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An American MBA programme currently running in Germany has been taken up by students from 20 other countries. Simon Kent flew out to Frankfurt’s Duke University in search of the true meaning of international business education
The challenge of managing an international organisation is not simply one of scale. Dealing with problems and issues within a local territory can be hard enough, but barriers such as language, time difference and cultural practice complicate matters further.
As a result of these pressures, the internationally minded manager now has an increasing number of options for MBA programmes that not only offer skills to operate in the market place, but provide experience of communicating in the global business world as part of the learning process.
Duke, the Fuqua School of Business, now offers a Cross-Continent MBA, which provides a combination of real and virtual campus environments for its international students.
Introduced in November 2000, the course currently has 101 students from over a dozen countries on the 20-month programme of study. Split between the European campus just outside Frankfurt Airport in Germany and the US campus in Durham, North Carolina, students learn through intensive face-to-face tutorial sessions and a permanent web link, which offers a means of communication between student and tutor, a discussion platform for the students themselves and access to the school’s extensive online library.
According to Professor Thomas Keller, Dean of Duke, the creation of the programme was a direct response to student demand in terms of study time as much as it was a result of international skills need or even the capabilities of technology supported learning. “We perceived there was a need for people who had started their careers and wanted to study for an MBA but did not want to leave their job to do a full time course,” Keller says.
“We were offering that possibility to some extent through a weekend-delivered programme at the Durham campus, but the course needed to have a broader geographical reach.”
Duke was approached by many organisations across Germany and Eastern Europe that felt they could benefit from an American-style MBA programme, but found extended residential study in the US an
