© Nathan Mandell

IEMBA Live-In Week brings world home to Kellogg
The world comes home to Kellogg Communications: EMP students connect with global peers during Live-In Week

Each September, an international homecoming of sorts plays out at the Kellogg School’s James L. Allen Center.

Second-year Executive Master’s Program (EMP) students from Kellogg programs in North America, Germany, Israel and Hong Kong gather at the Allen Center for a week of shared learning, new friendships and new perspectives — their International Executive MBA Live-In Week.

For students from Kellogg’s Evanston-based EMP program, it’s a chance to play host to a global ensemble of their peers. For students from the Recanati Graduate School of Business Administration at Tel Aviv University (KR), the School of Business and Management at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and the Otto Beisheim Graduate School at WHU in Vallendar, Germany, it’s a chance to study with the assembled Kellogg faculty, as well as to explore the state-of-the-art executive education facilities of Kellogg’s “home campus.”

“In Hong Kong we have a term we call ‘mother school,’” says Steven DeKrey ’85, associate dean and director of HKUST. “Kellogg is the mother school. It’s really a warm expression and it’s really true. Without this live-in component, though, the students wouldn’t entirely have that same connection. They are here, they enjoy the facilities, they become part of it. That’s the No. 1 benefit.”

During Live-In Week, different cultural perspectives become the basis for learning.

Student Kim Brown (EMP-53) works for the General Services Administration and attended the recent live-in program. Brown says when she arrived for the week, she had expectations about how people from other cultures act, but not how they think.

© Nathan Mandell Prof. Leigh Thompson

“It’s neat this week to talk to people on more of a social level, to hear how they perceive what’s going on in the world, or hear from a fellow woman how she is treated as a woman in Hong Kong,” says Brown, also citing the week’s rich academic component as a strong inducement to get students excited about participating in the Allen Center curriculum.

A course taught by Leigh Thompson, J. Jay Gerber Distinguished Professor of Dispute Resolution and Organizations, for example, taps into the diversity of experience present at Live-In Week to explore cross-cultural negotiations. Thompson’s course was a highlight for many students, including Shira Ben Meir, who works in marketing and commercial development for BSE Distributors, a pharmaceutical distribution company based in Israel.

“Coming face-to-face with some of the people I have to interact with in my business life, but now learning the rules that govern their negotiations, is invaluable,” Ben Meir says.

The significant international component in the Kellogg School culture is one reason why students such as Recanati’s Yoav Keren (KR-06) were attracted to its EMP program in the first place. “You learn more by this interaction with people from other cultures around the world,” says Keren, CEO and co-founder of Domain the Net Technologies.

Julie Cisek Jones, director of admissions and planning for EMP, says one of the goals for Live-In Week, as well as the EMP program as a whole, is to develop both personal and leadership insights.

	© Nathan Mandell

“You don’t necessarily walk away from the program remembering a particular class or a particular skill that you learned, but rather the way you’ve grown as an individual,” Cisek Jones says.

Adds Erica Kantor, assistant dean and director of EMP: “To some extent, we created this international program to put people, such as Palestinian and Israeli students, into the classroom together. At Kellogg, we model the idea that if one does things through business, one does not necessarily have to be at war.”

Though students come from vastly different backgrounds, Kellogg itself serves as a kind of common language across race, gender, age and country of origin, say Live-In Week administrators and participants.

“Kellogg is the shared culture that unites everyone,” says Orit Mendelson-Shoham, executive MBA programs director at Recanati. “Most of the students in our program share the same Kellogg professors and most of the curriculum. They share the same way of studying.”

“It’s like a long-lost cousin coming home — you immediately embrace them,” DeKrey says. “These students are true classmates, so you get rid of all the pretension and whatever you’d have to do to build a bond. Here, that bond is almost instantaneous.”

— Kari Richardson