Bing Xiang, a professor who is quite at home with Western and Eastern educational philosophies, is determined to provide a world class business education to China's highly promising entrepreneurs
One of the more intriguing short films shown in the Sundance Film Festival early this year was a film called Ha Ha Ha America. A hysterical but totally mesmerizing work, it highlighted the exasperation of the filmmaker on how the US has been losing its competitive edge against China simply because the former has become too focussed on the war on terror, rather than on confronting China's rise as a global economic power.
It would not come as a surprise if Bing Xiang were to suddenly make an appearance on screen and sing a short ditty on China's new aspiration to produce brassy business road warriors as smart as those produced by MBA powerhouses in the US such as Yale, MIT or Harvard.
Xiang is not your typical school administrator. More than three years ago, he was approached by one of Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing's foundations to help set up a business graduate school in China. Xiang left his teaching post at the Beijing University and set up Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, where he is now dean and accounting professor.
He is articulate and quite at home with Western and Eastern educational philosophies. He makes no bones about his dream of achieving a world-class business education for the thousands of China's highly promising entrepreneurs.
While the institution does not have an Alibaba treasure cave of financial resources, there is no doubt about the scale of its ambition. "Mr Li wants us to become the best business school in the region in ten years' time," says Xiang. At the rate it has been attracting leading educators around the world to its campuses in Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai, it is not entirely impossible that the school will, indeed, become an important centre for training China's future tycoons and CEOs.
Xiang admits it is a monumental task, and it would require marshalling a large amount of resources before his indigenous centre of learning can match the educational power houses of Wharton, Stanford and Chicago Business School. To many, however, Li's keen interest in the project gives it an advantage.
The school realizes it needs to build a credible faculty and that's exactly what it has done in the past three years. The school is confident it can provide a nurturing and highly innovative education relevant to companies in emerging markets such as China.
"What this would require from us personally is to expend considerable effort to innovate, both strategically and tactically," says Xiang.
China, he says, has to develop its own system of education for business executives since many of the well-established US institutions are well known for a blinkered and incomplete view of the realities in less-developed or emerging markets such as China. "The western management paradigm is either too-US or Europe-centric, which limits their understanding of the Asian market."
Xiang says that compared with the US, China is still an immature and underdeveloped market, where the key players are very different from those found in more developed economies. The major features of China's business environment are the state-owned companies and the independent private entrepreneurs. While multinational operations have been studied extensively, these entities contribute only about 25% of China's GDP. "This leaves three-quarters of the economy not well understood enough," he says.
Xiang believes that a business school must place particular emphasis on its humanities course. By focussing on providing a well-rounded education, executives could gain a better understanding of the ethical issues involved in any business.
"An executive with a strong appreciation of humanities is likely to be more responsible and would have a better sense of what is right and proper," says Xiang. This sort of orientation, he points out, is particularly well established among European schools, but Xiang says the school is not intending on copying that model.
"The most important thing is to develop a global vision that is simply neither Chinese nor Western but one that is whole and complete."
The school has formed a committee made up of experts in various cultural discipline, including Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Greek and Roman. "We need to have a world class facility and this is an area we need to build," says Xiang. The humanities committee is chaired by Professor Tu Weiming, a well-known Confucian scholar.
Corporate governance
Xiang says he wants to develop a school that is highly flexible and modern in its outlook, and driven by corporate governance. He says that even in a fairly de- mocratic faculty environment where all members have an equal footing on strategic issues affecting a school, good faculty corporate governance may be difficult to achieve if in the first place the institution has nothing but a mediocre faculty, which is only concerned about their future.
"The well-entrenched faculty would often resist change and would not want other people to get involved or join the team, thus stifling creativity and freedom of discussion," he explains. Good faculty corporate governance, he adds, can only work through a combination of factors, including open-mindedness and high competence.
Despite the support from Li and the Chinese government, the institution still needs a lot more to attain its various goals. Xiang says the biggest weakness is the lack of endowment funds to make it an even bigger faculty. He points out that in some US business schools, faculty endowments are as high as US$1.5 billion, while a number of institutions have at least a few hundred million.
"In the region, that does not happen and as of today all the financial needs of the institution are taken cared of by Li."
This is why, Xiang admits, the institution still has some difficulty attracting high-calibre people to work in the school "since most academics view endowments as a form of financial security". Add also the fact that the school still has to attain the branding and global recognition that its better-established rivals have already achieved.
In its drive to achieve recognition, the faculty's MBA programme has enrolled top applicants from Korea, Japan, France and other countries. Some of the students have obtained degrees from highly reputed universities, including Peking University, Tsinghua, Shanghai Jiaotong, Fudan, Xi'an Jiaotong, Nanyang Technological University, Michigan State University and the National University of Singapore.
Meanwhile, the school has teamed-up with other international B schools in its Executive Development Programme (EDP). Its China CEO Programme, which was launched in collaboration with Wharton and INSEAD, has just completed the first two modules in Hong Kong and Philadelphia.
Xiang says the outlook is good and the school is looking to develop links with other established institutions in Japan (Waseda University), Korea (Seoul National University) and Hong Kong.
Bing Xiang, a professor who is quite at home with Western and Eastern educational philosophies, is determined to provide a world class business education to China's highly promising entrepreneurs
