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Students take part in a course at the Sloan School of Management at MIT. File photo

Chinese executives seek global vision from overseas study trips

More and more mainland companies are sending their senior staff abroad for short-term programmes at the world’s leading universities

Sun Tao has a clear goal for his one-week education programme at the Saïd Business School of Oxford University.

“We hope lessons about leadership and strategies will help broaden the vision of our executives,” says the deputy president of Vision Overseas, a subsidiary of China’s leading private education provider New Oriental Group.

“We’re a service provider for overseas studies, so we have selected lessons about operational effectiveness and customer-based innovation.”

It is not the first time Sun has attended a business education programme. In 2013, he attended a two-week programme designed for his firm’s executives by Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania, which he found particularly helpful.

“The professors cited abundant data and models to analyse the market and customers,” says Sun. “It greatly broadened my vision.”

He has attended similar programmes at business schools on the Chinese mainland, but says “Chinese professors at Chinese business schools are quite talkative, but sometimes don’t have as much solid content”.

New Oriental is not alone in recognising the value of educating business leaders and executives.

We hope lessons about leadership and strategies will help broaden the vision of our executives
Sun Tao, Vision Overseas

Boosted by the government’s ambition of promoting innovation and entrepreneurship, more mainland companies are willing to sponsor their executives for short-term programmes at the world’s leading universities.

In the past five years, about 1,200 Chinese executives have attended non-degree executive programmes by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, which offers custom courses for Chinese subsidiaries of US corporations, Chinese state-owned enterprises, Chinese universities and others, according to Kate Anderson, director of enrolment.

Professor John Zhang, the director of Penn Wharton China Centre in Beijing, said some 500 to 600 high-level executives from private and state-owned companies, as well as senior government officials, enrolled in its non-degree executive education programmes every year.

Read more: As more opt to study overseas, China must find way to bring talent home

Tightened rules on overseas trips by officials under the nationwide austerity campaign had caused the number of government participants, who accounted for 30 per cent of participants two years ago, to dwindle to 10 per cent, Zhang said. But the vacancies had been filled by executives from private companies.

Courses in international marketing, finance and innovation were particularly popular, said Zhang, as were business courses aimed at second-generation entrepreneurs.

Meanwhile, Chinese companies, especially those from traditional industries such as education and real estate, were seeking ways to meet the challenges caused by China’s slowing economic growth and to embrace new technologies.

Vision Overseas spent 3 million yuan (HK$3.6 million) last year in sponsoring 22 executives to take a strategic leadership programme at Wharton last Christmas. Sun said this was to meet a rising challenge from online education.

Tomas Casasi Klett, director of the China Competence Centre at the University of St Gallen in Switzerland, said most of the companies that signed up for its executive education programmes were Chinese ones that had invested or planned to invest in Europe.

Chinese companies have been boosting investment around the world, encouraged by what the government terms its “Going Out” initiative.

“Chinese executives need to understand European laws, like how do you make sure you respect the rights of people in Europe, how do you partner European companies, just like the Europeans need to be trained and educated on how to do business in China,” Casasi Klett said.

Cheng Hong, the secretary general of China Entrepreneur Club, said that after decades of development, more Chinese companies were getting involved in international operations and management, and therefore needed executives with global vision.

“Companies have started to realise that life-long study is essential to these executives, and when these companies gain the [financial] ability to do so, they are willing to purchase such courses for their executives,” Cheng said. 

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