Our world often witness crisis in different forms which occurs at a low probability but often results with heavy consequence, for instance, pandemic diseases, the increasingly-evident climate change and international political turbulence. It is an impressing task to prepare our business leaders to better cope with these crisis: not only manage their own organizations through these risks with minimum negative impacts, but more importantly contribute to improve our society's resilience to and capability of recovering from crisis. This theme aims to inspire our business education community to think over how to extend our efforts well beyond regular business teachings on topics such as operations management or accounting, and discuss what new elements should brought into our traditional curriculum. We trust that we could contribute to better manage the crisis as a community.

Business education was always more internationally open than most sectors because of its immersion in knowledge of business, which never showed much respect for juridical boundaries. Business education partnership has now become central to the changes sweeping through the OECD and emerging nations, in which worldwide networking and exchange are reshaping social, economic and cultural life. Nowadays, the whole world is getting more unpredictable. It is imperative to understand how business schools’ partnerships across nations will be reshaped in this increasingly turbulent world. 

The turbulence that our business leader are facing is increasing in both frequency and scale. Some are largely negative, for instance, global warming; while some are largely positive, for instance, the development of disruptive technologies. Both negative and positive turbulences not only pose challenges but also offer opportunities. What are the qualities and skills that our future business leaders must have, to better handle the risks and grasp the opportunities? And what roles should our business schools play in shaping such leaders for the turbulent world? This section focuses on how to seize opportunities from the turbulence and how to grow stronger in the turbulence.

Developing transnational education is one approach for higher education institutions wishing to develop and diversify their internationalization strategies and to help position themselves in new ways within a globalized environment. The recent two decades, increasing number of international universities provide business education in China jointly partnered with Chinese Universities, meanwhile, Chinese business schools have inaugurated their ventures by off-shore programs as well. The session will discuss how the delivery of transnational higher education pose a significant challenge to university leadership and governance, including questions of motivation, strategy, risk, funding and human resources, as well as important academic issues, such as the maintenance of standards across a range of locations and/or modes of delivery.

It is our consensus that business school education should move from the old paradigm of profit maximization or cost minimization toward a more balanced mission -- the harmonized development of economy, environment and society. The last three decades have seen many admirable efforts and innovative practices to advance this visionary idea. It is the time to share the wisdoms that we have accumulated in this venture. More importantly, we want to discuss how we could integrate the sustainability education into business school curriculum in less developed countries where sustainability is still less of a consensus among the business community, and what new perspectives that we should bring into the landscape as we move into a new decade.