Teaching Grad Students to Navigate Tech Transformations & Geopolitical Uncertainty

I was repeatedly tapped at Northwestern University to help teach Strategy in the Global Economy to students earning their Master of Science in Communication. This course framed technology not as a mere backdrop to geopolitical business strategy, but as a fundamental aspect of the terrain.

I leveraged domain expertise, iterative feedback, individualized grading, and one-on-one mentorship to help students translate shifting geopolitical, economic, and regulatory conditions into communication strategies for multinational contexts.

Technology as the strategic context

The course framed globalization as a techno-economic system in which market integration and information infrastructure rewire how firms compete, partner with states, and adapt across regions.

Assignments encouraged students to integrate country risk, regulatory change, and technological capabilities into strategic narratives, rather than treating “tech” as a siloed function. Feedback cycles focused on refining this synthesis with each submission.

Retail as data systems, not stores

Students examined how Walmart’s information systems shifted retail from “push” logistics toward demand-driven “pull,” emphasizing item-level visibility and near-real-time replenishment—an operational mindset change made possible by RFID and inventory intelligence.

This work built the habit of narrating technology in business terms—availability, lead times, shrink reduction, and shelf accuracy—rather than in abstractions, and feedback honed the ability to connect infrastructure choices to margin and working-capital outcomes.

Cloud as competitive architecture

To understand digital-era scale advantages, students analyzed Amazon’s move beyond retail into platform infrastructure, where AWS’s 2006 launch transformed compute from a capital expense into an on-demand capability that reconfigured time-to-market and experimentation costs for entire industries.

Mentorship emphasized expressing these transformations succinctly for executive readers: cloud services as strategic levers for speed, modularity, and global rollout—not just IT tooling—anchored by precise references to service evolution and adoption.

Production, power, and the Apple–China–Foxconn nexus

Writing prompts required students to track collaboration and conflict among Apple, Foxconn, the U.S., and China, cultivating the ability to reason about why a company would prize cost-advantaged labor pools and flexible manufacturing regimes while managing policy and reputational risk across jurisdictions.

Feedback focused on articulating trade-offs among scale, cost, and control when production is offshore reinforces the vocabulary and logic of outsourcing, offshoring, and insourcing that underpin modern supply-chain strategy.

Vertical integration as a strategic bet

Students compared organizational designs by contrasting Tesla’s vertical integration with asset-light outsourcing models, training them to communicate how integration concentrates capability, compresses cycle times, and shifts bargaining power—while also increasing execution risk.

Assessment emphasized a crisp argument structure: state the capability being internalized, link it to cost, speed, or quality advantages, and demonstrate sensitivity to geopolitical and supplier risks that could undermine those advantages.

Geopolitics in the supply chain

Course sessions tracked the restructuring from just-in-time to more resilient inventories, diversification from China to Vietnam, and “friend-shoring,” building a habit of mapping policy risk into operational decisions that executives can act on.

Students studied how vertical integration became an advantage when supply chains were destabilized during the COVID-19 pandemic, and were tasked with discussing what an appropriate manufacturing strategy might look like during the ongoing resurgence of isolationist trade policy.

Students learned to translate headlines into strategy memos—moving from “tensions rise” to clear implications for internal and external communications about supplier portfolios, inventory posture, and capital allocation, with iterative commentary guiding sharper, evidence-based recommendations.

The semiconductor race as policy and capacity

Case work and readings positioned the chip industry as a multi-decade industrial contest, highlighting China’s drive for self-sufficiency under policy frameworks like MIC2025 and successive national funds, alongside persistent gaps in key toolchains under export controls.

The course closely examined the strategic and diplomatic importance of Taiwan in semiconductor and chip manufacturing, as well as Ukraine's role in rare earth element (REE) mining, and the crucial role of NVIDIA in maintaining U.S. tech dominance in the age of parallel computing.

The U.S. posture: expertise onshore, factories in flux

Students explored how U.S. firms historically retained core design and R&D capability while offshoring assembly and fabrication, and how current policy and security concerns are shifting incentives toward selective reshoring and allied capacity.

Feedback guided students to show the operational footprints behind policy slogans—where to dual-source for supply chain resilience and tax advantages, when to build buffer stock, and how to narrate resilience as a competitive differentiator for customers and capital markets.

Retail revolution to the platform era

Through the Sears–Walmart–Amazon arc, the course connected logistics, data, and platformization to cultural and market change, helping students develop comparative analysis across eras and business models.

Students practiced communicating how marketing and distribution innovations—long tail vs. blockbuster, marketplace vs. owned inventory—re-map value capture, with feedback tightening claims to the most decision-relevant metrics and risks.

Mentorship that builds strategic communicators

Across short and mid-sized papers, individualized grading and targeted feedback turned sprawling research into clean, executive-ready arguments that tied technology choices to profitability, resilience, and geopolitical constraints.

By the final assignments, students were reliably framing recommendations that accounted for policy, supply-chain design, and platform economics, demonstrating the core outcome of the course: strategic communication calibrated for multinational decision-making under technological transformation.