Kim Seok-nam, a general manager at Cha Bio Group, earned his MBA from the International Business Strategy Program at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo in 2004. Hitotsubashi is the first full-time MBA program in a Japanese national university to be taught entirely in English.
Hitotsubashi is like a Japanese product — small, high-tech and high-powered.
I majored in physics at Ohio State University as an undergraduate and did my master’s at the University of Pennsylvania in the same field. Then I came to Korea to work at Samsung Electronics’ LCD division for five years until 2002. After finishing my MBA in 2004, I worked at the overseas marketing team of LG-Philips LCD (now LG Display). Now I’m in charge of the biotech business strategy team of Cha Bio Group.
I was doing my military service requirement at Samsung and the duration was through the fall of 2004. At that time, there was a big hype on MBAs in Korea and elsewhere so I, too, thought about doing it. But since I had already spent seven years studying in the U.S., for the MBA, I opted to go to Japan, which was the world’s second largest economy at the time.
Yes. To be honest I thought about applying to famous U.S. schools such as Wharton (University of Pennsylvania), because their brand was too good to ignore. But I couldn’t join the fall semester because my obligation to Samsung was through September. I was able to apply to Hitotsubashi because its courses were starting in October. At the same time, Hitotsubashi had many distinctive advantages, including generous scholarship programs. And finally it came to my attention that the school was led by Hirotaka Takeuchi. Having taught at Harvard Business School, he is a very famous and internationally respected scholar.
In Japan, you get to learn management philosophies different from the U.S. I learned to see things from a different perspective, apart from fashionable keywords or popular frameworks that are used in U.S. business schools.
Yes, I think I would. There are hundreds of Japanese firms we can learn from and take as role models. Think about Toyota, Sony and many others which have global brands. But when I think of Chinese firms, I rarely find business role models. Korea still has a lot to learn from corporate Japan.
It helped me a lot when I was working at Samsung and at LG. Many technology documents are written in Japanese. In the technology industry, you would stand out if you can read and speak Japanese.
We have a loose network but we keep in touch. We also meet Hitotsubashi professors when they visit Korea, which is quite often. What is amazing is that every professor I meet still remembers my name after all these years, even though I was not a very outstanding student (There were only around 50 people in my class). I don’t think this kind of intimacy is possible in any U.S. school.
Hitotsubashi is not as well known as Harvard or Wharton in general. But that does not mean you cannot get a good job from there. For most MBA candidates, the two years they spend in the business school is going to be the only time in their long career in which they can focus on themselves. So you need to look at various perspectives of the program. Doing an MBA in Japan will bring you a unique experience and will help you think differently.