Financial Times: Value-added travel

Carlos Quintana is Mexican and Genilson Melo is Brazilian. But their small  national differences are nothing compared with the unexpected cultural  challenges they face studying together on the executive MBA programme at Fundação  Getulio Vargas (FGV) in São Paulo, Brazil. What has proved most demanding is  working on projects via phone and email with a team scattered around the world  and who are all from different nationalities and sectors. “I think most of us were surprised by how difficult it would be to really  work with people from different business cultures around the world, since we  mostly have already had plenty of international experience,” says Melo. “But  we’d often stayed within our own hemispheres or at least our own sectors or  companies. Dealing with truly different cultures has proved a real challenge,  which I suppose speaks to the value of doing a course like this.”“Maybe we didn’t know it,” adds Quintana, “but this kind of tough lesson is  probably something we needed.”

Melo, financial manager at Copersucar, Brazil’s largest sugar and ethanol  exporter, and Quintana, director of compensation at PepsiCo, the drinks and snacks company, in Mexico, are on  the Global Executive MBA programme, one of a number of EMBAs focused on giving  working professionals a truly international experience in addition to more  traditional coursework.

On the OneMBA  programme, participants are based either at FGV in Brazil, the Chinese  University of Hong Kong, Egade Business School in Monterrey, Mexico, Rotterdam  School of Management at Erasmus University in the Netherlands or Kenan-Flagler  Business School at the University of North Carolina in the US. Students meet  periodically at their home campuses, spend some time studying at each of the  others, and in between – over the course of the 21-month programme – work on  projects in teams made up of students from all the other locations.

Elsewhere, on the Georgetown/Esade  Global Executive MBA programme, students of various nationalities do not have a  home base close to where they live or work, but travel to meet for 12 days of  intensive, non-stop coursework six times over two years. What amounts to 60  working days of study – on location in Washington DC, Barcelona, São Paulo or  Buenos Aires, Bangalore, Beijing or Shanghai, and New York – includes special  attention given to international geopolitics.

“Normally the participants recognise their need to do the global executive  MBA,” says Pollyanna Nethersole, associate director of admissions at Esade  Business School in Spain. “Either they wish to conduct an international career,  or they have already been doing so for several years.” She says three special  themes loom large in the course – local-company case studies at each of the  international locations, management and leadership skills, and the global  business environment.

It is important for students to be certain this type of programme is what  they want, say Melo and Quintana. That is not only because of the cost – the  OneMBA costs R$112,000 ($60,000) if based in São Paulo – but also because they  are so demanding.

In addition to carefully selecting candidates to maximise interaction at  high-executive level across national and sector boundaries, such programmes  attempt to ensure participants get the most from every hour they can carve out  from their professional and family lives.

“We aren’t allowed to miss our classes or our meetings with global teams,” says Quintana. “This has led to some tense conversations with the directors in  Mexico City when it meant I had to miss important PepsiCo meetings. But they had  to understand: I’m doing this course.”“It can be tough to juggle home, office, classroom, and global projects,” says Melo. “But that’s another skill we need to build.”

Didier Guillot, director of FGV’s Hong Kong programme, says he sometimes  discourages students he thinks really want something else. “There is a big gap  between a normal MBA in Hong Kong and the Executive MBA,” Guillot says. “Most  international MBAs here are based exclusively on mainland China. For students  that only want to put their focus there, we tell them to stay with the local  programmes.”

That is not the only warning. “I tell them: ‘This is going to be a  challenging programme,’” Guillot says. “They think they are prepared to work  with global teammates, and I tell them: ‘Be really, really careful, because you  only have experienced this in your own business.’ I don’t think they anticipate  the difficulty of this. That is exactly what we want.”

Indeed, it seems the programme aims to force learning by wrenching students  out of their comfortable routines, before globalisation itself inevitably does  so.

“These people are executives. They are bosses,” says Marina Heck, associate  dean for the FGV programme. “Here, they become students and have to work with  people they can’t command. This obliges them into some kind of sociability. If  you put five stars in a room and tell them to make a decision, it’s not  easy.”

Melo and Quintana recall some such moments with looks of exasperation. “We in  the Americas or Europe tended to assume that once a clear majority came to one  conclusion, the decision was made,” says Melo. “But our colleagues in Asia  tended to insist that everyone fall into line before a conclusion was reached.  I’d never dealt with that.”

But both say they emerged from such delicate negotiations with valuable  experience and a network of contacts abroad. And for the moment, all has been  resolved. They are planning to go for drinks after the last day of class in this  round – and not talk too much about the course.