By: Ofra Shalev

December 1, 2005, The Marker (Israel)

Full article in Hebrew (PDF 562 K / 3 pages)

As he does every year, in December 2004, Professor Dipak Jain, Dean of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, went to teach a course at one of the universities in Thailand. This time he was accompanied by his wife and children, and they decided to take a short vacation on Phuket Island.

A short while after they arrived, Professor Jain felt the sofa, on which he was sitting in his hotel room, shaking. He turned on the television. The news bar on CNN reported a minor earthquake on one of the Indonesian islands. Not unduly concerned, he went out to breakfast with his family in the vicinity of the hotel. As they were approaching the hotel, they saw enormous waves coming from the direction of the beach, waves that reminded Jain of Niagara Falls. "People get annoyed when things don't go according to plan," he says during the course of an interview he gave while visiting Tel Aviv University, "but there is usually a good reason for it. Had we gone straight to the beach, we would have been hit by the Tsunami."

Jain is one of the leading scholars of marketing strategy in the world. He arrived in Israel, just a few days after BusinessWeek ranked the EMBA program that he heads as the best in the world, to participate in the graduation ceremony of the Kellogg-Recanati International Executive MBA program, conducted jointly by the Kellogg School and Tel Aviv University's Leon Recanati Graduate School of Business Administration. The EMBA programs are prestigious courses of study designed for executives with several years of managerial experience. Students are usually sent by well-established firms that can afford to pay the tuition fees, which are substantially higher than those of the regular MBA program. The Kellogg-Recanati program accepts managers with eight years of experience who can pay more than $40,000 in tuition.

The Kellogg School regularly appears among the top three in the annual rankings of EMBA programs. How do you do it, year after year?

"This is just an outside confirmation of our status. We are not aiming to be number one in BusinessWeek or the Financial Times. We are working to give the students the best possible experience and to the customers, the best possible students. We have an outreach program in which we talk to recruiters, academic colleagues and business partners around the world, because I believe that the most dangerous place to observe the world from is one's desk. You have to go outside. We listen to what everyone has to say and internalize it into the programs of studies. Listening to the voice of the market is a never-ending process."

(You can not accuse Jain of not practicing what he preaches. Before he became Dean, he taught in every one of the Kellogg School's joint programs around the world, and even served as marketing advisor to several giant corporations such as IBM, Motorola and Hyatt International.)

One of the key elements in the Kellogg School's vision is globalization. How does globalization find expression in its program of studies?

"Ten years ago we decided that the Kellogg presence has to be felt in the key markets around the world. My predecessor as Dean decided that academic partnerships with local universities were preferable to establishing Kellogg branches overseas. This was a strategic decision. The first place we set up such a partnership was with the Recanati School in Tel Aviv. Then came Germany, Hong Kong and Canada. We have a presence in the Middle East, Europe and Asia. The degrees we confer are joint degrees and our students are taught by faculty members from both schools. Not everyone has the opportunity to get to the USA, which is the center of action, so if the students can not come to you, you have to go to them."

Kellogg's next academic partnership will be in Miami. "We wanted a presence in Latin America too," says Jain, "and, contrary to what you might think, Miami is actually the capital of Latin America. That is where all the headquarters of the Latin and Central American corporations are located. Today, it is not enough to teach business administration students business strategy. You have to teach them something about the different geographic areas of the world. So, even though the programs of studies in our partnerships are more or less the same, each of them has a special addendum dealing with business administration in its particular area. So, in fact, a student from Chicago can come to Germany for a week and learn about the European Union, or to Hong Kong to learn how business in done in China."

How else do you incorporate China into the program of studies?

"Apart from the joint program in Hong Kong, we have a partial partnership with Beijing University, one of the top two universities in China. As most of the material is given in Chinese, instead of sending our lecturers there we bring the Chinese lecturers to Chicago and teach them how to teach. We call this 'train the trainer'. They go back to China and teach the students what they have learned from us. One of the lecturers in Hong Kong is an expert on China and he comes to Tel Aviv and all the other partnerships to give a course on the subject."

Business schools have been criticized lately for not properly preparing the students for the real workplace. What is your opinion?

"I do not think that is true. These are generalizations from isolated cases. It is important for us not only to prepare students for their first job, but to give them something for the long run. First of all, we teach them to turn unstructured problems into structured ones. Then we teach them the processes of solving a problem. The criticism may be due to the changing expectations of the market. Fifteen to twenty years ago, when people with MBAs went to work for a firm they were automatically perceived as having some added value, because there were not many of them. Most corporate employees had no formal education in management and the new MBAs brought in new thinking.

"Today, all corporate employees have an MBA and you can not impress them any more. So our students have to probe deeper. The world has changed. Expectations have changed, including the expectations of the customers. They demand more, because they have more options. I believe that one of the important changes is that the customers are more sophisticated and more knowledgeable. The world is more challenging - and will become even more so."

Another salient change is the type of firms that recruit MBA graduates. "Today," says Jain, "the biggest recruiters are the consulting firms, like McKinsey. After them come the investment banks, like Goldman and Morgan. Together, these two groups account for 40-45% of the recruitment. In third place are the corporations. The employees have also changed greatly in the area of marketing. Today, it is not only the traditional corporations like Kraft and Procter & Gamble that recruit marketing people but also technology corporations like Microsoft, Intel and Cisco. Incidentally, 30% of the MBA students at Kellogg are women."

Kellogg lecturers are promoted on the basis of their research and not their teaching ability. How can you ensure that students will have good lecturers?

"It is assumed that researchers cannot be good teachers. This is not a correct assumption. The best teachers are researchers. They bring their research to the classroom, so the material they convey to the students is up to date. Lecturers who do not conduct research, sooner or later feel outdated or that they have lost touch with the market. This is true even for teachers of arithmetics. Of course, the formulas do not change. The solution of the quadratic equation has not changed in recent years, but the methods of teaching arithmetics have changed. The pedagogical tools have changed."

To what extent do the students affect the learning?

"We do not see the students as students, but as partners. Our students have work experience and they bring something with them. So, what we hear from the students, the types of dilemmas and the questions they raise in class, affects the curriculum and the subjects of the lecturers' research. The curriculum is drawn up like this. We start off with a trial course and examine the students' response. It is a joint effort made by us and the students. At the same time, the students of course cannot dictate which courses are to be included in the curriculum. They have experience, but we have the ongoing contact with the business market and have a better understanding of what is needed."

"The nice thing about this profession is that we can move from one institution to another, from country to country, and learn also from anyone listening to us, from the young minds too. This is the privilege of the academic world. We are independent; we have time to think, to discuss, and to collaborate. This is why I would never change my job whatever the opportunities are."

Israel is strong in the area of entrepreneurship and has much to offer in the way of talents and skills, but it has a problem of presenting itself to the outside world. As a marketing person, what do you suggest?

"Lately, I have been working on country branding projects. I serve as an advisor to the Thai Prime Minister. Country branding is very much like firm or product branding. First, we have to determine who the customers of the country are. Usually, they are investors, tourists and citizens. Even people who do not come to Israel but use its products are customers. The next important question is what we can offer the world that is both special and meaningful. We have to choose areas in which we can demonstrate our excellence and use them as a focus of attraction. In Israel, for instance, you have knowledge, skills, and entrepreneurship. I do not think Israel has a marketing problem, but there is always room for improvement. In any case, the branding has to be a joint trilateral effort between academia, the private sector and government. This is the only way to build a good marketing platform.

"Actually, Kellogg's partnerships with other universities are a sort of country marketing activity. They strengthen the reputations of both sides. After the BusinessWeek ranking came out, and we and the University of Chicago were in the first three places, I called up the Mayor of Chicago and said to him - who would have believed that you could brand Chicago as a stronghold of intelligence? There are only two cities in the USA with this status - Chicago and Boston, where you have Harvard and MIT. I used that when I was working on the project of branding Chicago. This fact can encourage corporations to build their headquarters in Chicago, knowing that it will be easy for them to find talented students."

Do you think that India and China are a threat or an opportunity for the Israeli hi-tech industry?

"I have a completely different perspective on competition. In my view, competition is a synonym for excellence. It makes everyone better, because it makes them invest more efforts. When something good happens in a particular geographical area, you have to find out what you can do there. It is an opportunity for people all over the world to participate in the growth we see there."

In October 2005, Jain wrote an article for the Financial Times in which he quoted Shakespeare to demonstrate various dilemmas of the business world. "Shakespeare was not a businessman," he says, "but business is about people. Understanding human nature is very often one of the most important assets of good managers." Amongst other things, Jain relates in his article to the big frauds perpetrated by a few U.S. corporations, and the severe Sarbanes-Oxley laws, which were designed to prevent acts of fraud by improving the credibility of corporate financial statements. "One of the important things I learned from the previous Dean," says Jain, "is not to relate to anything in life as a secret. Nothing remains secret. Everything is exposed. If you work on this assumption, you will be more careful."

Jain wholeheartedly believes that you don't need education in the area to give useful advice in business administration. It is possible, in his opinion, to learn from writers and even from artists. In fact, Jain managed to learn an important lesson from animals too. After he survived the Tsunami, Jain was flooded with requests for interviews by the television networks. One of his interviewers said something that left a deep impression on him: not a single animal died in the Tsunami disaster. The explanation: apparently, while we are used to sitting in leather armchairs, animals have their bare feet on the ground. As the earthquake approached, they felt that this was not the ground they were used to and fled to the hills. "You have to tell the students," says Jain, "that in times of crisis, the people who make the right decisions are those with their feet on the ground. In times of crisis, managers who do not know what is going on in their organizations start running around in conflicting directions."