| Matt Symonds looks at how business schools are faring in an increasingly globalised era  European and North American business schools have rebounded strongly in the past two years against a backdrop of robust global economic growth. The need to innovate in order to stay alive amid globalisation has spurred companies to retain their top talent from Beijing to Chennai. One way of achieving this is to send valued executives and middle managers off to a top business school, and as a result the demand for both customised and open-enrolment courses has rarely been stronger.
But do the array of courses on leadership, persuasion and organisational effectiveness offer value for money, and how do business schools in Europe and the US adapt their courses for an increasingly international audience? Executive education has long faced the question of how to measure the return on investment (ROI) of courses. Schools typically refer to intangible benefits such as increased staff loyalty, reenergised workforces and out-of-the-box thinking. Joshua Kobb, director of international programmes at HEC School of Management Paris, instead feels that ROI can best be measured by defining the goals of any course from the outset. “For a custom programme, the better the client can communicate their organisational needs, the better the chance that the training program will bring tangible returns,” he asserts. “For open enrolment, the ROI focuses more on individual needs that translate into added value for the organisation.” The IESE Business School in Barcelona is taking a step closer to measuring ROI by launching a programme called Mission Critical Leadership. Following a self-assessment of their leadership style, participants will draw up a set of personal objectives and devise ways of putting them into practice. The IESE faculty will then coach them over a period of 100 days, monitoring their progress as they apply what they have learned. “It’s all about getting them to put theory into practice,” says Professor Paddy Miller, the programme’s academic director. “If we can help them do this, we will have truly made a difference that will translate into ROI down the line.” What you pay for a three-day course on negotiation, or the flagship Advanced Management Programmes (AMPs), can vary significantly from one school to another. The four-week AMPs at Wharton, Stanford GSB or the London Business School all cost around $40,000 (€29,000), while similar-length courses at the University of Toronto, UCLA or the Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School in Belgium may cost as little as $15,000.  Nunzio Quacquarelli, director of QS, a London-based company that provides search engines for business education, confirms that both potential participants and their sponsoring institutions face a wide range of costs for such courses. “Of the 500 or more open-enrolment courses that we compare at TopExecEd.com, the price differences can be substantial. HR managers and senior executives need first to think about what they want from their training investment.”
But how price-sensitive are the clients for these programmes, and does a big brand name make a difference? Lucy Collett is managing director at Standard & Poor’s in New York, and has taken several of Columbia Business School’s executive education courses, including a recently launched program entitled “Persuasion: Influencing Without Authority”. “I don’t think of the school’s brand as an additional benefit, but as a form of insurance,” she says. “We are all busy and have limited resources. When you invest in a programme at a school with such a strong brand, you can be fairly sure that you will get your money’s worth.” The Saïd Business School at Oxford has quickly established an international appeal, attracting participants from all over the world and from both public and private sector organisations. Director of the school’s program on negotiation, Associate Fellow Tim Cullen, confirms that his students recognise the value of the course. “Many have commented that they would still want to come even if we were charging much more,” he says. Cullen recognises that the Oxford name is part of the attraction. “Some of the participants explicitly want to come to Saïd for both the appeal of Oxford, and the appeal of the international classroom that we put together,” he explains. “The culturally and geographically diverse group is abundant with different perspectives and management styles.” Cullen underlines the role of other classmates in ensuring that the perspective of globalisation is not limited to Asia and Latin America for a school in the US, or to India and the Middle East for a school in Europe. For Ilene Chunko, responsible for corporate marketing at Euro-American giant Alcatel Lucent, the courses she has experienced in the US are appropriate for a global audience, but do have a cultural bias. “A few subjects, like the persuasion course I just completed, are based on human behaviour and can be culturally dependent,” she says. “The course addresses the cultural bias, and although many of the concepts of human behaviour still apply to any situation or culture, this specific course was weighted towards US cultural norms.” For Kobb at HEC, meeting the needs of a global audience is addressed from two angles: content and format. “With an international group, we are often asked to deliver off-site, and as such are likely to include international adjunct faculty in the training programme,” he says. “In order to cater to an international population, the programme format needs some adjustment, whether time-intensive or focusing more on the experience part of a training programme.” Historically the majority of case studies has originated from US business schools, and Harvard Business School has dominated the market. Critics have felt that this influence was overly US-centric. In the past ten years schools such as INSEAD and IESE, or European-led initiatives like the European Case Clearing House at Cranfield School of Management in the UK, have developed more internationally focused material. They have been aided by a series of partnerships struck with emerging business schools in Asia such as Tsinghua or ISB, or research facilities in Dubai or Singapore. THE DISTANCE LEARNING ALTERNATIVE Case study: Swiss
Management Centre There’s nothing new about distance learning – in fact, there’s a long tradition of discounted bundles of books and cassettes being shipped out to distant American prairies where for a relatively small sum of money students are promised famous Harvard lectures for a fraction of the cost of full enrolment. The big drawback, other than running out of motivation, was sheer loneliness, plus the fact that an MBA is as much or more about networking than it is about absorbing content. One example of how distance learning is changing is the Swiss Management Centre, whose diminutive physical campus is tucked away in French-speaking southwest Switzerland at Vevey, near Lausanne. The Centre opened in 2002. More than 90% of its 870 students are enrolled online, and all of them have flexibly tailored schedules to allow their jobs and lives to continue without the disruption of a full-time course. The minimum time needed to complete a fully accredited MBA is 15 months, but this assumes full-time study. More typical is 24 months, which includes one trip to the Swiss campus. Executive director Michael Schmelczer claims that one of the Centre’s strengths is that it offers everything; this includes proprietary content, some of it in electronic formats such as e-books via a closed contract with Pearson Education. Perhaps even more relevant to globalisation are the 60 different nationalities of the student body and what Schmelczer notes is the “huge effort” he has placed on networking and community building among those different individuals via technology. “We can connect together the right small groups to work and cooperate on the right projects at the right time, leveraging the low cost of communications to achieve our own, highly authentic brand of globalisation,” he says. |