The Great Unmixing

Teamwork is 60% of the curriculum, but cross-cultural competence gets 0% of the training.

Walk into any “international” business school and you’ll see the same picture: clusters of locals on one side, exchange students on the other, and professors quietly pretending it’s fine. It’s not.

Business schools brag about diversity, but diversity without integration is decoration. Students are thrown into “multicultural teams” with zero preparation on how to work across cultures. The result? Oil and vinegar. Ten weeks later, I’m mediating team meltdowns over cultural friction instead of grading presentations.

The irony: teamwork is the cornerstone of every business curriculum. But schools treat cross-cultural collaboration like an optional elective - if it’s mentioned at all. Instead of preparing students to actually work together, they waste time on social mixers, ice-breakers, and those tragic “phone-poll gimmicks” that solve nothing.

The fix isn’t complicated. During admissions and throughout the year, schools should host recurring, work-focused workshops led by people who’ve actually managed multicultural teams on things like conflict, decision norms, and feedback styles. No gimmicks. Just face-to-face sessions on conflict, communication, and trust across nationalities. The stuff that makes teamwork, work.

I spend hours outside class mediating these implosions. I’ve sat with German and Brazilian students over coffee, trying to bridge their completely opposite approaches to deadlines. I’ve walked Chinese students through how to challenge ideas in Western-style debate without feeling disrespectful. I’ve calmed French students who think their foreign teammates are “too passive.” None of this is in the syllabus, but it’s the real curriculum. And I do it off the books, one coffee chat at a time. But it shouldn’t depend on professors like me moonlighting as mediators. School’s need to realise they’re producing graduates who crumble the moment real diversity enters the meeting room.

Both students and schools should start with The Culture Map by Erin Meyer. It’s not theory - it’s a mirror. Her research breaks down how cultures think, decide, and disagree, and why teams fall apart when those differences go unspoken. I met Meyer during my INSEAD years, and her work should be baked into every teamwork class, case, and project. I think it’s the missing operating system for the global classroom.

Teamwork is 60% of the curriculum. Cross-cultural competence gets 0% of the training. If schools keep dodging this, they’re producing graduates fluent in buzzwords, but lost the moment real diversity walks into the meeting room.

Working across cultures isn’t about slides and slogans. It’s about sitting across from someone different - and still getting the job done.