Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/62913
journals. One of the obstacles to a school becoming truly interna- tional, to be very cynical, is that professors teach what they know, and the curricula often haven't changed in 50 years. The U.S. invented business schools about 100 years ago, and anything that's been around that long becomes institutionalized. There's something to be said for starting out with a blank slate. Take Japan and Germany after World War II—they had to recon- struct themselves from scratch, and they became much more modern than England and America. I don't think there's any school of quality in Africa, outside of South Africa, that is more than ten or 15 years old. So these schools are embryonic, and like all embryos, they have much more freedom to innovate. It's much harder to do that if you have 700 professors who have been at the school for 30 years. But that's changing now. I see more professors writing cases on business in emerging nations. And those cases are fascinating. What do you think it will take to make Western schools more interested in getting involved in emerging economies? One of my pet ideas is that we should change how the media rank- ings are structured and what they measure. If a student graduates from business school and goes to work for the Red Cross or Oxfam, his salary is going to be miserable compared to what he could make on Wall Street. And that will hurt the school's rating, because some rankings only measure salaries. I think if the rankings could be 34 May/June 2012 BizEd Pfeffermann, at far right, meets with students from IMD who won second place in GBSN's first MBA Challenge. relaxed, more schools might be comfortable teaching nontraditional business courses. Of course, some schools, such as MIT Sloan and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, are doing a lot in the developing world already. Most of these efforts are quite costly, so one issue is to find models that are more affordable, such as the one used by the Thunderbird School of Global Management. In the end, it comes down to individuals. If the deans are commit- ted to getting their schools involved in emerging markets, I think it will happen. I think it's the deans and the students who are doing the pushing in this direction, and the professors are the ones who are being pushed. In fact, the students might be a powerful factor! We frequently hear that students are the ones who lobby for schools to offer more programs in areas like sustainability, corporate social responsibility, and social enterprise. Yes! Many young people will pick a business school because it offers the opportunity to do worthwhile work in a developing country. My colleague Nora Brown orga- nized a video contest called "Can an MBA Change the World?" We invited students to send us five-min- ute videos showing work they had done in developing countries. What came in was absolutely fantastic— the enthusiasm and intelligence these students showed was beyond belief. As a prize, the leader of the team that made the winning film was invited to our conference in Mexico. The winner was from the Haas School at the University of California in Berkeley—but stu- dents from three other schools also secured their own funding to come to Mexico and show their videos. They were all wonderful. Once Western business schools decide to enter emerging markets, what key challenges do they face? What factors might trip them up if they're not prepared in advance? They have the choice of entering the market on their own or part- nering with local institutions, but there are obstacles in either case. When schools go in on their own, sometimes the local universities feel like they're being invaded, so there can be some hostility. But if a Western school partners with a local institution, there can be no assurance that each partner will perform adequately. There are also cultural issues that sometimes