The mousetrap maxim holds for business schools, too: If you build a better MBA program, the world will beat a path to your door.

That’s exactly what’s happening at MBA programs in the United States and regionally, as worldwide factors apply increasing pressure on existing domestic programs to not only improve their programming, but their means of delivering it. In recent years, MBA programming in the Kansas City area has seen the adoption of more on-line instruction, part-time and accelerated-completion options, dual-degree instruction, and specialization of MBA emphasis, to name but a few.

Perhaps most wide-reaching changes, though, are prompted by global factors. Driven by economic gains in China and India, which account for nearly a third of the world’s population, those forces are relentlessly pressing against MBA programs in a country that once held a virtual monopoly on higher-end business education.

“If you look at the worldwide rankings of top universities, I can remember when I started teaching in business school, that the Top 20 schools were all American or British. That’s no longer the case,” said Roger Pick, a professor of business information systems who leads the MBA program at UMKC’s Henry W. Bloch School of Management.

As a result, business schools regionally and nationally are upgrading their programs, conducting reviews of overall strategies, student-recruitment efforts, faculty development, classroom resources and more.

“There is a tremendous worldwide demand for English-language business education,” Pick said. “People with Ph.D.s in all business areas, if you are willing to uproot yourself, there are huge opportunities, primarily in Asia and the Middle East, to teach American-style business programs in English.”

That international perspective is important, said Brad Kleindl, who started his duties this month as dean of the business school at Park University.

“What’s happening is that the MBA degree and curriculum have become fairly standardized around the world,” Kleindl said. “Ten years ago, it was rare to find an MBA program hosted at a European or Asian university; we’re now seeing those uniformly across the world today, with curricula very similar to what’s based in the U.S.”

Kleindl said that Park would be assessing its MBA programming strengths with that trend in mind.

Extended Reach

Baker University, with the largest block of MBA students in the immediate Kansas City area, has taken its MBA program delivery to extremes—literally. Through its distance-learning assets, it can deliver instruction not just across the globe, but in war zones. The university proudly touts the work of infantry Capt. Edward Ziembinski, an Overland Park native who picked up his bachelor’s degree from Baker in 2002. Working as a mentor with national police in Kandahar, he’s been able to overcome intermittent e-mail access to keep pace with his MBA coursework.

Baker, through its School of Graduate and Professional Studies, is enjoying record enrollment, but nonetheless typifies what’s happening with many MBA-track programs. Dan Falvey, who chairs that school, said officials there were rolling out upgrades in direct response to comments solicited in an extensive program review.

“We’ve identified five threads that we’re going to build our revised outcomes around,” he said. They focus on business ethics, data analysis, strategic planning, innovation and communication skills.

It was interesting, he noted, how business programs had been urged in years past to orient more toward instruction in quantitative skills and specialized fields, but that the pendulum was now swinging back.

Recruiting Rush

Another tangible result of global interest in a U.S. education is that the face of the MBA student in Kansas City is quite literally changing. Pick said the Bloch school, in its second year under the leadership of Indonesian native Teng-Kee Tan, was expanding its recruiting reach into Asia to capitalize on the demand for a U.S. education.

“One thing that differentiates the U.S. from the rest of the world is that we have a tremendous amount of knowledge built into our economy,” Pick said. “That monopoly of knowledge, if you will, is not going to continue; it’s diffusing throughout the world. So in terms of our own MBA program, we’re starting to recruit students to come here from China.”

In that sense, MBA programs themselves are taking on an economic-development role all their own, and the impact on Missouri, he said, could be huge. “Bartle Hall was built to bring people to Kansas City to spend money for a week,” he said. “We’re going to have them come here and spend a year or two.”

At the Bloch school, other changes in program structure include a new emphasis on building contact networks and forming collaborative relationships, skills that successful executives must own.

In business settings, “there is more collaboration within organizations, and with outsourcing of all business functions today,” Pick said. As a consequence, he said, “more firms choosing to focus on core competencies and relying on other firms to provide other services.”

That makes it imperative for executives to be able to function not only across their own organizations, but with others, through effective networking and relationship-building. “We think the MBA program is one way of extending your network.”

The Bloch school’s own collaborative efforts have included surveys of larger employers in the region, seeking their leadership’s thoughts on skills that the program ought to reinforce. The results, in some cases, were surprising, particularly with skills that go beyond textbook instruction in management, marketing or finance.

“They were looking for things and experiences that transcend the classroom, and we’re working on how to operationalize that notion,” Pick said. That can include something as basic as basics of effective e-mail communication, a subject that might not have the depth to justify a full semester course, but one that could take a few days to refine skills in delivering bad news, for example, or making effective presentations that aren’t face-to-face.

Another area driving MBA instruction today, Kleindl said, was the emphasis on the ability to use technology to acquire information needed for effective decision-making. One of the best recent examples of that in his own experience was in Austria, in a management course involving 34 students from around the world.

“They were able to pull out their laptops, go to a wireless network and find information they needed to resolve a problem,” Kleindl said. “In essence, it’s the same type of technological base, but our students also have to be able to do the same thing—operate with global mindset, and use technology to find the information to make decisions with a global perspective in mind.”

Which takes us back to the global economy.

“When I earned my MBA, in 1982, that was about the end of the era when one could make decisions from a U.S. perspective alone,” Kleindl said. “It’s rare today to find a company doesn’t experience some kind of international impact on their business. They don’t have to be an importer/exporter.

“An MBA is supposed to get people to think strategically,” he said, “and you have to today, because international events will come back and impact your business.”

Return to Ingram's January 2011