11.2.2008
Teaching Political Risk to MBA Students
The CEU Business
School in Budapest and its satellite operation in Bucharest is doing well. The school was the first one to offer American-style MBA programmes in former communist Europe. Although very sucessful, the business school has to face many challenges as explained by recently appointed dean Paul Garrison.
"Nineteen years ago our American MBA here was a
big deal, you can imagine. But now, that's just expected; we've got to
go beyond that. This region has had 19 years of intense transformation
and we need to leverage that," says Mr Garrison, an American whose own
non-academic background is in marketing in the central and east
European region. The school, which was created in 1988 has enjoyed the patronage of George Soros, a Hungarian-born US
billionaire philanthropist. The goal was to educate business leaders from across the former communist bloc to
manage the transition from centrally-planned to free-market economies.
One of the challenges the school is facing is the unstable political environment. Classical
western-style MBA programmes do not typically include teaching political risk. But this topic is a subject that managers in the former communist bloc often cannot avoid. "At
American schools, you don't need to teach students about political
risk, you don't need to worry about government. But in many states
here, you cannot do business unless you have a relationship with the
political power. "We have one of the most diverse student bodies
of any school on earth, but we are still not teaching them, when you go
into Romania or Azerbaijan, how do you assess the political
environment?" he says. The CEU Business School is therefore currently introducing a new "executive board game" to
simulate real-life decision-making scenarios along with a new signature
course entitled "Transformational Business Leadership". The signature course aims to prepare
students with the skills needed to assess risk and manage a business in
an unstable environment where sudden political changes can create problems. Source: Financial Times
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