John Quelch says China's economic shift will depend on how business leaders of tomorrow are educated. Todd Balazovic / China Daily

Western academician says China packs enough punch to be a force in education

John Quelch always makes it a point to tell fresh MBA students at the China European International Business School (CEIBS) that he knew China much before they were even born.

Recollecting his first visit in 1981, Quelch, vice-president and dean of CEIBS, says that China was a country where there was very little happening in terms of business then.

"There was nothing to buy. There were just one or two Friendship Stores where you could use foreign currency, but basically there was nothing to buy," he says.

"I remember trying to buy a postcard but no one knew what it was."

Twenty years later, business is booming and Quelch, 61, has gone from tourist to tutor, responsible for educating China's next generation of business leaders as head of one of the nation's most prestigious business schools.

When Quelch decided to succeed Rolf Cremer as the CEIBS head in February 2011, most of the academic fraternity was surprised. His move to China was the first time any administrator from a high-profile Western institution had been appointed to a leadership role in a Chinese school.

But for the British-born academic, it was a way to round out an already distinguished career.

"I'd been dean of the London Business School, so I'd had a stint in Europe, and I'd been a senior associate dean at Harvard Business School for eight years, so I had a stint in North America - so I thought a good trifecta would involve doing a leadership role in Asia," he says.

His extensive experience in leadership roles in some of the West's top institutions combined with his own life-long curiosity for business in Asia made Quelch an ideal candidate to drive China's new push to become one of the world's top education destinations.

"I've always been associated, fortunately, with very high performing and excellent institutions, so I have a very good sense of what the best practices are," he says.

"Not that it's necessarily correct to impose best practices on an institution in Asia, or in China, but nevertheless I have a firm grasp on what the best practices are in the developed world when it comes to business school administration," he says.

Quelch's ability to traverse different cultures is part of what made him such a successful leader in the first place.

While serving as the dean of the London Business School from 1998 to 2001, he managed to increase the school's revenues by more than 50 percent by engaging former graduates and establishing the school's first alumni associations, something he picked up while working as a professor at the Harvard Business School in the US.

Complementing his cross-cultural approach, CEIBS was founded as a joint-effort between the Chinese government and the European Union in 1995.

"This is actually a joint-venture where both parties understand the power of the institution comes from the fact it is a joint-venture - that the bi-cultural aspect of the institution is one of its greatest and most unique assets," he says.

But, if Quelch has his way, he will not be the only high-level academic who travels East to help foster China's business school environment. One of his primary focuses while helping develop CEIBS is to strengthen the school's faculty.

"The learning process is not just a function of curriculum content, but also a function substantially of the people you have a chance to interact with while you're here.

"I have a pretty powerful network of faculty connections as a result of being 30 years in this profession and that enables me to find people who are high quality who could be potential candidates."

His efforts have already begun paying off. In the year since Quelch has taken over as dean, he says they have added seven "outstanding" faculty, including George Yip, the former dean of the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University, to help meet the growing popularity of students, both Chinese and foreign, seeking high-end Chinese MBA degrees.

Still, he recognizes the value of the current faculty, calling himself a China "neophyte" when matched against the school's current foreign professors, many of whom have lived and worked in China for a decade or more.

And even as he musters his efforts to increase the quality of the staff, Quelch is also placing more importance on tightening the admissions process, which is already strict with the school accepting an average of 1,000 students per year.

"What we have to do is work very hard on our admissions process so that we select the 1,000 students who are likely to have the most impact on economic development after graduation," he says.

"Our job is not to educate 100,000 managers every year - our job is to educate 1,000 leaders every year who will have a profound impact on the economic environment."

Though China has witnessed monumental changes since his first visit in the early 1980s, Quelch is confident that as the nation increases the education opportunities not only for its own people, but also for foreign students seeking knowledge about one of the world's biggest economic players, the next two decades could show equally phenomenal growth.

"There is a tremendous amount of work to be done to invent China 2.0," he says.

"(China) has to rebalance from being an economy that is an imitation economy to an innovation economy."

Much of that shift will depend on how the leaders of tomorrow are educated, he says. With schools like CEIBS constantly striving to raise the standards of how China's great minds operate, that shift may not be as far away as some think.

"China is a vast country with a lot of independent and entrepreneurial individuals in third- and fourth-tier cities, who at one level should determine their own destiny, but also help the administration in directing the economy to the new 2.0 version," he says.

And leading the way toward China 2.0 are educators and innovators like Quelch who have the vision and know-how to deliver the leaders of tomorrow.

toddbalazovic@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 03/23/2012 page6)