Asian Firms Tap Western Business Schools

“To sustain the high rate of growth in the emerging markets, there is a sense they need to develop world-class capabilities,” said Harbir Singh, professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. “That is really the core reason that people are upgrading their skills and making sure they are globally competitive.”

For Bin Yu, chief financial officer of Tudou, a leading online video distributor in China, the move to get more master’s degrees in business, and executive M.B.A.’s for those already in the field, is obvious.

“You have seen the trend of going for M.B.A. and E.M.B.A. starting to pick up in the past 10 years, especially in the past five years, along with the evolution of Chinese economic system as it gets exposed to the outside world,” she said. Ms. Yu signed up for the executive M.B.A. program at Insead, based in France, last spring. The one-week-per-month class modules took her to the school’s campuses in Singapore, Abu Dhabi and Fontainebleau in France as well as to Tsinghua University in Beijing, with which Insead has a relationship.

“The classmates share all their real-life experiences and management problems or issues with the class,” she said. “It is real time and real life examples we can learn from each other.”

Business schools are not always forthcoming with precise enrollment data, but a number of schools acknowledge that they have seen substantial growth in recent years. Martin Hackett, managing director of open enrollment programs at Wharton, said that the trend was clear and that the school’s open enrollment program this year attracted 50 percent more participants from India than last year. “We are seeing more interest from companies in China and have plans to offer some open enrollment programs in China in 2013,” he said.

Jorge Choy, the regional director of executive education in Asia at Insead, said that Insead did not provide exact numbers but added, “The share of Asian participants has increased significantly over the years, and this trend is expected to continue.”

To understand the momentum for executive learning among businesspeople in the growing economies, it is useful to think of the explosion of personnel and the need to manage them, said Krishna G. Palepu, senior associate dean for international development at Harvard Business School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Companies that lead in a fast-growing sector might be growing at five to six times the speed of the general economy, he said. To keep pace with that growth, they might have to hire even faster.

“Real growth in employee base is more than the company growth rate because you are losing 10 percent to 15 percent of the people if you are a leader, because people always look to you and hire from you.”

The most constraining aspect of growth is thus the lack of depth in leadership in companies in China and India, Mr. Palepu continued. “That kind of growth is not just kept up by innate leadership capacity that is available in the company or in the economy,” he said. “There aren’t enough business schools of high quality to train people fast enough to feed this machine.”

That sharp growth often thrusts underqualified people, trained only as software engineers, for example, into a position of leadership just a few years after joining. “You are immediately in a position to have to manage a large group of people,” he said. “But you don’t have the general management skills, strategic thinking, financial management, communication and marketing skills.”