Connecting MBA studies to real management

By Bahk Eun-ji

Why Yonsei MBA?

Kim:

I was able to enlarge my global values and views as an executive. I had worked at a foreign affiliate for a long time before I decided to go to the school, so it was a part of my career path.

The most helpful for me was that the curriculum at Yonsei was practical as well as international.

Before I went to the school, my education background was rather focused on an overall view of business administration such as marketing and accounting, rather than integrated business studies that are practically used.

Seol: The term “practically useful program” is about putting emphasis on “glocal,” which refers to the mixture of localization and globalization.

The global business has to be based on localization so as to impress local consumers. For instance, Walmart, the world biggest multinational retailer chain, was not able to successfully launch its business in Korea, mainly because of being unsuccessful in localization. In other words, it failed to understand the propensity of Korean consumers.

When Walmart started its business in Korea in 1996, they brought its own style and concept without adaptation to the local market. For example, the width of aisle of the store was six meters, while the one in Korea was four.

The size did matter — Americans have bigger frames so they want to avoid shopping in a crowded area. Due to their individualistic style, they tend to love quality products at reasonable prices in spacious places.

Six meters were, however, way too big for Korean customers, who loved to shop in crowed areas — they tended to consider busy shops represent a successful business. It was not about which one was good or bad, it was just about cultural differences.

Walmart failed to understand the differences and ended up leaving the country.

Suh:

It’s true that running local business is one of things that we emphasize during the business school course.

Lee:

Of course the curriculum was satisfying but what I liked the most was the school faculty. All the professors have studied abroad to get a degree and had the experience of teaching at a prestigious business school.

I also joined the global full-time MBA program of Yonsei during the summer vacation. The school invited renowned professors from abroad for the course for two or three weeks and ran it for more than five hours a day. It required a lot of effort and was extremely hard to get high grades; definitely worth attending the course.

Practical studies

I wrote a thesis for the degree and that was the trend of MBA programs before 2000. Later, MBA programs require studying business cases instead of writing theses.

As president of a global automotive company, I was mostly interested in what kinds of requirements were needed for imported cars in the Korean market for my thesis. And for that, I focused on how the imported car market could stimulate industrial development in Korea compared to the market of neighbor countries such as Japan.

Seol:

When I was writing a thesis in the late 1990s, I worked at a retail company with an education background in marketing. At that time, new formats for distribution channels such as hypermarkets or largesized supermarkets were mushrooming in Korea and global retail chains tried to open businesses here. Therefore I decided to write my thesis on how these kinds of new businesses influenced Korean consumers and how it changed their life style.

I started the course in 2008, so I did a case-study instead of writing thesis.

Intel was conducting a survey about human resources management targeting junior staff in order to estimate the leadership of managers.

As a president managing employees, I wondered how much I could get meaningful results through the survey. So I chose some managers who got low scores and did kind of experiments aimed at making those employees perform better.

The experiments were divided into two parts; dismissing a junior staff member who kept making trouble with managers, or encouraging the mangers to do a better job through providing incentives.

Honestly, it has been difficult to figure out which way was more profitable when it comes to dealing with employees, but it was fairly meaningful work for me — the executive who has to spur employees to perform to their best ability. It took almost five years and still the tasks are underway to get more refined results.

Why Korean MBA?

Instead of China and Japan, I think Korea is the better place for foreign students to study an MBA because of the country’s market traits, forward-looking aspect and challenging spirit.

As far as the market size is concerned, China is second to none but it somewhat lacks in the more refined approach. By contrast, Korea stands out in technical terms with its unique spirit and the willingness to implement.

Because of its time-honored socialism-based approach, in my view, China still lags in terms of global standards of systems and cultures although it has great potential in market size.

As a latecomer, Korea has already chalked up some successes. Hence, I think that certain Korean styles would work globally.

In the Korean market, consumers have big preference for premium products and many of them are early adopters from whom corporations want to learn much.

For our case, we also work with government agencies and learned a lot.

If you study in China, you might learn something about China but little about neighboring countries and that is also the case for those who study in Japan.

But things are different for Korea where MBA students should turn their eyes to nearby countries like China and Japan because of the relatively small market size of Korea.

In Korea, you can learn not only Korean things but also Chinese and Japanese things.