By Susan Church

While riding a train, Dr. Alex Miller and Dr. Pat Postma plan activities for their Executive MBA students.

Pat Postma doesn't believe in business as usual. As head of a lauded MBA program that prides itself on training entrepreneurial thinkers, Postma grooms her business students to expect the unexpected. But even she did a double take the night she stepped out of her hotel in Shanghai after dinner, her eyes dazzled by flashing neon lights, shops brimming with consumer goods, and thousands of people in the streets. "Here I was, leaving one four-star hotel, and I looked across the street and there was another four-star hotel. The last time I was there 12 years ago, none of that was there," she said. Not the hotels, not the neon. "Shanghai had become a modern city, and I needed constantly to remind myself that China was not what it once was." That's a vital lesson for business executives who hope to sell their products in a global economy. And it's taught at UT Knoxville's Executive MBA Program by plucking students out of the comfortable confines of classrooms and corporate suites and setting them down on foreign soil. At UTK, corporate executives earning their MBAs are required to spend two weeks abroad with fellow students and faculty as part of their intensive, yearlong training towards the degree. This year's trip included a visit to Hong Kong and the People's Republic of China. Last year -- the first for the Executive MBA Program --- included a swing through Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The program moves south next year, picking up Chile and Argentina. The emphasis, said Postma, is on giving students a hands-on experience with nations that are now or soon will be embracing some form of market driven economy. "These areas could be hot new markets for the USA five years from now or the best place to hire software developers over the next 10 years," Postma predicted. "If a company isn't there early, it could be at a real disadvantage. Businesses today can't think of the USA as a self-contained market. It's essential to operate with a sense of the global business world. Because if you don't, your competitor will be knocking on the world's doors first."

A window carving at a temple near Shanghai.

Last September's trip took 24 students and five faculty on a two-week tour through Hong Kong and China, focusing on the industrialized south. Students had access to Chinese factories and foreign joint ventures, including plants run by Kellogg's, Volkswagen, and Xerox, in the communist country. They also had time to squeeze their way through congested streets, catch the strident tone of street vendors haggling over the price of produce, and watch cities giving birth to capitalist culture. Thousands of miles from home, the students saw much that startled them with its familiarity. Dr. Inez Tuck said she was prepared for a repressive landscape, epitomized by the shapeless, dour gray Mao jacket. What she found was a land charmed by capitalist couture. "I was surprised by how Western it was," said Tuck, who is director of the master's degree program in nursing at UT and earning her MBA. "The women were very fashionable. They could just as easily have been walking down the streets of New York City. At every step of the way, I was reminded of just how little we know about other lands." But Western dress, factories and traffic congestion do not an occidental nation make. Students also became aware of the subtleties of dealing with a land where everything from favorite foods to concepts of time are vastly different than the West's. Kellogg's, which has a manufacturing plant in Hangzhou, the former Canton, is faced with a battle to convince consumers that a bowl of cold flakes soaked in a beverage the average Chinese hasn't tasted since infancy is better for breakfast than a steaming hot bowl of rice. George Cooper said the biggest lesson he learned from the trip is to "assume nothing." "Even the smallest assumption can get you in trouble," said Cooper, an MBA student who is director of quality at Arvin Industries, a Columbus, Indiana, producer of exhaust systems, that would like to develop links in Southeast Asia. Cooper had a conversation with a Chinese businessman, chiding him for the country's political stance that had kept the nation's doors closed to foreigners for over a hundred years. The implication was that China was so far behind in the global economy, it might as well bow out of the race. But the Chinese businessman took a longer view of history. "He told me, 'So we had a bad hundred years. Give us another hundred and we'll catch up,'" Cooper related. "Even their sense of time is more expansive than ours."

The class visits a Hong Kong station of China Power and Light, known for its operating efficiency.

In some ways, the Chinese have quickly caught up to the West, the UTK travelers said. In traffic congestion and sheer numbers, they outpace their Western counterparts. Hong Kong alone is bulging with over 14,000 people per square mile, making it one of the most densely populated cities on the planet. The city is laced with scaffolding and prodded by bulldozers in the rush to build new factories and high rises to house workers. Some of the students found that alarming. "They're running towards a goal of industrialization for which they're going to pay a terrible price," said Jack Ditterline, executive vice president of Belvack Production Machinery in Lynchburg, Va. Ditterline conjures up an image of the city of Shenzhen, one of 14 free enterprise zones the Chinese government has established in an experiment with capitalist economies. "It's dusty, dirty, continually under construction," Ditterline said. "The Chinese are making the same mistakes we made in ignoring the ecological implications of industrialization, but they're making them in a much shorter time, which means their decisions will have a greater impact -- and be more costly in the long run. "They're rushing headlong into what we in the United States have begun to question," Ditterline said. "The pressure, the congestion -- the very things we've now begun to ask, 'Is it worth it?'" In a hundred years, perhaps, the Chinese will find out. Taiwan Branch The mirror image of the UTK Executive MBA program exists in Taiwan. It's also run by UTK. The University exports its EMBA courses and instructors to Taiwan to teach Taiwanese executives subjects such as systems improvement, measuring value, entry into world markets, process management, and organizational effectiveness. The program began last summer. Over a period of a year and a half, the Taiwanese execs spend six residence periods of a week or more each in classes. The rest of the time they are at their normal jobs. Their final "class" will be three weeks at UTK, where they will share courses with the EMBA students who did a residence in China as part of their program (see main story). UTK is among a small group of leading business colleges that have taken the foreign plunge. UTK's Pat Postma says enhancing the program's image -- "contacts, knowledge, credibility in terms of your level of sophistication, and acceptance by places other than the state of Tennessee" -- is part of the reason for the international outreach. Tuition for each of the 17 Taiwanese executives is $26,000.

Tennessee Alumnus, Spring 1996