Talking Cultural Competency with Dr. Deirdre Mendez, Director at the Center for Global Business
If there’s one thing that defines Dr. Deirdre Mendez, it’s her endless enthusiasm and curiosity for the world of differences around her.
As Director of the Center for Global Business at The University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business, Dr. Mendez combines her love of celebrating cultures with the dynamic landscape of international business. She also teaches intercultural management to students and executives at McCombs.
As the author of The Culture Solution, a guide to improving international collaborations through cultural analysis, Dr. Mendez has shown a commitment to global thinking. Long before she entered the business sphere, though, her love of the world around her developed from experience abroad.
Discovering a lifelong love of languages
Originally from southwest Florida, Dr. Mendez discovered a deep interest in foreign languages during her primary education. To improve her fluency in Spanish, she spent time in Mexico City as a middle schooler, and she describes her high school experience as “characterized by a love of languages.”
Eventually, Dr. Mendez began her undergraduate education at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. There, she studied linguistics, picking up additional language skills in Polish, French, and Nahuatl (Aztec).
Later, Dr. Mendez earned a PhD in linguistics from The University of Texas at Austin (UT). She chose to focus on sociolinguistics, she says, because “rather than examining the nuts and bolts of languages, [she] was looking at how people use language to interact with each other.” While at UT, she also became fascinated by Japanese language and culture.
The newly minted Dr. Mendez then went into intercultural consulting, where she put her passion for understanding the cultural implications of language to good use. “I began my career with a focus on Japan, because it was both interesting to me and very important in business at the time,” she says. “Japan was, in the 1980s, what China is today to the United States. American businesses were working hard to access the Japanese market, and American companies were forced to partner with Japanese companies to get a foothold there because of government rules. Many of them struggled to overcome cultural differences.”
After two decades of helping international businesses better understand each other, Dr. Mendez was invited to return to UT’s Center for Global Business. The decision to transition from the private sector to education was easy once she realized her unique opportunity: to impart key insights from her years of consulting to students before they entered the global marketplace.
“I realized I could give people who hadn’t even begun their careers the skills and knowledge to anticipate and solve culture-based problems,” she notes. “That was very exciting to me — the idea of a 20- or 21-year-old who knew those things and could walk in the door and provide this special value to an employer.”
Serving UT students by celebrating cultural competency
Global competency isn’t just a skill useful to business students — it’s a crucial part of any career in the 21st century. The Center for Global Business is developing a suite of programs and coursework that will give students the skills and knowledge they need to be effective in the global marketplace.
“We are connecting the dots between what students are learning and how they express and make their skills visible to employers,” Dr. Mendez says. “Our programs combine experiential learning — study abroad and international internships — with academic learning and we help students package their skills in a way that resonates in the workplace.”
The Center for Global Business makes these skills available through intercultural management courses and the center’s certificate in global management. Through these offerings, the center ensures that all UT students have the opportunity to learn hands-on skills they need to adjust, perform, and solve problems in any cultural context.
Learning these skills in a city that is globalizing rapidly is exciting, too. Dr. Mendez notes Austin’s startup community as one key factor in the city’s rapid internationalization, since small companies begin to enter global markets as they mature. “Many of our internet-based companies have a global market from their inception,” she says, “and multinational corporations are choosing to locate in Austin as well.”
By empowering students to celebrate the value of difference and adapt to the world around them, Dr. Mendez and her team have positioned the Center for Global Business as a springboard from which students can enter the global future with confidence — whatever form it may take.
