Source from NYTimes

TOKYO — Fueled by an appetite for growth, corporations in China, India and other markets in Asia are sending an army of managers and executives to Western business schools to groom future leaders. U.S. and European business schools, meanwhile, are cashing in on the growing roster of clients from cash-rich companies and strengthening ties with the markets and people driving the world economy.

“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 2011,” 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.”

Programs intended for working executives are designed to be flexible for this very reason: such executives cannot take much time out for study overseas. Some executive programs consist of short modules — each lasting one week, for instance — that take place over a course of six months to a year, while others combine in-class learning with online studies away from campus. Yet others accommodate busy executives with classes over just a few days. That means executives fly in, attend classes packed with sessions on leadership, innovation and strategy for as little as two days, and leave.

“We have people coming to your programs who say, ‘This works for me,”’ said Mr. Hackett of Wharton.

Local business schools in countries like India and China are springing up in response to these fast-growing learning needs, but the quality, the breadth and the diversity often do not match the European and U.S. equivalents, participants say.

Ravikumar Panga, a sales executive at Ashok Leyland, a leading commercial vehicle manufacturer based in the state of Tamil Nadu, India, had completed an M.B.A. in India earlier in his career and has had extensive domestic sales experience ever since. But he was transitioning from a domestic sales job to a higher managerial position in Europe where his employer was making new, bigger acquisitions and was set to send Indian executives to run the units in Europe.

“To that extent I had a conversation with management, and I said I am not getting that international exposure, how to deal with European colleagues and American colleagues,” he said. “I felt fine on the management techniques. But international exposure, less.” So, he is now participating in Harvard Business School’s management development program, composed of short-duration modules that amount to seven weeks of classes in total.

“At an Indian business school, in a typical class of 100, 75 would be Indian students,” he said. “Then, the rest will be mostly from Singapore, Malaysia and a few from Dubai, and never from Europe, the U.S. and Australia.”

At Harvard Business School, Mr. Panga enjoys mixing with students from 57 countries, including seven who stay with him temporarily in his living quarters on campus: two Americans, as well as students from Poland, France, Japan, China and South Africa.

The group meets, disbands and reunites several times during the program, and Mr. Panga says he already misses being away from his so-called “living group.”

“I don’t miss them in an emotional way, but in an intellectual sense, having a rigorous, fruitful discussion with classmates,” he said.

Executive participants interested in venturing into the more developed economies have much to absorb in the manners of business of the developed world, school officials say, especially for those from China.

“It is a degree to which personal relationship drives business success and business opportunities there. Sometimes they may over-rely on that rather than do strategic planning or approach new markets in a strategic way,” Mr. Choy said. “Their skills in those areas, strategic planning and thinking, may be less well-developed as a result.”

Western business schools, meanwhile, have much to gain from all this, and business-savvy participants see it. “Business schools worldwide also saw this new opportunity in China — more investment coming in and economic development taking place,” said Ms. Yu of Tudou. “It is a two-way thing, domestic industries had the urge to learn more about Western education, culture and everything, and the outside world realized there is a big market in China.”

And opportunities for these schools only look set to grow. Western business schools, supported by powerful marketing staff members who fly across the globe, pitching as well as coordinating programs with their emerging market clients, find the looming potential alluring.

Sandhya Karpe, managing director of custom programs at Wharton, speaking from her hotel in Beijing, said that her clients were discerning and that internal processes to approve an engagement were often long and cumbersome. But she said that five years ago, the two leading markets, China and India, were much more price sensitive than now. “They have now evolved to a place where companies are marking large sums of money to support these initiatives,” she said. “They understand they need to engage with global schools and know that it clearly comes with a different price point.”