MBA moving east

DANIEL McCABE | One mark of a good businessman  and a good academic  is the ability to shift directions quickly in pursuit of a winning idea. Take management professor David Saunders, for instance. A few years ago, Saunders, the associate dean for his faculty's masters programs, traveled to East Asia on a scouting mission. He was looking for a country where McGill might offer its MBA program. He considered Korea, Hong Kong  just about every place except Japan. "I thought Japan was just too expensive," recalls Saunders. It would be costly to set up shop in Japan and the price McGill would have to charge for its program as a result would be high  maybe too high to interest any students. Hong Kong was scratched off the list after a visit there. "There were already 50 foreign universities offering programs and the University of Western Ontario's business school was just setting up shop. That made my decision easy  why on earth would we go in knowing we had 50 competitors on day one?" Even with Hong Kong out of the running, Saunders still wasn't keen about Japan, but decided to meet with the Canadian embassy's education and cultural officer in Tokyo anyway. Her sales pitch about Japan captured his attention. "She said it would be a mistake to set something up that tried to appeal to a mass market in Japan  you can lose a lot of money very quickly going that route. But she also said that if we found the right niche market, we could do very well. People in Japan are willing to pay top dollar if they think you've got something important to offer them." And according to the embassy official, an MBA program offered by a top university with an international focus was certain to appeal to many Japanese. Saunders and Dean of Management Wallace Crowston decided to consider Japan more carefully. They came up with a plan  since many Japanese firms already send their employees overseas to pick up MBAs at American universities, why not offer them an MBA program of comparable quality at home? They would save big bucks, after all, if they didn't have to ship their staff across the ocean. Saunders and Crowston went to Japan and met with McGill alumni living in Tokyo to pick their brains about the plan. "They were resoundingly negative about the idea," recalls Saunders. "They explained that the programs aren't really what is important to these companies. They want to send their employees overseas for a cross-cultural experience. The program is almost an excuse." Back at the drawing board, Saunders and Crowston came up with plan B. There are plenty of expatriates from Canada, Britain, the U.S. and Australia working in Japan in embassies, multinational corporations or as English-language instructors. If these people want to pick up a degree in their off-hours in English, the pickings in Tokyo are pretty slim. A familiar "brand-name" like McGill would be very appealing. In addition, smaller Japanese firms without the resources to send staff abroad might be interested in an MBA program from a Western school with a solid reputation in international business. "We went back to our alumni and they said, 'Bang! Now you've got it!'" There are other factors that could work in favour of the McGill program. Recently, some influential opinion-makers in Japan  including the president of a leading university  have criticized the country's universities for failing to impart certain critical skills to their students. "The talk is about how Japanese universities aren't training their students to work effectively in teams, they're not using information technology, they're not able to sift through a large amount of information and get to what's really important. Those are exactly the types of things we do in our program." One of McGill's strengths, says Saunders, is its use of technology to help teach business courses. The plan is to allow students in Japan the same type of extensive access to online research materials enjoyed by the faculty's Montreal students. "The businesses there have been very impressed with our use of technology." The application deadline for the program is in February and Saunders says that over 5,000 people in Japan have already contacted McGill to find out more about it. Courses would be offered on weekends and on holidays. The program would consist of courses that are already a part of the McGill-based MBA program and several McGill management professors would be recruited to teach many of the courses in Japan. The 60-credit program will take two years to complete and can accommodate about 45 students at a time. "On the academic side, it's the same program that we offer here. Every course we offer in Japan is offered in Montreal, although the reverse isn't true." The focus in Japan is on courses dealing with international business. The courses will be offered in the downtown Tokyo campus of Sophia University, McGill's Japanese partner. "It's the most international school in Japan, an English-speaking institution with excellent library resources, and their president has been extremely supportive of the idea," says Saunders. The faculty is hoping that its Japanese program will be a money-maker, but its ultimate goal is more ambitious. "Our dream," says Saunders, "is to have a worldwide MBA program with courses offered in about four different countries. Montreal and Tokyo are part of that equation and we're looking very seriously at moving into India and the Middle East. We could offer different courses at different times during the year in the various countries and students could move around to get a truly international experience."