This year marks the 10th anniversary of the joint-degree executive MBA partnership between the Kellogg School of Management and the Leon Recanati Graduate School of Business Administration, the foremost business school in Israel. We are proud to be part of the Kellogg global network and, moreover, we are proud of the tremendous effect that the Kellogg-Recanati Program has had both on our school and overall in the Israeli economy.

By being positioned as the elite EMBA offering in Israel, the program has attracted an incredible student body of mid-level managers positioned for senior leadership roles at the forefront of Israeli business. Recanati is the only business school in Israel to have been awarded the prestigious accreditation of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, the international organization that accredits the world's best business schools. The Kellogg-Recanati Program boasts a strong management faculty that draws upon the intellectual capital of both schools' esteemed faculty. As a result, our graduates — more than 16,000 of them from all areas of the Recanati School and some 400 alumni affiliated with the joint program with Kellogg  — have played a prominent role in transforming the Israeli economy.

Over the 10 years that the Kellogg Recanati Program has flourished, this relatively small group of alumni has created an effect beyond its numbers. As graduates of the only multinational MBA program offered in Israel, they are culturally comfortable in both their own culture and in the borderless culture of world business.  They have benefited from the Kellogg School's global perspective and have learned to combine this frame of reference with the technological leadership evident throughout the Israeli economy.  Their contacts with students and professors from other Kellogg joint-degree EMBA programs in Germany, Hong Kong and Canada have proven invaluable.

In addition, the Kellogg-Recanati alumni association is a powerful network of professionals, and one that is unique in Israel.  These alumni — who won the Kellogg School's prize for the best alumni association in the world in 2005 — have shown Israeli business schools how an enduring association of peers who have shared an outstanding leadership and management curriculum can provide each other with informal support long after their formal studies have concluded.  As befits an association of privileged managers, the Kellogg-Recanati graduates have been active in the larger community, organizing projects for the benefit of the poor and disadvantaged.

Kellogg-Recanati's effect on the Recanati School has also been remarkable. The program has improved our teaching holistically, throughout our MBA and our undergraduate programs.  Our professors know that only the best teachers are incorporated into the program.  Indeed, teaching within the program is a mark of pride for all Recanati faculty privileged to be associated with the joint-degree curriculum.