When Luis Cabral starts work in the impressive, six-story Landmark building opposite the Carnegie Hall concert venue in Manhattan this month, it will not be to the sound of audience applause or to the smell of greasepaint. An economist by trade, he will be the first professor to be based in Iese Business School's New York campus. But Prof Cabral will not be the last: a dozen faculty members from the Spanish business school will move there over the next few years.
This Spanish school is not the only business school pursuing expansionist dreams. Indeed, the argument that recession inhibits global expansion is one that seems lost on business schools, which are pursuing international growth with vigour. Even Harvard Business School – which has always argued that students should go to Harvard, not Harvard to students – has succumbed. For the first time in its 101-year history, HBS will this month open its first teaching facility outside Cambridge, Massachusetts, in Shanghai.
While Iese's move to the US marks the first time that a top European business school has had the temerity to tread in the backyard of some of the richest and most powerful MBA schools in the world, the past year has seen a whole raft of new business school ventures set up across the Middle East and Asia, as the regions' corporations, governments and students develop a taste for formalised management training. What is more, they are banging at the door of established business schools to help them in their quest. These aspiring schools have the money and the will, but not the expertise, points out Colin Mayer, dean of the Saïd school at the University of Oxford, which has been approached by several aspiring institutions. Their success will depend on getting the appropriate balance between independence and accountability, he says. “The faculty will flow if they have both the money and the correct governance structure,” he says. “The governance structure is the really complex element.”