Global teaming in action: one MBA links five business schools on four continents.

On a drizzly Monday morning in November, Cemex executive vice-president for planning and finance Hector Medina stood in a hotel ball-room near the Monterrey Tech campus explaining to several dozen business administration students how the Mexican cement giant had gone about acquiring a British competitor called RMC.

Medina's talk, delivered in flawless English, spared few details in its description of the complex takeover, with many cheerful facts about vertical integration, market reach, expected synergies, and "enhanced global industry position across the value chain." But far from being intimidated by the hardcore nature of the explanation, the students took advantage of the I'll-be-happy-to-answer-any-questions segment to pepper the Cemex VP with the kinds of probing queries that seasoned executives might pose.

And for good reason. The assembled students were indeed seasoned executives--all enrolled in a groundbreaking 21-month MBA program called OneMBA. Unlike typical graduate students in their early 20s casting about for a career to latch onto, OneMBA students (average age 38) are all senior employees well along the leadership track in industries from automotive and banking to pharmaceuticals and waste management. In the Nuevo Leon capital that morning, most of them could have changed places with Cemex's Medina and held court with comparable authority about developments at their own company.

Still, while OneMBA-ers may be notably older and wiser, mature degree-seekers are, by definition, hardly unusual in an executive MBA program. Something else about OneMBA sets it apart, and what that is became clear during the post-conference bull session.

Walking The Talk

To a man and woman, it was the international and cross-cultural overtones of the Cemex talk that sparked the most interest. The nuts-and-bolts of one cement company's acquisition of another may make for an edifying case study, but what really captured their attention was how and why a Mexican company with operations in the United States, Spain and the Philippines (among other places) did a deal with a British company with operations across Europe.

"In this day and age, everybody has to be able to move in and out of different regions," says Will Wilson, an American, managing director of National Football League (NFL) operations in Mexico and a OneMBA student based at Monterrey Tech. "It's important to be knowledgeable about how to do business but also about different cultures' understandings of how to do business. That's the main attraction of this school."

The mixed emphasis--advanced business knowledge in a global context--distinguishes OneMBA from other executive business degree programs.

True, most business schools include some kind of nod to "global" issues. But OneMBA walks that talk in a new way. Rather than tacking on global variations to a pre-existing set of courses, the OneMBA curriculum was designed from the ground up to explore all business administration subjects--marketing, planning, strategy, finance, leadership, you name it--from the point of view of different regions and their cultures.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

"It's the next evolutionary stage of business education, with truly global international business content and experiences integrated into the very essence of the program," says David Ravenscraft, a OneMBA associate dean who helped create the program. "All of our innovative approaches are woven into a rigorous MBA curriculum."

U.S. companies doing business in Mexico and elsewhere might hear in those words the potential for addressing two needs. If an executive education can supply your existing top personnel with advanced business skills that will work anywhere in the world, then you've not only got a more effective senior executive staff (improved stock, so to speak), but also a better ability to create new opportunities around the globe.

That gives some top executives a whole new motivation for enrolling in an MBA program. "When I first started thinking about an MBA, I figured there wasn't much more for me to understand about marketing," says Brazilian Carlos Alberto Alves, regional sales and marketing manager for Latin America Tyco Electronics. "But I found out I had a lot to learn about marketing as it's done in China, or in the United States. It's a real challenge to understand these things from other cultural perspectives."

Or look at it this way: To a typical manager, an overseas assignment means unforeseen issues that are usually reacted to rather than prepared for. To a OneMBA grad, the same assignment means putting his or her familiarity with those issues to work. Such assignments are only going to increase in coming years, so OneMBA looks like a model for future advanced business education in an increasingly globalized business environment.

But OneMBA is no experimental prototype; it's a fully functioning and already prestigious program that's available right here and now.

Diversity Enhances Networking

You can get a pretty good idea of just how serious OneMBA is about offering a truly (as opposed to nominally) global perspective by asking a seemingly simple question: Where is the program based?

In truth, there is no single institution that OneMBA calls home. Rather, it's managed by an equal partnership of five business schools on four continents. Executives who commit to the program use the nearest of those schools as a base and for classes in the core curriculum, but also spend time at the other four.

In other words, the multicultural perspectives are built in to the physical structure of the program. That alone makes for a broader international alliance than the two-school exchange agreements or brief immersion courses that might typically form the "global" element of traditional MBA programs.

Besides physically being on four different continents for a week at a time throughout the year, OneMBA executives pursue a study load that comes straight out of all four of those continents. "For example, five globally coordinated courses covering leadership, operations, finance, marketing and strategy are co-designed by professors from each partner school," Ravenscraft says.

Those professors, moreover, don't hail from your run-of-the-mill business barnyards. OneMBA's partner schools are five of the most lauded institutions on the planet. For example, Monterrey Tech (more properly The Monterrey Institute of Technology's Graduate School of Business Administration and Leadership, or EGADE-ITESM from its Spanish initials) is considered among the top three Latin American business schools by AmericaEconomia magazine (see rankings, pages 24-25), as well as Britain's Financial Times.

The U.S. campus is the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School in Chapel Hill, where Ravenscraft teaches. That school's own executive MBA program was ranked No. 3 in global business by Business Week.

The other three partners are the Chinese University of Hong Kong, with the No. 1 executive MBA program in Asia, according to Business Week and the Financial Times; Fundacao Getulio Vargas Escola de Administracao de Empresas de Sao Paulo, or FGV-EAESP, widely recognized as the best business school in Brazil; and Holland's Rotterdam School of Management (RSM) at Erasmus University Rotterdam, one of Europe's most prestigious institutions, is known for its business-like and practical orientation.

"If you look at the quality of each of the five individual schools, there's a lot of depth in the overall program that you don't typically find," says Pete Slone, a VP for government affairs at Medtronics who's enrolled at OneMBA. "But it's the international composition of the program that attracted me, not the schools' reputations."

That international composition isn't just limited to the partner schools, the teaching talent or the course content. It includes the executive students themselves. All OneMBA-ers speak English either as their first or second language (a program requirement) and all are senior executives. But the homogeneity ends there. Once in the program, you're automatically working and studying with an atlas of nationalities, including Brazilians, Brits, French, Chinese, Cypriots, South Africans, Dutch, Indians, Moldovans, Canadians, Mexicans and Americans.

Such a student body profile is an international business experience in and of itself, a fact not lost on the OneMBA students and administrators.

"It's a diverse set of students and faculty that live and work in most of the important regions in the world," Ravenscraft says. "That ensures a current, active knowledge of global business."

And it's a gold mine for another activity near and dear to executives' hearts--networking. Not only are OneMBA enrollees making close contacts with scores of overseas colleagues in their own and other industries, they're making those contacts with people who can do them some good down the road.

"We're all senior people in our companies and in our careers," Slone says. "That makes the networking much more valuable."

In other words, you're not inundated with calling cards from recent grads looking for help landing their first position. In fact, OneMBA doesn't even offer a placement service. Everybody's already got a job.

Strengthening Team-Building

The logistical challenges inherent in a globetrotting MBA program for students with full-time jobs and (usually) families seem to have been met to the satisfaction of the OneMBA participants. There are five weeklong sessions at each of the partner schools that all 100 or so students attend, four-fifths of whom are making a major international voyage to get there.

A visit to another city on the same continent is usually included on each trip. The home school sessions focusing on the globally created core curriculum consist of scattered multi-day clusters, allowing execs and their companies to better plan for time off.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

That schedule works well for Slone, who's doing his OneMBA work at the University of North Carolina some decades after graduating from Georgetown with a degree in international affairs. The switch may have created some basketball loyalty conflicts, but time-use headaches, according to Slone, are minimal. "It strikes the right balance," he says.

"A lot of us can't take a month off from work. And my family situation means I can't take every other weekend off, as most executive MBA programs would have it."

It all works because what may be the key global learning experience takes place in the time between those scheduled clusters. That's when the executives pursue required team projects.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Some of those projects involve partnering with others from their base school to apply concepts from the globally coordinated core courses to their region (that is, either U.S./Canada, Europe, Asia or Latin America). Others put together a team of seven or eight students, at least one from each region, to work together on a project of true global proportions--initially face-to-face at one of the week-long overseas "residencies", and then virtually.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

"This global teaming is a critical differentiator of the OneMBA Program," Ravenscraft says. "Large global organizations depend on virtual global teamwork. Yet, few MBA programs prepare the students for this form of team building. Our executives work on seven projects with three different diverse, global teams."

The importance of the team projects isn't hard to grasp. It's one thing to hear a lecture or read up about regional and cultural variations in business practices. It's quite another to experience them firsthand while you're trying to get something done.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

"The global teamwork is the true value-added of this program," Slone says.

"It means developing team charters for how we're going to interact and allocate work amongst ourselves. Along the way we get direct experience not only with the cultural differences but also with different methodologies.

For example, doing due diligence on a proposed acquisition the way it's done in the United States may not be relevant in another region and you'll have to do it differently. You will not experience those things in a classical MBA program."

There are other benefits. "Besides learning to deal with the cultural challenges and delivering what you have to on time, you get a feel for what's happening in the countries or regions you're sharing work with," the NFL Mexico's Wilson says. "What are the key businesses? Who are the leaders and how do you get access to them? You can quite easily segue from doing these projects as education to doing the same kinds of things in real life."

Earning A Reputation

OneMBA students, professors, guest speakers, administrators, and company CEOs who've sent executives to OneMBA, agree that the global MBA program is an idea whose time has come. The question is why it didn't come years ago. After all, global business is not exactly a 21st-century invention.

One answer is that MBA programs--executive or otherwise--have in fact steadily increased their global perspective. While 20 years ago most business schools consisted of almost all domestic students and domestic professors teaching one or two courses on international business, now almost every major business school, in the United States at least, has a significant number of international faculty and students. They encourage their students to have an international experience, either with a semester abroad or via an immersion course where they might spend 10 days visiting and studying in two or three cities in one region.

Those are good experiences, to be sure, but hardly the top-to-bottom global education of OneMBA. "The international experience is still mostly treated like we used to treat international content--as an isolated, one-time course," Ravenscraft says.

OneMBA, in Ravenscraft's view, represents the next stage after the incremental steps toward a truly global business education that other schools have been taking. At the same time, though, its approach is a major innovation that could not have taken place 10 or 20 years ago.

"For one thing, necessary technology developments in global travel and communication hadn't happened yet," he says. "Also, the equal partnership of five global business schools would have been difficult before now because Anglo-Saxon business education dominated. Now, the better professors and students from any of our partner schools would be very successful at any other partner school."

And, of course, the need to have globally savvy executives on the payroll has never been nearly as widespread as it is today. "Virtually every industry in North America is impacted by international competition, global sourcing and trade," Ravenscraft points out. "OneMBA was designed to give executives the knowledge and personal connections to manage, source, sell and compete anywhere in the world."

North and South American CEOs are starting to like the sound of that.

While most of the current class of OneMBA executive students sought out the program on their own, the impetus for enrolling employees in the executive MBA program is starting to come from the companies themselves.

"Corporations would increase their odds of gaining from the increased human capital resulting from the program if they sponsor the executive," Ravenscraft says, referring to the OneMBA tuition that can run from US$30,000 to US$74,000 (not including travel), depending on the school. "If there's concern about an executive leaving after the company paid the tuition, they can spread out the financial payments over five or more years."

Slone sees that happening. "I actually committed to paying for this on my own," he says. "But a year into it, my CEO was so impressed with the experience I was gaining and the international networks I was developing that he decided to pay 100 percent of the costs. That speaks volumes about the emerging reputation of this program."

Kelly Arthur Garrett ([e-mail]) is a former U.S. magazine executive editor who lives and writes in Mexico City.