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MBA Academic info1. Introduction and Mission Statement The International Education Commission (I.E.C) is the first and only accrediting body to offer academic recognition for business and management programs across the whole spectrum of demands and new opportunities in postsecondary business education. The Standards of Accreditation are intended to assist an institution to achieve overall effectiveness in all areas of its growth and ensure the quality of its educational programs. The Standards of Accreditation apply to all institutional programs and services wherever they are located and however they are delivered. As progress is made toward the global economy, the International Education Commission is becoming the focal point of three interdependent and interweaving partners groups •The Students •The Universities and Schools •The Companies and Corporations (Business Community) The central objective of the International Education Commission is to define, promote and enforce better practices in business education worldwide. To accomplish its mission, the I.E.C Policy reflects its strong commitment to:
2. Academic Outlook The origins of business and management education in the world lie in the demand for skilled professionals of all types needed to run the increasingly complex industrial and commercial organizations of the late 19th century. Not surprisingly, the different countries responded in very different ways. The resulting mosaic of approaches today causes some headaches to those involved in the attempt to establish educational equivalence and student mobility between countries. Management is becoming generic. The generic concept of management means that all organizations, regardless of their particular genre or location, need to be managed and that the skills necessary to manage these institutions are basically the same. Recognizing this, organizations have begun to avidly recruit people who can perform the functions of management: leadership, administration, problem solving, innovating and decision making. While specialist training should not be ignored, at the highest levels, companies need generalists; they need managers who can see challenges and manage solutions without being confined by the outlook engendered by specialist disciplines. This is undoubtedly the most significant factor responsible for the growth in the demand in these areas that has for long been overwhelmingly won by the advocates of the MBA. The hallmark of an MBA education is that it offers flexibility as circumstances and personal inclinations change. The MBA can shift from marketing to finance, from the private to the public sector, from functional specialization to general management with relative ease. The transition is facilitated because the person has the broad-based and universally-applicable skills derived from the graduate business program. The MBA degree is applicable to and compatible with almost any career orientation. 3. What is an MBA? The Master of Business Administration (MBA) is a post-graduate diploma designed to prepare individual of circumstances. The MBA appeared in Europe in the 1960's. A typical European MBA is shorter (generally lasting one year), less academic, more industry-led and international than its American counterpart. It is in Europe that the greatest variety of MBAs has evolved. The following 6 essential features underlie any successful MBA program : Analytic FoundationIt is critically important for every manager to be an effective decision maker. In the MBA program, emphasis is placed on learning how to apply a variety of quantitative tools - including quantitative methods, economic analysis and computer models - to the decision making process. Management DisciplinesThese subject areas expose students to fundamental activities of an organization - finance, marketing, accounting, information and production. They provide the particular contexts in which managerial decision-making takes place InternationalismThe stress on internationalism should be a pervasive issue in all MBA courses. When corporations increasingly compete around the world, intellectual mobility across cultures and national boundaries becomes crucial. The global perspective is thus an excellent jumping off point to start integrating the curriculum. IntegrationIntegration: it means cross-functionality or interdisciplinary. That's the ability to combine disparate skills to solve problems. Students must understand the relationships among an organization's various functions, and between the organization and its environment. While an organization can be conceived abstractly as a collection of discrete functional components, in actuality, it is a single, holistic entity. This is the perspective students must adopt if they are to rise to the top levels of management Mixing Academia with the "Real World"Action-learning is an excellent way of linking theory with practice and to avoid "paralysis from analysis". This "medical school" approach requires students to gain considerable practical experience at work. Such "learning by doing" is also one of the best ways to reach cross-functionality (real business problems rarely appear in tidy packages labeled "finance" or "marketing"). Action learning is far superior to the "static classroom approach". It is therefore no surprise that projects which take place in the field are well received by companies, students and often faculty alike. Team work and "soft" skillsMuch of the benefit from a business school course comes from the exposure of the students to a concentrated group of highly intelligent people from a variety of backgrounds. Business-schools are trying to replicate the business world, where working effectively on teams is probably the most crucial factor. Primarily, the result is a continuing intellectual stimulus, forcing the individual to present arguments cogently and concisely, and to subject these to criticism by fellow students confronting the group to be able to negotiate. (Interdependence in the global economy starts with one's co-workers.) While managers should have responsibility for their own achievements on their own projects, the learning process is a social one: managers learn best with and from each other. Leadership in groups can shift, self-appointed bosses are rejected. The ability to communicate is thus of vital importance, and so is the ability to influence with integrity (ethics). 4. Alternatives to the full-time residential MBA Not everyone is suited to the MBA deal. The investment necessary for an MBA, both in terms of time and money, is easily misplaced. More often, postgraduate needs are better served by education in either a course more specific to a particular function, or in a more academic discipline such as econometrics or economic forecasting. The distance learning business qualification is rightly acknowledged to be one of the most difficult to secure. The stock criticism will remain that sitting at home reading textbooks and catching the latest training video pale beside the resources, both human and technical, that a full-time course can offer. Most distance learning institutions are aware that with minimal attendance underpinning their teaching methods they can never reach the same quality of graduates as the full-time program. What they can assure is that the fruits of the learning will be more immediately enjoyed (just in time). More business schools are now learning a valuable lesson from the undeniable popularity of distance learning. The advantages of earning an MBA on a credit basis from a mixture of modular residential courses, executive management training and distance learning techniques are being carefully researched by the International Education Commission. 5. Accreditation With so many MBA programs out there, one may be wondering who is watching over this mass of schools. There are many organizations which have as their primary function the evaluation - and, hence, accreditation - of educational institutions. For business schools in particular, the International Education Commission is carefully monitoring accrediting bodies throughout the world. The bodies herewith are fully approved by the I.E.C : American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), Association of Indian Management Schools (AIMS), Association des Institutions de Formation en Management d'Afrique (AIMAF), Association of Management Development Institutions in South Asia (AMDISA), International Education Commission - Europe (I.E.C-E), Canadian Consortium of Management Schools (CCMS), Caribbean Management Development Association (CMDA), Consejo Latinoamericano de Escuelas de Administracion (CLADEA), Russian International Association 6. Ranking The MBA is not simply an education, it is also a credential. Representing a credential, the utility of the MBA can be defined purely in terms of its market value. Brand names matter. An MBA from a top school is becoming more and more a crucial "legitimation" within the business community. A top MBA is a signaling device. It tells the marketplace that a student was good enough to get in. It invites the recognition of and facilitates entry into many kinds of organizations which might otherwise be oblivious to an individual's talent. Elite programs are able to protect and ensure this great demand for their graduates by wisely and purposely limiting the size of their entering classes. Most early rankings relied primarily on business school deans, faculty members or top executives to rate the different institutions - even though those professionals only had a vague knowledge of most of the programs. This very crude methodology was pointless at best and grossly misleading at worst. Soon appeared the credential approach to ranking. Such an approach means that you consider what gets in or what comes out, quantitatively, of an MBA program; you do not consider the educational experience itself. The most serious and impressive ranking of this type is undoubtedly the U.S. News World Report yearly survey. Here is how U.S. News devised these rankings : overall rank is based upon 4 indicators of "academic" quality.
Of course, the U.S. News selection is open to criticism (can't schools lie when they give the numbers, and how do U.S. News choose or weigh indicators anyway ??). But those rankings, if you know exactly what they mean, are indeed a giant step forward and an excellent introduction to a more advanced form of assessment. If business schools want their products (MBA degrees) to succeed in the market place, they must listen to their customers (students and their future employers) and understand their needs. The next step in the reengineering process is therefore the installation of continuous feed-back mechanisms. Schools must determine what tools and skills students bring to class, what they take from it, and what for. By building these feedback mechanisms into the curriculum, you reinforce the notion that change is not only inevitable, but desirable. At most places, however, the barriers to change are formidable. Business schools are often as badly organized as the worst corporations, with tenured faculties that refuse to do things differently. This is particularly true in America : there is a lot of questioning about whether the sort of business-as-usual, research-oriented, academic, disciplined-based paradigm is really working. This is not so much a problem in Europe : the best European schools have long had close ties with business. Lacking the huge endowments of many American institutions, the Europeans were forced to put greater emphasis on executive education. Until Business Week began to rate business schools on customer satisfaction in 1988, many rankings had been based largely on the reputation of the schools' professors and their published work in academic journals. Business Week adopted a strikingly new and efficient approach, surveying both the graduates of top schools and the corporate recruiters who hire them to determine the best business schools. In effect, the survey measures how well the schools are serving their two markets : students and their ultimate employers. The graduate poll is randomly mailed to more than 5000 MBAs from about 40 of the most prominent schools. MBA graduates are asked to assess such characteristics as the quality of the teaching, curriculum, environment, and placement offices at their schools. The poll of corporate recruiters is mailed to about 400 companies that recruit these graduates off the campuses of the best schools. Again, it is very easy to criticize the methodology used to obtain and crunch the numbers. But if you consider Business Week's rankings with US News', you are starting to get a very clear picture of what the best programs are. Yet, however interesting those rankings may be, they are indeed missing the point : the global assessment of graduate business school quality. Ranking is the ultimate assessment, and as such, it should be left to professionals. 7. Ultimate Criteria in Higher Business Education, the I.E.C Point of View While a successful MBA program must reflect what partner companies believe their needs are, ultimately, it must aim to achieve its own role as an educational institution. Being reactive is not enough, innovations must also be proactive. Innovations must be proactive because they must reflect the business school's considered view of changes in international business. Business schools should be able to anticipate and find answers to the questions which both companies and managers put to them. New technology and the increasing rate of globalization are continually overturning management realities. In this connection, research is absolutely vital to the operation of a modern business school or program. How else can an institution adapt to the issues confronting the business world? The more research, the greater the credibility. The purpose of research is twofold : 1- to anticipate or acknowledge changes - to develop new curricula, teaching methods and institutional goals accordingly This is why research should be carried out by the faculty and the institution itself. The nature of the institutional research function depends on the size and complexity of the business school and may vary from a part-time operation to an office staffed by several persons. All institutions, however, must engage in continuous study, analysis and appraisal of their purposes, policies, teaching methods and programs. Institutions should assign administrative responsibility for carrying out institutional research. Institutional research should be allocated adequate resources, and those responsible for it should be given access to all relevant information. Institutions must prove that they make adequate use of their institutional research. Finally, institutions must evaluate regularly their institutional research function. The winners in tomorrow's volatile world-and indeed, already in today's world-will be the innovators: the creative people and organizations that continuously learn from the world around them, and use this knowledge to come up with new products and business processes quickly and efficiently. A company's most important sustainable competitive advantage may be its ability to learn faster than its competitors. A key objective of any MBA program is to show managers how to learn. What all this means is that, as the demands on management become increasingly dynamic and interdisciplinary, the MBA is the first step in a life of continuous learning. Thus, effective education is not about teaching any more, it is about providing effective and significant learning opportunities and about encouraging the motivation to learn. At all levels educational institutions need to be more learning facilitators than purveyors of "right" answers. MBA programs should aim to stimulate individual initiative, responsibility and involvement on the part of the participants. Participants should be helped to achieve their own personal goals on the program as well as those set by the school. It is particularly important to avoid the development of a dependency culture, where students depend on faculty for learning through an essentially passive process. Learner-centered learning is, in no way, an abdication of educational responsibility. Learning must be active and must be driven by the participants' own need for development. If organizations and individuals must adopt a continuous learning philosophy, they do require new supporting and stimulating education infrastructures. At the student level this implies the need to "know thyself better", to continually challenge and adjust mental models through action and critical reflection processes. From a training perspective, the key to putting this philosophy into practice is to understand the interrelationships between course content and delivery methods and the impact they have on how we learn, so that the most effective approach is used for each learning experience. The way material is taught is just as important as the material itself. Administrators ought to have free hand in employing whatever teaching methods they consider most appropriate to a given subject. Too often business schools rely almost solely on lecturing and case work, and managers on programs have to learn by rote. This is one of the most inefficient learning technique. At risk of sounding trite, there is no substitute for experience. One of the best ways of teaching people how to manage is to let them do it themselves; and managing change is at the very core of what management is about. Does it all mean that business schools' students will eventually become entrepreneurs, starting with their own education? Well, yes. We shall rather speak here of "intrapreneurship" - an approach to the student/manager's role as involving an entrepreneurial style of activity within a wider organization. Business schools' administrators must therefore stop being "zoo keepers" and become "safari park rangers" if they are to prepare tomorrow's top executives. Entrepreneurs by definition are autonomous, and selectively demand transparent leadership. They unite in hope, and only trust leaders whose values exemplify those same standards that they have set for themselves and to which they can truly and passionately own. The quality of a leader is quickly known among the followers and this requires a very tall order of character and strength among administrators. In the open flexible business school, nothing is hidden and there is nowhere to hide. Visible results speak louder than words. There is no longer any doubt that management education has to adapt if it is to survive and retain its usefulness. Direction-givers at business schools must be charismatic and reach a very high level of strategic thinking : strategic intent. Strategic intent describes a process of coping with turbulence through a direct, intuitive understanding, emanating from the top of the school and guiding its efforts. A turbulent environment cannot be tamed by rational analysis alone so that conventional strategic planning and institutional research are deemed to be of little use. Yet, it does not follow that a business school's adaptive response must be left to a random distribution of lone faculty members and students acting opportunistically and often in isolation. Strategic intent relies on intuitively formed patterns or gestalt - some would call it a vision - to give it unity and coherence. Strategic intent yields a simple yet robust orientation, intuitively accessible to all the school's actors, an orientation which, on account of its clarity and necessity, can be pursued with some consistency over the long term in spite of the presence of turbulence. Finally, when turbulence becomes chaos, values come before visions. Navigating the unknown requires an internal compass of values, not a map. The rules are few. When major environmental changes happen continuously and unpredictably, the fastest response time comes once internal values govern and guide everyone's behavior. This simply means doing the right things at the right time, for the right reasons. The International Education Commission is not so much seeking an ideal model as an ideal process. What business schools truly value and reward in day to day action is therefore the ultimate and continuous live issue in Higher Business Education. |