to work efficiently in an international business environment (MDB group, Inc.).
• 50% of French employees feel uncomfortable in an international environment because of limited foreign language skills (Ifop jan 2009).
• Some 70% of the population, though conscious of intercultural diversity minimises its impact believing that everybody shares common values and believes (MDB group, Inc.).

What has changed in the past 20 years ?

From a simple world to a complex world:

• With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world, previously static, small, bipolar and predictable has dramatically changed into a dynamic and greatly diversified huge new space.
• Information technologies have considerably contracted time and interconnected the world
• Globalisation is overwhelming and puts further pressure on top managers and senior executives to acquire a global world knowledge
• Asia challenges the Western model

The new XXI century senior executive need to be trained in order to:

• Adapt rapidly to this new geography
• Be able to communicate from multicultural perspectives
• Be able to understand and analyse strategic information rapidly, identify opportunities as well as risks
• Develop an international profile to be a talented Senior Executive and increase personal branding
• Develop a new attitude to face uncertainty, novelty and change