An MBA does not always mean career success
Interview with Dana Chan,
on how getting an MBA helped her career and the quality of MBA programs in China
The interviewee is the General Manager of Asia
Idea Co., Ltd. and Executive Director of The Jiayu Management Institute
For my undergraduate degree, I majored in computer science at Jinan University in Guangzhou. Then I worked at a university in Hong Kong briefly before joining IBM for three years as a systems engineer.
I made the decision to go for an MBA at that time because I had a lot of
technical knowledge but I needed a business background when I went out
to talk to clients who wanted me to provide business solutions.
I wanted to study in the US and I chose the University of Southern California
because it was the only programme that offered a one-year MBA, and IBM
would only offer me one year education leave. I used all my savings
from the previous four years of work to pay for my MBA.
We were actually surprised by how diverse the USC program was - there were 30 students from 13 different countries and we learned a lot about cross-cultural
interaction from our classmates. When I joined the program, the average
age was 33 and I was one of the youngest. I think I learned more from the
other participants as most of them had a lot of work experience. When
we did a project together we all had different experiences from
different countries and I think it was real advantage of that program.
After graduation, I worked in the US for Andersen Consulting for 4 years and
was assigned to a variety of companies, particularly in the fields of
insurance and IT. Then I went to Jakarta. I had never worked for a
family-owned company and it was very different from my previous experiences.
The company I worked for was the third-largest conglomerate in Indonesia
at the time and I managed their corporate IT. The conglomerate had more
than 70 companies, including finance, manufacturing and agriculture.
The main challenge was to build up a team from scratch. But I think that
the foundation and the standards were very clear and quite advanced.
The situation is the same in China at the moment.
My MBA gave me a lot of academic and networking benefits since I was from a technical background. I wasn't looking for returns on investment from an MBA but for the experience of working in different countries and cultural environments.
I have now worked in Indonesia, Singapore and China in Asia - not many
people get the chance to work in these different kinds of environments.
My children were born in the US and educated in international schools
in Asia. The Jia Yu Management Institute was established mostly to
satisfy internal training needs - more formal pro-grammes for our senior
executives instead of just short courses. Now we are extending this to our
customers, suppliers, and bankers. The staff under their charge say the
managers are not the same now! I can also see these changes in my
immediate subordinates. They think more deeply about issues; this makes a
lot of difference to people development. For corporations like ours,
with 20,000 staff, it's too expensive to send so many of them to external
MBA programs. Some senior executives are sent to external EMBA programs
for networking. The quality of MBAs in China varies a lot, even in
the same university. We may turn down MBA-holders from top universities -
it depends on the individual rather than what degree they have.
It's not easy to find people in China with good people management skills who
can develop others. They may be good at their own work but are not good
in coaching or training. Different programs have different strengths
and this is very important. We will choose the MBA program we recruit
according to the positions we are recruiting for. In addition to local MBA
holders, we have MBA holders from Taiwan and Indonesia coming to work
for us.
