The University of Maryland's R.H. Smith School of Business, a member of GBSN's Executive Board, is part of a long-standing US program: CIBER (the Center for International Business Education and Research). The Smith School runs an International Consulting Course, and these past few days I have been fortunate to mix with a number of participating MBA students. Many top business schools organize international experiential student projects. What makes this program very special is that it brings together students from three countries - in this instance from the US, Tunisia and Uruguay. Besides the Smith School, several non-US schools collaborated in organizing the program: the Mediterranean School of Business (Tunis), a member of GBSN, and IEEM, the business school of the University of Montevideo.
Together with MSB Dean Mahmoud Trikki and Carlos Folle Estrada, IEEM's Dean, and of course the CIBER leadership - Dr. Kislaya Prasad and Karen Watts - the students gathered in Washington, where they were cordially received by their countries' ambassadors, and visited a number of Washington-based institutions. Today, the students left Washington for their project destinations: a seafood start-up company and a services center in Tunisia, a free trade zone and a leather company in Uruguay. This is true internationalization. Students from Tunisia and Uruguay got to know one another, lodging in the same dorms, and half of them got to do projects in a country they had never been to. One student mentioned that international exposure was even greater than what was intended, because a number of American Smith School MBA students were of foreign ascent.
Friday, I met students from the US, Asia, and the Caribbean who had completed similar assignments last year. They had carried out programs in Japan, Thailand, China, and Uruguay. All of them got job offers after completing their consultancies - indeed, one woman had four offers.
Mixing nationalities of student teams and of projects as part of program design a pretty unique way to go. Incorporating business schools from the developing world and their students in experiential student programs enhances the capacity of these schools for running their own student consulting programs, which few emerging markets management schools are doing yet.
Guy Pfeffermann is the CEO and founder of the Global Business School Network.
I am delighted to read Della Bradshaw’s “Moving targets” article (on FT.com today), because it touches on hugely important issues. The vast majority of the world’s population is already living outside the US, Europe and Japan, much of it in mega-cities. These cities are continuing to grow at phenomenal rates.
Meanwhile, most top business schools are in what looks increasingly like an island, albeit still a large island – the “developed” high-income countries. The list of mega- cities that need more quality business schools is even longer than what Bradshaw elicited from her Business Education colleagues: if Mumbai and Shanghai are underserved, how about Jakarta (19 million), Metro-Manila (16 million), Calcutta (15 million), Cairo (14 million), Lagos (13 million), Karachi (12 million) or Dhaka (11 million)? Among the runners up are Lima, Teheran, Bangkok and Bogota.
Top-ranked business schools have made some forays into these huge markets – through partnerships, capacity-building, direct implants and on-line programs – and organizations like the Global Business School Network are working to increase these efforts. But by and large it is increasingly true that the world’s managerial talent pool remains in one place – the “developed” economies – while global economic growth is happening in another – the developing world.
Click here to read the full article from the Financial Times
Guy Pfeffermann is the founder and CEO of the Global Business School Network. Follow him on Twitter @GPfeffermann
