Kyle Kellams: Let's go back 21 years. Thomas Friedman's book The World Is Flat is becoming widely influential, making the case that technology is bringing global actors into closer contact with each other. In the two-plus decades since, technology's globalization has further evolved. We know the present influences business — but what about the past?
An honors college class next fall at the University of Arkansas, "How History Shapes Business: Past, Present, and Future," considers internationalization. The course will be taught by Jon Johnson, University of Arkansas professor, and Leigh Hopkins, a consultant, board member and investor. The class developed when Hopkins and Johnson struck up a conversation and found common interests.
Johnson says an honors college class is the ideal setting for a course like this.
Jon Johnson: They tend to be smaller classes, and the students tend to be a bit more willing to play along as you figure out what you're doing. So I pitched it to Linda Kuhn, my favorite human being on Earth — the dean of the Honors College. And Linda thought it was a grand idea.
Kellams: Leigh, what do you remember about the origination of this?
Leigh Hopkins: The idea had been knocking around in my head for a bit. I talked to a few people at different universities and was trying to work out how to address this long, winding road — how to teach something, where I should teach it, how I should teach it, and whether indeed I could teach it. And then I had a conversation with John. I don't know if you remember, John, but it started with "who on earth are you, I can't remember why you're here" and ended with "we really should teach this together." So I feel like I found the right home and the right mentor to help me bring this together.
Kellams: How did you develop the title?
Hopkins: It really comes from having spent close to 35 years in international business — first as an investment banker, then as a retailer, and in the last few years a multi-hatted whatever I am now. In that process I've traveled a lot, done business in probably 40-plus countries. One of the things that was occurring to me as I was doing this was, over time, everywhere I go looks more and more similar. The flight is however many hours, you land, the airport looks nice, the hotel looks nice, the offices look nice. People speak the language of capitalism, Western corporations, and increasingly they speak the same language. It kind of all looks the same.
But if you're sitting across the table from somebody who's in their late 60s in China, they lived through the Cultural Revolution. They grew up in it, and it shows — but it doesn't show immediately. People are very similar around the world. Our motivations are the same. But I don't think we spend enough time thinking about why the differences are there and what the differences are. Context is everything. And so I started thinking more and more about how surely the history of a country shapes how it does business — not just the history somebody lives through, but the history of that country that has over time defined the institutions of which they're part. I started looking for books on this and, to be honest, didn't really find very much. And I thought, well, this is fun. Let's go explore this and see whether we can make it into a discussion and a topic that would be fun to explore.
Kellams: I love what you just said, but to me it sounds overwhelming and intimidating — you have more than 190 countries who've gone through multiple histories, often simultaneously. How do you get your bearing on this?
Hopkins: The thinking is to tackle 10 or 11 countries. We'll probably tackle the U.S. last, on the basis that after we've gone through everything else, we can come back to the U.S. from an outside-in point of view. We thought we'd look at some of the really different and really interesting ones. Still to be finalized, but we'll cover China, India, Japan, Germany, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Mexico. That gives us a good cross-section of experiences.
The historic framework will cover the longer history, the pre-1800s history, the time up to World War I and the redefining of the modern era, and then the modern era up to now. We were just talking about how if critical junctures in time — big moments, crises and revolutions — redefine institutions, then we should probably spend our last week doing a bit of crystal-ball gazing, based on the AI revolution: given the tools we've now developed, where are we going to go with these different countries? So we'll have a clear view of which countries to cover, a framework of the history, and then think about how the history shapes the institutions that shape the business we see today.
Kellams: Jon, you mentioned that you like these colloquia because students play along as you figure it out. What do you hope the students will bring to each of these sessions?
Johnson: Curiosity is the first thing you're always looking for in a student, especially in a class like this. And I've created many classes over the years, and what I've found is the first time you teach a class, you're learning as much or more than the students. So I'm looking for students who will teach me, or at least point me in the direction, arouse my curiosity, and then develop ways to convey the information and the learning to them in a meaningful way. The first time out is always a little nerve-racking, but also exciting. Having it in a colloquium format with honors students is the perfect venue.
Kellams: You mentioned Japan — just thinking about Japan's history, there was feudalism, there was an emperor, conflict with China, a prominent role in World War II, and then the rise in the '80s of global power.
Hopkins: With Japan, you start with the pre-closed-country era, then you have 300 years of a country that was closed other than for a few Dutch guys trading some stuff down in Dejima. What does that do to you? And then 1868, the Meiji Restoration comes along. You send these embassies out to the U.S. and Europe to take away the best things. So you have two moments in Japanese history when a top-down structure of government was imposed on the people. One was after the Meiji Restoration, when the embassies came back from the U.S. and Europe and said, we should do this for schooling, we should do this for the military, we should do this for industry. And the other was the occupation, when the U.S. wrote the constitution, which Japan has lovingly kept to today.
And yet throughout all of this, the Japanese character has remained very distinct — very much the Japanese character, which must be rooted very much in the history. You've got the Meiji Restoration into World War I and the skirmishes there, World War II and then the massive rebuild since, and now this new era of Japan: where does it go from here? You think about the Economist article — the Switzerland of Asia. Is that its fate? Population is now shrinking over a million a year. What does that mean? And what do we learn from all those layers of history?
Kellams: Can business be influenced by something that took place centuries ago?
Hopkins: I think the answer must be yes. The value of a kinship-type relationship is still very strong in some countries — that probably built over hundreds of years. Sometimes Japan engages the world like a country that's come out of being closed for 300 years, even though they've done amazing things overseas in terms of investment and development. But I think there's a wariness of the outside world that's still reflected in how business is done, in management.
Johnson: The discipline of management is largely ahistorical. We're economists, we're psychologists, we're sociologists. We tend to approach a country a company might be going into from, "let's just do an inventory of what's on the ground" — figure out the culture as it stands now and go forward. Over the years, many companies have learned the lesson that taking someone from this country, putting them in Japan, giving them a few weeks or months to learn the culture and then moving forward just doesn't work. And many companies have gone to relying on locals to run the business, because they do have that deep historical background.
It's not just top-of-mind thinking — the system one, system two thinking comes from Daniel Kahneman. System two is the very conscious, cognitive approach. But system one is the deeper part, the subconscious. And I think that's where history is really important.
Hopkins: One of the exciting things about this is trying to get students to get really curious about context. We live in a world where we see a lot of things on a headline basis, on a tweet basis, and we don't know much about the context. Often we don't have time or the energy or the desire to go and understand something about the context. And yet context is what's so enriching and explains so much.
Whenever I used to go to a new country to do business for the first time, I almost always made myself read a history book and a novel from that country. I probably chose very badly, but even the random choice gave me some context. I was able to say to myself, "OK, I vaguely remember there was a coup not so long ago, and in that novel they talked about this family structure." It's amazing how much that made it so fun — just for my own edification.
Kellams: Does something like colonialism still play a role?
Hopkins: I think it has to. You're dealing with countries where, in the lifetimes of people you're dealing with, they were part of a colony. Positive or negative, it's got to play a part.
Kellams: You mentioned sitting across the table from someone who went through the Cultural Revolution in China. Is it possible that sometimes we don't even know how our history — personal or national — affects how we operate?
Hopkins: That's such a good point, and part of the reason why we wanted to come back to the U.S. last — to come back to it with a fresh view. I've now got this toolkit for looking at a country and its history. I'm now going to look at our history and see, well, hang on, did that do this? And do I see a regional difference as well?
That could be a really interesting area — whether there's a regional history difference that shapes how business is done in different parts of the U.S.
Johnson: The U.S. is populated by immigrants who settled in different parts of the country, and you see that in cultures up to and including in the Ozarks — Scots-Irish and all of that.
One of the goals, I think, is to help the students see how they think differently than other cultures. So it's not just taking their assumptions and applying them to another country — it's, how do you think differently from other people? These cognitive frames, the schemas, the worldviews, vary by country, and they're very historically grounded.
Kellams: What I hope happens is that the student roster has not just diversity from across campus in different disciplines and colleges, but different backgrounds, grew up in different places.
Hopkins: We were just talking about a recruiting strategy for the colloquium, and we definitely want as much diversity in all of those dimensions as we can get.
Kellams: You've both been involved in working with others and teaching in business for some time. It's kind of a gift to be this enthused and this curious about something.
Hopkins: Maybe this is part of the magic — there's nothing like a foreign country, and thinking about somewhere that's different, to get you interested and asking questions. I hope that's part of the fire we can light, getting people to say, "I really want to go abroad and see what's going on, because I can see this just helps me understand everything around me, even here at home, through a different lens."
Johnson: And I've got the best gig in the world, Kyle. I get to do this as part of my job.
Kellams: Thank you both for coming in.
Jon Johnson and Leigh Hopkins will teach "How History Shapes Business: Past, Present, and Future," an Honors College class at the University of Arkansas, next fall. Our discussion took place in the Anthony and Susan Hui News Studio.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
