The current business environment requires operations within an international context, and those looking for hands-on experience in other countries might consider the exciting new executive management program created by Georgetown University and ESADE Business School in Barcelona, Spain. Known as the Georgetown-ESADE Global Executive MBA, the program will be offered by Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business and Walsh School of Foreign Service with ESADE Business School. It will be delivered in six 11-day modules on four continents, and is designed to meet the needs of accomplished executives whose scope of work is global.

According to a press release from Georgetown announcing the launch, The Global EMBA has been developed using the expertise of the McDonough School in inter-disciplinary teaching and international residencies, ESADE’s know-how in executive leadership, social innovation and international business as well as the Walsh School’s recognized leadership in the area of international relations and global policy. The result is an intellectual challenge and an academic experience that goes beyond classrooms, cases and textbooks. The program is believed to be the first of its kind to include a strong global policy dimension within an executive business degree.

“This program will give accomplished executives a chance to both crystallize their professional experience and better understand the complexities of global business in a world-class program that is adapted to their schedule,” said McDonough School of Business Dean George Daly. “I am excited about this new Global MBA program, the result of our collaboration with ESADE Business School.”

The Georgetown-ESADE EMBA program will begin in Washington, D.C. in June 2008, with subsequent modules in Barcelona, Buenos Aires/Sao Paolo, Bangalore, Barcelona/Moscow, and Washington/New York over a 16-month period. Successful participants will receive two Masters of Business Administration degrees from Georgetown University and ESADE Business School.

Applications are now being accepted for the inaugural class, and the complete program fee for 2008/9 is 85,000 euros ($120,000 USD). The three application deadlines are February 28, April 1, and May 15, 2008. Participants will be notified of acceptance within two weeks of their admissions interview.

This week’s GMAT challenge from PrepForTests.com is a problem solving question.

Have a go at answering this and then review your answer.

The third-round application period looms for many prospective MBA students, and there’s no better time to incorporate the advice of MBA admissions directors on ways to make—or break—your chances of getting in at the school of your dreams. But how can anyone stand out amid a sea of applicants? Admissions directors are looking beyond work experience and the GMAT to evaluate candidates. A recent piece in the Financial Times discusses some ways to manage the details of your application to ensure you follow the rules, take advantage of all opportunities and market yourself beyond your resume.

The article notes that New York University’s Stern School of Business has made a request of their potential MBA students this year: to limit the size of objects submitted with their applications. Stern appreciates creativity in potential students, and has encouraged the submission of unconventional materials that reveal something of their character and interests. Past applicants have sent in stories, poems, and paintings—one even included a mock cereal box decorated with photos and an ingredient list which included “a charismatic social individual.” But leave the personalized guitars, skis and snowboards at home, please. “We tell people we want them to think outside the box – it just needs to fit inside a box,” says Isser Gallogly, Stern’s Executive Director of MBA Admissions.

Creativity is fantastic, but admissions directors also look for integrity. “In the essays, we want people to sell themselves to us, but we also want them to be honest,” says David Simpson, acting Associate Dean of the MBA program at London Business School. “Candidates often talk about extra-curricular work even though we’re not specifically asking about this. That’s great. But if they write it down, we’re going to ask about it, so they should have a good story.”

Schools stress that applicants shouldn’t regard the interview as another opportunity to list accomplishments. It’s where the school finds out who the person really is and interviewers may have strong views on the type of person they believe will fit into their program.

A major pet peeve reported by admissions directors: overkill in all its forms. Long-winded essays and a barrage of recommendation letters, for example, will not endear applicants to admission staff who have thousands of applications to review. Several admission directors cite the tendency of applicants to send long or multiple e-mails in the hope that they will get the attention of one of the recipients. “Long e-mails are very irritating,” says Rod Garcia, director of MBA Admissions at MIT Sloan School of Management.

Applicants can certainly damage their chances by failing to display courtesy and respect to all the staff members—including administrators and customer service staff—with whom they interact during the applications process. “People don’t necessarily understand that every interaction is an opportunity to show their qualities,” says Gallogly.

Time is of the essence, and synthesizing these tips into your overall application strategy will go a long way toward ensuring you receive that all-important phone call or e-mail this spring.

A new language program at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School aims to help international students interested in a post-MBA career in the United States find—and keep—jobs. Despite the current high demand for MBA graduates, many international students still struggle to get a job offer — or even an interview. At Kenan-Flagler, for instance, only about 40% of the recruiters will meet with foreign nationals. The chief reasons for such resistance: the limited number of U.S. work visas and language deficiencies.

There’s not much business schools can do about the visa shortage, but the new Honing Executive English Language Skills (HEELS) program helps assess students’ English-language skills, provides objective feedback, and then offers specially designed courses to improve those skills. The MBA Career Management Center offers HEELS in partnership with linguists at The World Company. It requires all of its foreign MBA students — more than a quarter of the class — to take an oral and written test when they arrive on campus. The students are rated on a nine-point scale based on their accent, pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and other factors. To boost their scores, students can pay a fee to take special classes taught by linguists that focus on speaking English in a business context.

The school’s press release says the interactive HEELS courses are taught in small groups and focus on accent modification, grammar and vocabulary issues, and modify non-verbal communication that might be misinterpreted by U.S. managers, coworkers or clients. In addition to the English classes, North Carolina offers courses for international MBA students on American culture — from sports and entertainment to the origin of slang expressions — and on U.S. business communication, including practice exercises for impromptu speeches, team presentations, boardroom pitches and employee performance reviews.

“HEELS helps students achieve a standard to which they can aspire to improve their skills if they want to work in a specific U.S. industry,” said David Hofmann, MBA Program Associate Dean. “They can learn from the recruiters’ valuable feedback, and will no longer have to guess whether their language capability could hinder their ability to secure the types of jobs they want in the United States.”

Other schools are also expanding programs to help foreign students prepare for careers in the United States. The University of Rochester’s Simon Graduate School of Business, where nearly half of the MBA class is international, offers an English-language and U.S.-culture program that includes language instruction and trips to museums, theaters and sports events.

At the University at Buffalo, there are English as a Second Language classes, as well as opportunities for foreign nationals to practice pitching themselves to recruiters at mock career fairs and in interview workshops. “The average recruiter is going to decide in 30 seconds whether a student has the communication skills to make it in his organization,” says Paul Allaire, an assistant dean at Buffalo. “We want to give our international students a fighting chance to compete.”

For more on this story, read the Wall Street Journal’s “How Foreign Students Learn to Talk the Talk“.

What can b-school students learn in a theater class? Plenty, it seems, as a growing number of prestigious MBA programs are including acting classes as an innovative way to boost leadership, communication and presentation skills. In a “Leadership as Acting” course at MIT-Sloan, students perform a condensed version of Shakespeare’s “Henry V”, in which a small group of people with a common goal and an inspiring leader can achieve great things.

Former course participant Kerry Bowie said, “The speech I gave — when Henry rallies the troops and is very persuasive about how they don’t need anyone else to come from England and fight with them — that’s a good speech in terms of motivation.” Bowie went on to explain that “as a leader, sometimes you have to do that. I think that CEOs of starts-ups are saying the same thing. ‘We can do this. We can go and meet the giants.’”

A recent businessweek.com article titled “MBAs Acting Out” says acting classes are cropping up on curriculums at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business Administration, which offers an acting elective where students are asked to write and perform their own plays; Babson College, which has a class titled Acting Skills for Success in Business; and Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business. Sloan gives its class each fall during its innovation period, a week each semester in which MBAs are encouraged to hone their soft skills through experiential classes.

Acting lessons teach students how to master the non-academic qualities—teamwork, leadership and interpersonal skills—that employers and recruiters are looking for in potential managers. A 2007 Graduate Management Admission Council corporate survey reported that companies that recruit and hire MBA students primarily focus on the candidate’s interpersonal skills during the interview process, with 63% rating interpersonal skills as “very important.”

Dirk Riehle (Stanford GSB 2004) took an improv class because he was curious about how it could help his management skills. Riehle discovered that many of the skills taught in improv theater translate into making better crisis managers. He says both improv actors and crisis managers must be able to think creatively and on their feet in a time crunch; accept input from teammates as relevant contributions; and focus on the task at hand while maintaining peripheral vision to catch new developments.

Across the country, theater groups such as Improv Asylum in Boston, Bay Area Theater Sports in San Francisco, or The Groundlings in Los Angeles offer private workshops for corporations large and small to stimulate teamwork and creativity. Leadership is all about performance, so if you need a little help in this department, shake off your stage fright and consider signing up for an acting class.

This week’s GMAT challenge from PrepForTests.com is a data sufficiency question.

Work out which of the statements 1 and 2 are required to answer the question.

Have a go at answering this and then review your answer.