The ability to deal with people from different cultures is a huge advantage for someone like myself who has senior management
Posted in General on 05. Oct, 2010
The ability to deal with people from different cultures is a huge advantage for someone like myself who has senior management aspirations.CASE STUDY – ALISTAIR KIRKWOODAlistair Kirkwood (39) has always been passionate about American football. Time and time again, I’ve found it’s wrong to assume that people from different cultures will think and act the same.Apart from giving me a wide group of friends throughout the world, the MBA has enabled my career to progress further and more rapidly. Having spent my MBA year interacting with people from many cultures, the recruitment process became much easier. The fact that there were only 40 people in my class meant I was able to get to know my fellow students really well. After graduating, I joined Unisys with responsibility for setting up sales teams in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. The teaching staff were from the United States and Europe, exposing us to many different business perspectives.Paris is a wonderful place to spend a year.
Out of a class of 40 students, we were 22 different nationalities with a wide mixture of experience, culture and backgrounds. Many schools I considered pay lip service to offering this broader business view This was not the case at EAP. He studied for a full-time MBA in Paris at EAP (now ESCP-EAP) business school.”I was looking for an MBA that had a genuinely international outlook. “How to put a cross-border sales team together, how to form alliances, how to find distributors for your products – these are the real questions that many more parochial MBA courses fail to address and which we include as an integral part of our genuinely pan-European approach to business education.”CASE STUDY – DAVID LEWISDavis Lewis (42) is a Business Development Director with consultants Ernst & Young in the UK. We have essentially the same teaching structure in place in each city and our staff from all four centres meet regularly as members of a unified faculty.”Reflecting the fact that companies of all sizes have to learn to deal with opportunities and problems that transcend national borders, Professor Halliburton believes that ESCP-EAP is bettered equipped than most schools to enable managers in different countries to work together in this challenging environment. These intensive sessions allow direct exposure to local markets and include company visits and lectures from prominent business people.
”It is easy to be cosmetically European,” says Professor Halliburton. “Our challenge has been to construct a well-integrated teaching programme running across national borders. This broad international exposure is also reflected in the school’s multinational body of 120 teaching staff.The cross-border operation means that full-time MBA students in Paris also have the opportunity to follow a week-long study programme in each of ESCP-EAP’s centres in Berlin and Madrid. The school also collaborates in a Global Executive MBA in partnership with the Krannert School of Management (Purdue USA), TIAS Business School in the Netherlands and Budapest University of Economic Sciences (Hungary).Students of the full-time MBA in Paris may enjoy immersing themselves in French culture but their horizons are further stretched by the fact that no single nationality predominates, and more than 20 countries are represented in each class. There are plans to recruit a separate intake of student in London, once the business school has transferred its British headquarters to the capital. The school operates from a network of campuses in four European cities: Paris, Madrid, Berlin and Oxford (soon to move to London).As the Director of the Oxford campus Chris Halliburton explains: “Being one school in four countries allows us to brand ESCP-EAP as the only genuinely transnational business school in Europe.” Formed in 1999 from the merger of two of France’s leading business schools, ESCP-EAP offers a range of Masters degrees in management and European business taught in several languages and involving lengthy periods of study in its different campuses.Based in central Paris, the school’s 12-month full-time MBA is taught in English, while a part-time Executive MBA is offered in Paris and Madrid.
ESCP-EAP European School of Management, can justifiably claim to have gone several steps further. If you are planning to approach a global player, the experience and the contacts gained in studying abroad for an MBA could well give you an edge over your competitors.’It’s easy to offer a cosmetically European teaching programme’ Business schools all over Europe are busily forging alliances with partner schools in other countries to meet the rising demand for MBA courses with an international dimension. Multinational companies are full of people who have studied and worked in more than one country. Is the investment likely to pay off in terms of increased salary prospects? Ask yourself also, whether an American MBA on your CV is going to impress your prospective employer significantly more than a qualification from a well-respected European school?’Whether you ultimately choose to study for an MBA in Europe, the States or elsewhere in the world, the chance to tap into international alumni networks is an invaluable tool when job-hunting in a worldwide marketplace. “Before thinking seriously about one of the major American schools though, check that you are being realistic about your abilities. This tends to last for two years rather than the average 12-15 months in Europe.