About the Baratta Center

Mission and Vision

The Baratta Center for Global Business Education is the preeminent center for developing principled, globally minded leaders equipped to navigate and shape a world defined by geopolitical competition and technological change.

Drawing on Georgetown’s world-class expertise across the McDonough School of Business and the School of Foreign Service, the Baratta Center takes an interdisciplinary, applied, and AI-forward approach to global business education that is built for the complexities of an increasingly multipolar world. The center also creates programming and actively supports the Baratta Global Business Fellows (GBF).

What We Believe

The Baratta Center is built on a simple but consequential premise: that the most important business challenges of our era are inseparable from geopolitics, and that the most effective global leaders — in both the private and public sectors — are those who understand how power, policy, and economics interact.

This is not a niche. It is the central challenge facing every multinational company, every finance ministry, and every multilateral institution operating in the world today. And it is a challenge that business education, as traditionally conceived, has been slow to confront. The Baratta Center is here to confront it directly.

We approach global business education with four convictions:

1. Analytical rigor and geopolitical literacy are not in tension — they reinforce each other.
2. The best learning happens when students engage with real problems, real decisions, and real leaders.
3. Training the whole person — equipping students not just with skills, but with judgment and conscience — is what distinguishes a Georgetown education.
4. In a world of accelerating complexity, the leaders who thrive will be those who can read the landscape clearly, act decisively under uncertainty, and bring others with them.

A Uniquely Modern Platform

Georgetown has been educating global leaders since 1789 — and training leaders at the intersection of business, policy, and global affairs since 1936, when the School of Business was founded explicitly to meet the demands of both government and industry. That heritage is not incidental to the Baratta Center’s identity; it is the foundation on which the center is built.

What makes Georgetown’s position genuinely distinctive today is the convergence of three assets that are rare in combination. The School of Foreign Service — consistently ranked among the world’s very best programs in international affairs — sits steps away from McDonough’s classrooms, creating the conditions for a depth of interdisciplinary engagement that is difficult to find anywhere else in business education. Washington, D.C., is not merely a location but a living laboratory: the decisions made in the buildings surrounding Georgetown’s campus shape the very dynamics we study. And Georgetown’s Jesuit tradition — with its emphasis on educating the whole person and on leadership in service to others — gives the center an intellectual and moral seriousness that runs through everything we do. The Baratta Center draws on all three.

Who We Serve

The Baratta Center serves students first. Our programs are designed to accelerate the development of the next generation of global leaders — to give them the frameworks, exposure, networks, and judgment they will need not just in their first role after Georgetown, but throughout careers that will unfold across a world none of us can fully predict. The measure of our success is not what students know when they leave Georgetown, but how they lead when the world gets complicated.

We also engage deeply with the practitioners who shape the environment our students will enter — the executives, investors, diplomats, policymakers, and multilateral officials who are navigating geopolitical complexity in real time. That engagement is not decorative. It is how we keep our education current, connect students to opportunities that matter, and how we contribute to the broader conversation about the future of global business and governance.

Our Team

The Baratta Center’s mission to develop principled, globally minded business leaders is supported by renowned faculty from across Georgetown’s nationally ranked schools, as well as our advisory board, made up of executives from major multinational businesses.