What is it about?
This article shares a classroom activity that teaches international business strategy through experience rather than lecture. Students split into small teams, each running a pretend global company (a smartphone maker, a fast-food chain, a pharmaceutical firm, an automaker, a fashion retailer, or a software company), and decide how to balance two pressures every real multinational faces: keeping costs low versus adapting products to fit local markets. Teams study their company's specific position in three different countries, then choose a strategy: compete on price everywhere, customize heavily for each market, or find a way to do both at once. Just as they settle on a plan, a surprise "disruption card" changes the game: a trade war erupts, a pandemic disrupts supply chains, or a rival company's new AI tool changes the competitive landscape. Teams have only minutes to adapt their strategy and defend it to the class. A structured discussion afterward connects the exercise back to established international business theory and real companies like IKEA, Unilever, and 3M. Having been tested across multiple semesters with strong, consistent student engagement, the exercise works equally well in person or online, giving management educators a ready-to-use tool for teaching one of international business's hardest concepts.
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Why is it important?
Business students often learn international strategy frameworks as static diagrams to memorize rather than living tools for real decisions made under pressure and incomplete information. This exercise closes that gap by putting students inside the tension itself, forcing them to choose a strategy, then react when the ground shifts beneath them, exactly as global managers must. Its timing matters: the built-in disruption scenarios, including trade wars, pandemic-style supply shocks, and AI-driven competitors, mirror the exact volatility shaping global business right now, rather than the calmer world international business textbooks were originally written for. What makes the exercise distinctive is how completely it is packaged for other instructors to use immediately: detailed company profiles, market data, disruption cards, and debrief questions are all included, with variations for class sizes ranging from a dozen students to over fifty, and adaptations for in-person, synchronous online, and fully asynchronous courses. For management and international business educators looking for an engaging, evidence-informed way to teach global strategy, this offers a complete, classroom-tested resource rather than just an idea to build from scratch.
Perspectives
As someone who has led through organizational disruption as much as studied it, I built this exercise because strategy frameworks only become real once you have to defend a decision, then watch it get upended by events outside your control. Good leadership, whether in the classroom or the boardroom, means teaching people to hold a plan firmly and let go of it quickly the moment reality changes around them.
Prof. Robert M Yawson, PhD
Truman State University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Framing International Strategy: Experiencing Cost Pressures and Local Responsiveness in the Undergraduate Classroom, Management Teaching Review, September 2026, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/23792981261481483.
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