Walk into an MBA classroom and you will encounter the boundary-less, globalised reality of 21st-century business as never before. At Spain's IE Business School a typical class on its International MBA programme has students with an average age of 29. Around a third are women. Many have backgrounds in economics, business and engineering. But the most stunning detail is that a typical class has 30 nationalities among the 50 or so students.
And, perhaps even more astonishingly, it works. There is a genuine feeling of global camaraderie, a sense of a unique global network being created.
The Masters in Business Administration (MBA) may have been an American invention, but there are more people in Europe considering taking the qualification than ever before and business schools are springing up throughout the new economic powerhouses of India and China. For example, the China Europe International Business School has a campus in Beijing as well as Shanghai. Most intriguingly, it also has a campus in Accra, Ghana, from which 40 students have recently graduated from its Executive MBA programme. The MBA qualification and the experience are now global as never before. But how will the MBA change in the years to come? A number of issues will shape the MBA and business school of the future.
Totally global
In the classroom this means that content is expected to be truly global rather than a steady stream of Anglo-Saxon corporate case studies. One of the changes to the invigorated MBA programme at the Open University Business School was to internationalise content. The race is on to uncover the best examples of inspiring business practice from China and elsewhere.
More broadly, b-schools are wrestling with the challenges of running their operations on different continents. A growing number have campuses throughout the world. Chicago Booth, for example, has its home campus in Chicago as well as campuses in London and Singapore. Indeed, it is the first and only American business school with permanent campuses on three continents. Its European campus in London is situated right in the heart of the city's financial centre — across the road from Guildhall and down a block from the Bank of England. It is the home for Booth's European Executive MBA.
The smarter classroom
B-school students are not only drawn from across the world, they are also technologically savvy. One American study looked at whether higher education students want to consume hard copy or eBooks. The majority still wanted their hard copy in textbooks, but the one group that didn't was MBA students. They expect high-tech classrooms rather than traditional chalk and talk, and want to consume their knowledge through a variety of channels and devices, at a time which works for them. Content for the Open University Business School MBA, for example, is available for eBook readers as well as MP3 files and can even be a talking book.
High-tech upstarts
Technology cuts both ways. Business schools also have to master technology because they face growing competition from imaginative
and entrepreneurial tech companies. Among them is an alliance between Skill-Pill and the media giant, Pearson. In June they launched the Mobile MBA, which delivers 112 key skills via animated videos which can be purchased and downloaded through the Mobile MBA 'app' directly to your smart phone or tablet.
Now pitting its competitive wiles against established business schools is the Jack Welch Management Institute. Inspired by and named after the celebrated former CEO of General Electric, the Institute aims to offer "the most leadership-focused business education in the online world, teaching immediately applicable principles and practices based on the management canon of Jack Welch and other renowned business leaders."
Always learning
Newly minted graduates leave campus with the best business tools and techniques. But today's state-of-the-art is tomorrow's old news.
In response, some leading American business schools offer free updates to MBA graduates. The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania is to offer free executive education — short non-degree courses — to its MBA alumni. With a five-day leadership course at Wharton costing around $12,000 (more than £7,000), the offer could be very appealing. The Haas School of Business at UC-Berkeley has made a similar pledge to offer free top-up courses for MBA graduates.
European schools are also embracing lifetime learning. ESCP Europe, which has five campuses in London, Paris, Madrid, Turin and Berlin, invites all EMBA alumni to take up to two 12-hour electives from the latest EMBA curriculum every year for free.
MBAs go soft
Research by the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) looked at the knowledge, skills and abilities employers sought in MBA graduates. At the top of the list were communication skills followed by strategic skills, a proven ability to perform and core business knowledge. While the hard side of business — finance, accounting, analytics and so on — is covered in depth on all MBA programmes, the human skills have tended to be neglected. For business schools to meet the needs of recruiters in the marketplace, this will have to change. Expect an increasing number of schools to realign their programmes with a much greater focus on the soft side of business than ever before.
This is already happening. A revamp of the Wharton MBA, the first in 17 years, will be partially introduced in 2011, with full implementation in 2012. Innovations include a greater focus on analytics — the use of mathematical techniques to make better business decisions; more emphasis on oral and written communication; a more integrated approach to ethics and legal responsibilities in business; and new methods of leadership development emphasising self-analysis.
Research gets real
There is a feeling in the b-school world that academic research has become a little too distanced from reality, laden with regression analysis rather than insights. This may well change.
"The distinction between academic and applied research is a false one," says Santiago Iniguez, dean of IE Business School in Madrid and author of a new book, The Learning Curve. "There are only two types of research — good research that is applicable to reality, and bad research, which has no value to business. The best business schools produce the former and their faculty transfers this to students through the learning process."
For most schools, such changes are more a matter of fine tuning than radically overhauling. There is no sign that the MBA bandwagon will grind to a halt any time soon. The latest survey of business school alumni from the Graduate Management Admission Council, the organisation that administers the GMAT — the MBA entrance exam — shows that the median starting salary for 2010 graduates of MBA and other graduate management education programmes was US$78,820 (£48,527), up from US$75,000 (£46,176) for alumni who graduated in 2009.
Another report, from the QS World MBA Tour (see box below), a London-based company that organises information and recruitment fairs for business school applicants, is also upbeat. It predicts that hiring in the finance and consulting sector should return to pre-recession levels beginning in 2012. For business schools it is another in a long line of new beginnings.
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