As They Say … In China Everything Is Possible. But Nothing Is Easy.
I have been watching and studying some of the US business schools who have entered the China MBA market for some time now (joint executive MBA programs are the usual market entry strategy). One such school is the University of Maryland Smith School of Business; an excellent business school with excellent programs, students and faculty and with loads of money to do great things (they are not scared to charge market rates).
For example, click HERE to learn about what schools like Smith are doing in China with their executive MBA program. It seems that each week I get a high quality marketing brochure in the mail from Smith re: one of its programs and said brochure, just one of them, must cost at least as much as my entire marketing budget for all of our Cal Poly Orfalea College of Business graduate programs.
Well, even the big boys falter. Smith just closed up it’s executive MBA program in Beijing (only); it looks like its much larger and well known Shanghai program is alive and well. Other B-schools are also struggling. See this May 15, 2008 Business Week article that just came out, China: Why Western B-Schools Are Leaving. Yet another good example of how local Chinese (in this case Chinese MBA programs) can replicate and achieve quality quickly, thereby making things miserable for the early foreign market entrants.
The money quote in this article:
Thirty Chinese universities are now authorized by Beijing to provide executive MBA programs. “The Chinese schools are coming right at the teeth of what I offer,” says Gary Gaeth, the associate dean of the University of Iowa’s Henry B. Tippie School of Management, which will start a program with the highly regarded Peking University this year. “And their MBA programs are every bit as good as everyone else’s.”
Oh, how that market and invisible hand can quickly swing the other way.
Yes, in China, when you make it you can make it big. But when you lose, well, you know the rest of the line. In China, experienced and knowledgeable expats will tell you, “Here, anything is possible. But nothing is easy.”
7 comments May 19th, 2008