Ninety students from the three campuses of the University of Pittsburgh’s Joseph M Katz Graduate School of Business – Prague, São Paulo and the eastern US city itself – are descending on the beautiful Czech spa resort of Karlovy Vary today for the start of their first Global Executive Forum.
Amid the elegance of the Grandhotel Pupp – “embosomed with amenity forest” as one local website puts it – the students on Katz’s EMBA Worldwide programme will spend two days studying negotiation in business. Then they move on to Prague to spend the rest of the week immersing themselves in global human resource management.
“The students will work in global teams, and begin to forge relationships that will develop when they meet again, and that they will carry with them for long after the programme ends,” says Anne Nemer, the programme’s executive director.
The three groups, each of 30 students, will spend another week together early next year in São Paulo, before finishing the course in July with three weeks in Pittsburgh.
The forums, and the integrated approach across three campuses, distinguish the Katz course as one of a handful of global EMBA programmes that have developed in response to the needs of executives and their sponsoring organisations, as business becomes increasingly global.
Many standard EMBA programmes have foreign trips and company visits included in the curriculum, but the global programmes have taken this much further. The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business has three campuses, in London, Singapore and Chicago, for its EMBA. “When our students do their travel, they are put into study groups together, so there may be two people from each campus working on a case or a presentation,” says Bill Kooser, associate dean of the school’s EMBA programme.
“So you are not just in class, listening to someone talking about doing business in Asia, but in a study room late at night working on a presentation with someone from Japan, Korea or Germany, say.” As a result, says Mr Kooser, the students develop relationships at a much deeper level than they would if simply going on foreign trip.
The schools have different approaches to running these global EMBA programmes. Both Chicago and Pittsburgh run their own integrated programmes at three sites – although Katz is considering a fourth location in Asia.
The second approach is to partner with other institutions, and two notable examples here are: the Trium Global EMBA, bringing together New York University Stern School of Business, the London School of Economics and HEC School of Management, Paris; and OneMBA.
OneMBA, which has just started its fifth annual intake, has five partner schools: the Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Business Administration, RSM Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Mexico’s Tecnológico de Monterrey Graduate School of Business Administration and Leadership, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Kenan-Flagler Business School and Fundação Getulio Vargas Escola de Administração de Empresas de São Paulo.
Both approaches have their pros and cons. “Given that we wanted students to get a Chicago experience, with Chicago faculty, and end up with a Chicago degree, we felt we had to have a Chicago programme,” says Mr Kooser. “We felt the joint venture approach sometimes leads to differences of opinion over management and direction.”
Pittsburgh, meanwhile, wanted to send a very clear signal to the market about what it meant to graduate from the programme, says Ms Nemer. It felt it needed to control the selection process, not just for each campus but also for the cohort as a whole, to ensure it achieved a good balance of experience and motivation. Also, says Ms Nemer: “Schools that partner can’t guarantee that course content or faculty is the same.”
However, for the backers of the Trium programme the inherent diversity of the partnering approach is a bonus. “We wanted to leverage local experts and industries, and develop a programme that was in every sense of the word multi-cultural,” says Erin O’Brien, executive director of the programme. “We realised that each school has their own approach and, arguably, their biases but felt that three schools together would be a stronger programme than one going alone.”
The approach underlines the idea that “global business is complicated and that the three schools are looking at it from different angles”, she says. This gives students a more sophisticated look at the challenges and risks that international business presents.
As for potential disagreements, Ms O’Brien says the “roughest days” were probably before the launch of the programme in 2001, when there were a lot of meetings to discuss curriculum, location and other matters – such as the logo.
But things have gone well since the launch, she says. “The schools are happy with the quality of the students that have gone through, and if things hadn’t gone well, there would have been more potential for disagreements.” A good indicator of progress, she says, is that the three institutions, either together or on a bilateral basis, have started further partnerships since Trium began.
OneMBA also has diversity built into the programme, which is designed so that two-thirds of the content is common, and focused on global business, while the remaining one-third is left to each school to decide for itself. This means that the course retains regional relevance, says Mike Page, dean at RSM Erasmus and one of the founders of OneMBA.
This approach has rubbed off on the students, too. “They are high achievers who have found the space and tolerance to listen to one another from different parts of the world,” says Dr Page. “They have actively engaged with the diversity rather than saying: ‘Let’s address only the issues that are common to us.’
“More and more, we are trying to build into the programme the notion that if you want to be effective as a global manager, part of what you need is to suspend judgment and understand why other people hold different views and approach problems in a different way.”
The cross-fertilisation across campuses works differently for all four programmes, even if some of the overall aims are similar. While Katz has its Global Executive Forums, Chicago begins and ends each programme by bringing all 270 students – 90 per campus – to the Windy City, breaking into smaller groups of 30 from each campus for intermediate week-long visits to Singapore and London.
The face-to-face element of the Trium programme is a “lockstep cohort”, says Ms O’Brien. The class, capped at 65, attends two-week modules together in each of the three locations, and there are also two other guest modules in Mumbai and Shanghai, where the programme works with local institutions and faculty.
OneMBA starts by bringing everyone – around 100 students from the five schools – to Washington, then schedules further week-long “global residencies” over the next 21 months in Europe, Mexico, Brazil and Asia. In between, the students have a mixture of local and global co-ordinated courses – the latter involving teamwork with colleagues around the world.
However they are organised, the travelling elements represent an important part of the programmes – more than 30 per cent of the total content in the case of the Katz forums, for example. They help reinforce the idea in students’ minds that the cohort as a whole, and relationship building across the cohort, is as important – or in some cases even more important – than any sense of attachment to the “home” campus or school.
For all the programmes, a top priority is to ensure a sense of equality exists between the different campuses or participating institutions, which requires considerable efforts to be expended on co-ordination. For Trium, the LSE’s Matthew Mulford is the academic keystone, working with faculty from the three institutions and attending every module.
At Chicago, Mr Kooser says one of his biggest roles is “co-ordination, making sure we are consistent in our policies and approaches”. OneMBA has an executive for its consortium, made up of academics and administrators, which meets physically when the students do their trips and has a teleconference every month. Faculty responsible for the separate modules also have regular five-way meetings.
Getting the formula right for a global EMBA programme is no easy task and schools have had to adapt – and at times change course – as they develop. In Chicago’s case it even felt the need to change location – after opening in Singapore in 2000, it realised it was getting better contact with larger companies based there than it could at its first overseas site, in Barcelona, says Mr Kooser. So two years ago it moved from the Catalonian city to London.
Long-term commitment is also important, says Ms Nemer. Pittsburgh’s first involvement with Prague preceded the fall of the Iron Curtain, she says, when the US Agency for International Development (USAid) was supporting the development of business schools in central Europe. A long process of evolution has followed, she says.
For the partnership or consortium programmes there is another issue to contend with, says Dr Page. A global programme, he says, requires schools to practice what they preach about understanding and tolerating diversity. “We are talking about a legacy that comes with a degree of control in it,” he says. “[In a consortium] the five schools are prepared to accept the credentials of one another and to operate in a genuine network of trust.” Still, all the effort that goes into these programmes behind the scenes is aimed at producing a seamless programme for students, and the global EMBAs are proving popular.
Chicago has had record applications for the past two to three years, says Mr Kooser, while Trium is turning people away, says Ms O’Brien, and this year’s applicant list was the most impressive it has had. “We are pretty steadfast, we are not going to accept 28/29/30-year-olds,” she says. “We are very sincere about [students having] 10 years post-graduation experience.”
The global EMBA programmes stand or fall on their ability to prepare students for modern business life. “So much of the success of strategic alliances today depends on the ability of teams to work well with each other, and much of that is across cultures and contents,” says Ms Nemer. “Even this worldly, global class of executives may never before have had to work in such a diverse environment.”
