EMBA keeps leaders ahead

Just two years ago, when a domestic media introduced what EMBA is, they made such a joke: they called EMBA "Master of Business Administration in Electronic Commerce", and regarded the E in EMBA as "" Abbreviation for E-Commerce. In fact, the E of EMBA refers to Executive, which means "senior managers". It is this E that distinguishes EMBA from MBA. If MBA is to cultivate leaders, especially business leaders, EMBA is to improve leadership, because before admission, EMBA students are already leaders of a certain level.

This discipline, which was first created at the Chicago Business School 60 years ago, was officially approved by the State Education Commission in 2002 to be opened by 30 colleges and universities. Before that, only CEIBS, Tsinghua University, Peking University, Renmin University of China, Fudan University, and CUHK were the first to try to jointly offer EMBA with some foreign institutions.

The curtain begins.

After entering 2003, colleges and universities qualified to offer EMBA started a new round of enrollment. Since the state allows these colleges and universities to recruit students on their own, and does not conduct a national unified examination, the enrollment and enrollment time of each college are quite different. It is no exaggeration to describe the current EMBA admissions situation with "one after another, not cold all year round".

What exactly can an EMBA learn? How high is the threshold? What advice can current EMBA students offer to latecomers based on their presentations? This article attempts to answer these questions.

Walk with Chinese and foreign masters

EMBA teaching draws lessons from foreign methods in terms of curriculum setting, teaching methods and teacher allocation. 60% of Peking University Guanghua EMBA professors come from famous European and American business schools.

Internationalized teachers According to the regulations of the State Education Commission, all colleges that are qualified to offer EMBA teaching must be equipped with more than 30% foreign or overseas teachers with good EMBA teaching reputation. The high cost of hiring these professors is the high EMBA tuition fee. One of the reasons why not. For example, Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management has specially hired 28 well-known Chinese professors, all of whom hold tenured professorships in well-known American universities; Fudan University has professors from Yale and Chicago Business School; Jinan University has hired Stanford professors.

In addition, many schools have attracted a large number of Chinese people active in economics and management as professors, such as Professor Lang Xianping who teaches at Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, and Professor Wu Jinglian who teaches at CEIBS. In order to balance the academic color, some academies have also invited consulting companies, investment banking experts and government officials to come to the academies to give lectures. For example, John Thornton, the outgoing president and COO of Goldman Sachs, opened a "Global Global" in Tsinghua School of Economics and Management. Sexual Leadership" course; Xiamen University has consultants from BCG (Boston Consulting); Shanghai Jiaotong University has experts from Morgan Investment Bank.

High-level communication In addition to classroom lectures, case studies, lectures and forums, team activities, business simulations, corporate inspections, and foreign internships are all important components of EMBA.

For example, Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business has set up two series of lectures, "Walking with Masters" and "Cheung Kong EMBA Forum". It has invited Li Ka-shing, Liu Chuanzhi, Shi Meilun and other already very successful business people, so that students have the opportunity to have a direct relationship with them. The two-week "Overseas Business Leaders Training Camp" provided by Sun Yat-sen University arranges students to communicate with foreign business schools and enterprises, and strives to broaden the students' horizons and help them discover business opportunities; Dinner Lecture Series", inviting entrepreneurs to the school to give keynote speeches. Tsinghua SEM also maintains long-term close cooperation with world-renowned economists, management scientists and entrepreneurs.

Effective communication to facilitate communication between students and teachers is also a key consideration of the School of Management. In order to strengthen the interaction between students and professors and digest the knowledge they have learned, the University of International Business and Economics has made a strict rule for this purpose: for each credit, students must have at least 12.5 hours of contact time with the professor. Generally, EMBAs are taught in two ways: English classes and Chinese classes. The English classes are taught in English, which ensures the transmission of authentic information, while the Chinese classes adopt simultaneous translation. A common phenomenon is that students who understand English laugh when a foreign professor tells a joke. And when the joke was translated into Chinese, the remaining classmates would laugh again.

The reality is that the core management personnel of many domestic enterprises have not yet reached the level of proficiency in listening, speaking, reading and writing. Based on this consideration, Changjiang has adopted a rather special approach - all teaching is in Chinese.

Professor Qi Daqing, EMBA director of the school, explained: "Our main purpose is to provide a more systematic platform for Chinese business elites to receive management education, and the most important concern is the effective delivery of teaching content, not language ability. Lin Yang, a student at Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business and Executive Director and Executive Vice President of Digital China (China) Co., Ltd., also felt deeply about this. The advantage is that the culture is completely interoperable. The foreign teacher may be very accomplished in a specific field, but the culture is different from yours, which will be reflected in the teaching process. Secondly, there is no problem of language transmission, although Foreign teachers will do simultaneous interpreting in their lectures, but no matter how high the translation level is, they still feel like they're just scratching their heads."

Improve leadership and competitiveness

Training comprehensive management capabilities EMBA first emphasizes the training of students' comprehensive Management ability and overall improvement of leadership. Zhang Weiying, deputy dean of Peking University's Guanghua School of Management, said in an interview: "Leadership depends on the ability to learn. Without the accumulation and updating of knowledge, one cannot see far. Through learning and the pursuit of knowledge progress, a business leader's judgment can be improved. Accurate, subordinates are more willing to follow him."

For example, Changjiang is positioned to cultivate the comprehensive decision-making and management capabilities of the core decision-making level of Chinese enterprises. Similar to Harvard Business School, Changjiang emphasizes general management, that is, comprehensive management. Although the school offers professional courses such as marketing and financial accounting, it does not introduce them as functional content, but from the perspective of the core decision-making members of the enterprise, to teach them how to understand and use these tools to make overall decisions.

Lin Yang introduced that, for example, the management accounting course taught by Professor Xiang Bing focuses on how to read the income statement, cash flow statement, and balance sheet, so as to see the way and find problems, rather than how to do these three surface. This solves the problems faced by corporate executives in their actual work, rather than the problems of staff in specific departments.

This year's EMBA admissions for all-rounders and specialists have an obvious change, that is, some schools have simply emphasized comprehensive learning in the past, and have begun to focus on the professional direction.

Among the 2002 class of Tsinghua EMBA students, the proportion of the real estate industry is about 11%. At the request of the industry students, the School of Economics and Management of Tsinghua University officially launched China's first real estate EMBA this year. In addition to domestic teachers, there are also top experts and scholars from MIT, University of Michigan, Harvard University and other famous foreign universities. Almost two-thirds of the nineteen courses in the real estate direction are used to study comprehensive courses. In the last semester, professional courses in real estate are arranged, such as planning and design and urban development, modern architecture and environmental technology. In the future, EMBA courses in the fields of telecommunications, insurance, media, and medical care will also be offered one after another.

This year, CUHK launched a new EMBA program for hospital directors. Through market research, CUHK found that there is a serious shortage of public health management talents in our country. Many deans are very experienced in business, but they are unable to manage the hospital's marketing and internal management. The popularity of S?RS this year has exposed the serious loopholes in crisis management in hospitals in our country. CUHK invited officials and experts from the Ministry of Health to assist in courses and teaching, and cooperated with the Hopkins University School of Public Health Management, which is well-known in the field of hospital management, and sent experienced professors from the United States to teach in China.

After the success of Shanghai's bid to host the "World Expo", the demand for media and exhibition talents has become increasingly prominent, and the EMBA Media Orientation Class of Antai School of Management, Shanghai Jiaotong University came into being. According to Xu Fei, director of the school's EMBA program, compared with Beijing and Guangzhou, the media industry in Shanghai is still relatively weak, and a large number of professional talents are urgently needed. Relying on the strong faculty of Shanghai Jiaotong University's "School of Media", and in cooperation with Northwestern University and the University of Southern California, who have rich experience in the media field, the EMBA media direction of Shanghai Jiaotong University has received widespread attention since its launch.

In addition, CEIBS has a financial direction; Tongji University focuses on four advantageous directions including "project management", "modern logistics management", "finance and investment management", and "exhibition management".

Height and Width of Threshold

An obvious fact is that the current EMBA teaching has formed three hotspots: the northern area centered on Beijing, the Yangtze River Delta area centered on Shanghai, and the Guangzhou-centered area. Centered on the Pearl River Delta. Peking University Guanghua has classes in Shenzhen and Shanghai; Shanghai Jiaotong University Antai School of Management has established EMBA teaching bases in Guangzhou and Shenzhen. CEIBS, also located in Shanghai, also opened an EMBA class in Beijing.

In addition to the standards set by the state (undergraduate degree or above, more than 8 years of work experience, of which more than 4 years of management work experience, etc.), the admission requirements of each college are very different. CEIBS requires candidates to take a written test based on the GMAT method. After passing the written test, they will also participate in an interview; Tsinghua SEM and Peking University Guanghua both focus on interviews, supplemented by written tests; Fudan and Washington Olin Business School have Mainly for interviews.

Changjiang's admissions system is quite special. There is no written test, only interview. The topic is not technical, but examines the ability to grasp, judge and analyze the macroscopic level of specific issues. For example, what do you think are the challenges and opportunities faced by the best companies in mainland China (regardless of ownership)?

According to a survey, only 44% of business leaders in my country have reached the level of college or above. The condition stipulated by the State Education Commission that "you must have a bachelor's degree to apply for the exam" will inevitably block some business leaders who want to study. In this regard, some Sino-foreign cooperative EMBA programs will lower this standard to junior college, but candidates must make up for this deficiency with their achievements. Qi Daqing said: "If you can convince the examiner that your current achievements are indeed outstanding, you may be admitted, but persuasion will take more effort. You can give it a try, but you must be fully psychologically prepared. Use all your abilities to convince the examiners that you will be a special case."

Admissions to business schools are uneventful. There have been embarrassing scenes in which some colleges have more teachers than students, and some colleges have ended up admitting less than a predetermined standard. At the same time, other colleges are still crowded even if they keep raising their tuition fees. Strict colleges claim that they will not reduce admissions rates in order to gain market share. The admission ratio of CEIBS and Peking University Guanghua is about 3:1, and the admission ratio of Shanghai Jiaotong University Antai School of Management is also similar; Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business and University of International Business and Economics have clearly stated that they strictly control the number of students enrolled and do not rely on scale to expand their influence. Fudan's local EMBA program has even improved on the standards of the State Education Commission: the work experience has been increased to 10 years, and the management experience has been increased to 6 years.

What do you want for a lot of money

Throughout the domestic EMBA program, the tuition fee ranges from 110,000 to 330,000, and the average is between 180,000 and 250,000. Business schools believe that the target group of EMBA is less sensitive to price, and they value more the value-added utility brought by EMBA.

"I figured out a problem I hadn't figured out before," said Wang Zhongyu, who works in the Shanghai representative office of a foreign company. He is studying for an EMBA at CEIBS. "My boss used to be dissatisfied with my management style and thought that I was managing too much and should give employees more freedom. I used to be unimpressed by this. Now, through study, I suddenly realized. Learning management knowledge systematically is like After mastering a language, after you communicate with others, you will feel that everyone is in the same context. It is like the standard of TV, how can different standards be compatible?"

Broaden Vision and learning new knowledge are one of the expectations of EMBA students. Huang Xin, the executive deputy general manager of a group with a state-owned enterprise background, studied the EMBA of CUHK. He told us: "I didn't come to study the EMBA just because of the diploma. My idea is that as I grow older, I will study systematically by myself. There are not many opportunities. In today’s fast-changing society, new knowledge is constantly emerging, and my past knowledge system is somewhat unable to keep up. There are many young people in the company, and their knowledge and information are very large. As leaders We must keep learning so as not to fall behind."

Lin Yang introduced that he has been engaged in management since 1991 and has received various short-term trainings for more than ten years. This kind of formal and systematic training has very limited knowledge of other industries. For example, from a marketing background, he is unfamiliar with financial knowledge, investment securities industry, and the entire macro economy. When the company opens up new business directions, it used to rely on its own experience and understanding of the industry, but now it will use scientific methods, such as using financial models to quantitatively analyze the return on investment.

More importantly, EMBA education is not to force you some knowledge, but to solve the problems you encounter in your actual management work. Therefore, EMBA students are required to have management work experience. Only when certain problems arise in specific work, and then read them, will they improve. Lin Yang said: "For example, when it comes to strategy, if you have formulated some strategies, some have been successful, some have failed, and then look back to see how the successful strategy is done, and whether it conforms to the theoretically speaking, unsuccessful strategy. Which step has not been fully considered. Studying with problems in this way is especially helpful for the improvement of management level."

Needless to say, relationships are also a kind of productivity, and the network of classmates will be of great help to future career development. Wei Zaisheng, vice president of ZTE, believes that one of the biggest gains of his Guanghua EMBA at Peking University is the establishment of relationships with classmates and professors. Jiang Rong, chairman of Beijing Yuetan Building Real Estate Development Company, originally studied EMBA for the rigorous study style of Tsinghua University, and the relationship with the classmates of EMBA elites has become his unexpected gain. At the same time, each college also attaches great importance to the establishment of rich alumni association resources to provide EMBA students with opportunities for career development. For example, CEIBS has established more than 1,800 alumni association resources, and Peking University Guanghua School of Management has more than 700 alumni association members who are active in all walks of life.

The teaching of EMBA usually adopts the method of 4 days a month, and these 4 days usually run from Friday to next Monday. EMBA students have a lot of official duties, and there will inevitably be some conflicts between work arrangements and study time. At this time, students need to make arrangements in advance and coordinate with the school.

"Forget your identity and finish your studies seriously", this is the common wish of Huang Xin and his classmates, "Everyone also hopes to use this opportunity to relive the feeling of being a student. Some students even hope to live in In a dormitory with bunk beds." However, the EMBA study will not be a journey full of warmth, and the ruthless business society is not a morning reading by the willow tree on campus. Fortunately, the elites here have long been accustomed to all this. Two years is just a shift in their life.

div>