Announcing the "America's New Map" Massive Online Open Course (MOOC)
Offered by the University of Maryland through edX
The course is entitled The Superpower Grand Strategies: Winning the Globalization Game. It is fundamentally the book as a course, something it was designed to roughly resemble from the start (e.g., the segmentation and progression of throughlines/threads constituting a full-spectrum argument for US grand strategy this century).
Worked this over the holiday season last year, after getting set up with John Clay Elliott Johnson at UMD, where I am now a lecturer in Civil and Environmental Engineering. John and his colleague Madeline Friday walked me through the entire creation process: basically 24 lessons spread over four clusters, each with a mini PPT-delivered lecture by me, knowledge checks, and other suggested analytic efforts on the part of the student.
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You can take the course for free or you can pay for the credential. It is the first in what will be a three-course certificate program. Course #2 (Navigating Global Markets Amidst Superpower Brand Wars — New Rulesets for Global Business) will delve into the business principles to be derived from ANM (that will be direct collaboration between John and I), and the final in the series (A New Map for Product Managers — Strategic Brand Development for the Global Middle Class Markets), largely developed by John, will focus on brand development and management across the complex global landscape explained in Course #1 and #2.
The certificate program itself will be known as Professional Certificate in A New Map for Product Management: Navigating Global Markets in the Era of Climate Change and Demographic Collapse.
On all of this, my great thanks go to Daniel Patrick Forrester for starting me down this path.
So, to sum up:
Professional Certificate in A New Map for Product Management: Navigating Global Markets in the Era of Climate Change and Demographic Collapse.
Superpower Grand Strategies: Winning the Globalization Game [UP NOW]
Navigating Global Markets Amidst Superpower Brand Wars — New Rulesets for Global Business [UP THIS SUMMER]
A New Map for Product Managers — Strategic Brand Development for the Global Middle Class Markets [UP THIS FALL].
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR THE MOOC
Information about the course that you’ll find here:
Introduction
Learn to navigate North-South dynamics and superpower competition for success in a changing world by exploring how climate change, demographics, and the global middle class reshape global economics.
About this course
This course promotes a “grand strategy” approach to how climate change and demographic trends – along with the ascendancy of a global majority middle class – transform our global economy from its historic East-West paradigm to one dominated by North-South dynamics. This is a crucial perspectives for anyone involved in international trade and the globalization of markets.
The world economy is undergoing three structural changes, each of which are enough – on their own – to define a new era of globalization . The first is climate change, which decimates lower latitudes (developing countries), denying them the benefits of globalization, while paradoxically empowering higher latitude global markets. The second is demographic aging unfolding at great rapidity across America, Europe, and Asia (Japan in particular). The third is the ascendancy of a majority global middle class whose huge resource requirements, per economists of all stripes, will drive future global economic growth – if this South-centric mass of humanity can successfully navigate climate change’s devastating impact.
Put them together and the world trade is facing an unprecedented tilting of its geopolitical axis from one historically oriented East-West to one dominated by North-South dynamics (e.g., mass northward migrations by climate refugees [see the US-Mexico border today]). The world’s 21st-century superpowers (United States, European Union, Russia, China, India) will thus compete in helping smaller powers survive and navigate these world-restructuring dynamics, in effect entering into a superpower “brand war” to win (first) economic and (then) political allegiance from among these more vulnerable nation-states.
In this new form of competition – one that will unfold as much in the cyber realm as the real world, superpowers will seek to address the majority global middle class’s quest for stability, prosperity, and security. Having achieved consumer status for the first time, these billions, largely centered in the Global South (per World Bank statistics), will naturally be attracted to those superpowers most adept at creating a sense of geopolitical “belonging” in larger unions anchored by their large financial markets that facilitate their export-driven growth. We are already witnessing this strategic offering in processes like the EU’s state-accession model and China’s Belt and Road Initiative — despite the recent increase in trade barriers (tariffs) and their effects on international markets.
Employing a “grand strategic” perspective, this MOOC is the first to explore that cluster of tectonic changes as they transform our world, offering competitive advantages to some international businesses while generating lessons and understanding for anyone involved in information technology, economic policy, foreign markets, and foreign direct investment.
Scientists estimates that species the world over are forced by climate change to increase their evolutionary speed by roughly 10,000 times. The same will be true of humans and all their enterprises: reconfiguring national borders, disrupting labor markets, reshaping capital markets, triggering financial crises, altering how and why multinational corporations engage in outsourcing, and altering global capitalism and its free trade rule-set to its very core.
In combination, climate change, demographic transitions and the emergence of a global majority middle class alter the very nature of economic activity this century (liberalization of investments, role of trade agreements, strategic partnerships among great powers), sending different countries down wildly different paths that beg the question: Exactly what is globalization going forward?
In sum, if broad-framing macroeconomic change is a skill-set you want to master, this course lays the groundwork for your understanding of how globalization affects us all by altering our planet, transforming our societies, and recasting this world order of American creation.
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What you'll learn
How climate change will trigger the biggest geographic transfer of resource wealth in human history – super-empowering the New North while beggaring the Global South
How climate change will drive South-to-North human migrations far beyond anything the world currently witnesses, triggering state failure across lower latitudes and supercharging angry nationalism and populism across higher-latitude states.
How demographic aging across the Global North will permanently transform those nations and their markets.
How globalization’s unfolding is largely driven by nations embracing a demographic transition from high-birth/death rates to low-birth/death rates, allowing for a “demographic dividend” that enables economic integration into global value chains.
How the ascendancy of a majority global middle class re-runs the geopolitical experiment that was the Eurasian continent’s successive “world wars” of the early 20th century, as both Left (communism) and Right (fascism) sought to control that process.
How superpowers will compete in “brand wars” to earn the economic, network, political, and security allegiance of smaller states threatened by these structural shifts.
How the Western Hemisphere (North/Central/South America & Caribbean) are unusually advantaged relative to the Eastern Hemisphere (Europe, Africa, Asia) for the North-South integration to come.
How to process all these tectonic changes and world-restructuring dynamics from a grand strategic perspective.
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Syllabus
Week One:
Forecasting several decades of global turbulence and connecting these looming realities to upcoming leadership generations
How US-style globalization swept the planet and remade it
How modern globalization has evolved since World War II and where it’s going next
Understanding the current global security landscape
How the world is shaping up into three zones of North-South integration
How to observe your enterprise’s standing in whatever “market” defines its domain
Week Two:
Forecasting the coming North-South integration
The dawning of the Anthropocene Epoch and how it remakes our planet
Pitting Middle Earth (lower latitudes) versus the New North (higher latitudes) on security
The demographic transition explained
The national imperative to “cash in” a demographic dividend – and what that costs
How to orient your enterprise’s future amidst these tectonic global dynamics
Week Three:
Who will rule the global majority middle class? Left? Right? Itself?
The superpower brand wars to capture the loyalty/allegiance of the global middle class
The different superpower integration and regulatory models
The differing competitive styles of the five superpowers
The defining superpower struggle in the cyber realm
How to decide where your enterprise needs to go in the coming years/decades
Week Four:
How the Western Hemisphere is primed for North-South Integration
Why the Americas will “win” by coming together in larger unions
How America can lose the superpower competition due to its internal “demons”
An America's-First Strategy targeting hemispheric integration
How America – and your enterprise – need to act to actualize North-South integration __
Reviewing the course and previewing the subsequent MOOC exploring the strategic business principles revealed by this grand strategic analysis.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR THE MOOC
All in all, something I was very excited to create and, now that it’s done, I am eager to start Course #2.
Please share this information with anyone you think would be interested. edX is presently dominated by mass purchases by companies (versus individual purchases), so this is something Throughline is definitely going to share with, and promote to, our wider business ecosystem.