UCLA Prof Heads New Breed of Globe-Hopping MBA Program
Aspiring young business people from all over the world packs their bags and head to top-rated business schools in the United States. But Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago aren't the only hot spots for business education. A growing number of top institutions are building international business programs that take the show on the road. Chris Erickson is the faculty director of the dual-degree UCLA - National University of Singapore Global Executive MBA, a program which sets up camp in Los Angeles, Singapore, Shanghai and Bangalore. He shared his perspectives on this new breed of program.
BNET: How did UCLA come to form its partnership with the National University of Singapore (NUS)?
Erickson: We wanted to globalize and do it in a serious way. There are a couple of ways that U.S. business schools run these kinds of program. One is they just show up on another continent and set up a campus and run their own program. We thought about it and realized to effectively understand a given place and do business there, you really need deeply embedded cultural knowledge. As an institution, we're not experts on Asia--though individually, some of our faculty are. We needed an institutional partner in Asia who had that cultural and institutional knowledge.
BNET: How has the partnership changed the approach to delivering an MBA program?
Erickson: One thing that was new to us, that NUS provided, was the format. It's a part-time intensive program, which has a lot of advantages. The standard model in the classroom is the academic quarter or semester where you have a three-hour class, and then you come back next week, after you've read the next couple of cases and articles. Our program has the same number of contact hours, but classes meet just six times over two years. They meet for two weeks, each time taking three full 30-hour courses. The idea is that people can be employed anywhere in the world, and once every three months they come together for a session. Of course, there's a lot of work to be done in between the sessions, but it can be done remotely. Most part-time MBA programs get people who live relatively nearby. That's great if you want a deep network in a certain place. We can, and do, get people who are currently employed all over the world. Students get a broad network all over the west coast of the United States, as well as in East Asia, South Asia and some parts of Latin America. It's incredibly interesting watching people from very different background and cultural assumptions tackle the same problems together, given the high amount of group work. And because of the broad base of cultures that our students are drawn from, it really does make for a very different kind of dynamic than the normal UCLA or NUS culture.
BNET: So, you have this base of students from all over the world. They must serve as a great real-time barometer of economic conditions and business trends all over the world. What do you hear from them when you all gather?
Erickson: Tough times. There's uncertainty everywhere. Just a few months ago, people were talking about the belief that Asian economies were separated from the mortgage crisis and America's market worries. But what the last few months have shown us is how interconnected all of the economies are--we really do have a global economy. It drives home how truly valuable this kind of international business education and exposure is.
BNET: When you're not leading the CIBER [Center for International Business Education and Research] program, you teach negotiations. What are some of the myths that young managers have about being a good negotiator?
Erickson: Many people think you're born with the skill--you're a natural negotiator or you're not, but it's very much a practicable, learnable skill. However, the concept of thinking of oneself as a negotiator and improving in that role can lead to a lot of anxiety. We try to get rid of this anxiety and turn the misconceptions about negotiations on their heads. One of these is that people generally think that negotiations are very rare activities, things that happen once in a great while, like when General Motors negotiates with the autoworkers union or an individual is negotiating about a job offer. But what we try to get across is that negotiations are a very pervasive human activity, something we do all days every day. Also, some people come into it thinking negotiations are all about winning or losing: "I can't get the outcome I am happy with without the other party losing out." People miss out on many opportunities for mutual gain. It's those kinds of mindsets that people need to change to become great negotiators.
Jeremy Dann is a lecturer in innovation and marketing at UCLA's Anderson School of Management.
