Venus and Mars

Santiago Iñiguez, Dean of Instituto de Empresa Business School.

Venus and Mars; is how some view European society and thinking as opposed to that of America (it’s debatable if that includes Canada or Mexico). This metaphor has been used to illustrate the different general abiding attitudes on opposing sides of the Atlantic vis-à-vis social issues, philosophy and religion etc. Does this same paradigm apply to management education?

Some differing cultural and structural features are at the root of this confrontation between the two different archetypes of American and European business schools. In America prevails a shareholder culture, universities rely heavily on the income generated by their endowments and the MBA market is the biggest and the most homogeneous worldwide. In Europe, there is a dominant stakeholder culture, management education is still very fragmented and there is a coexistence of various business school models. ( A difference of opinion | Economist.com 4/5th paragraph). If I were to choose a word to define higher education in Europe it would be “diversity”. The size of the American education market and the resources available to business schools result in more research-oriented faculties and in a more decisive role of a school’s brand name. As regards sources of revenue, business schools in our continent rely almost entirely on the revenues generated by their activities and, in the case of public universities, on state subsidies.

Let’s give credit to where credit is due: Management Education was invented in America. In fact, the first MBA in history was launched by Dartmouth University, my co-blogger’s stomping ground. However in Europe, the flourishing of business schools only occurred in the late 1950s. Many business examples demonstrate that being the pioneer does not necessarily ensure continuing as the benchmark in the long run. The Wright Brothers first flight heralded a subsequent US lead of the aviation industry for the rest of the century. However, Airbus, the European aircraft manufacturing consortium, has overtaken Boeing in the past years.(Financial Times: Boeing/Airbus)

Analogously, it seems that in the last decade European business schools have caught-up with their American counterparts and have lost their historical inferiority complex. Della Bradshaw, the renowned journalist of the Financial Times and co-blogger, might agree with me having written articles like European schools make a move up the table in her Business Education section.

Despite the two differing models of management education, the trend is, irreversibly, towards convergence: it is a consequence of globalisation. Will the descendent of Venus and Mars take more after its mother or father?

Comments

[Santiago Iñiguez]

, Dean of Instituto de Empresa Business School,

Thank you, Joseph, for being the first commentator in our blog. Let me further fuel the debate by bringing a good synopsis of recent books with Europe vs. America perspectives.
The New York Review of Books
At the same time, I believe it’s only fair to recognise that Europe is not in its best shape these days. Let’s see what comes out of the European Prime Ministers’ summit ending today. I hope we can still adhere to Wharton’s Professor Jeremy Rifkin statement: “Europe has become a giant laboratory for rethinking humanity’s future”.
The European Dream

[Joseph Haslam]

I like to reference Entrepreneur and IE Professor Martin Varsavsky when interviewers ask me about this.

"The Europeans may be late with colour TV but it looks better. They may be late with cell phones, but they sound better.' I don't want to sound offensive to Americans, but I really believe that Europe often does things later, but many times better."
Young, Rich & Restless Forbes Magazine, April 1999.

I choose to do an MBA at IE as I favoured the European model of management education: older intake, international recruiting emphasis, shorter duration, more qualitative content, professor exchanges, corporate social responsibility, mandatory entrepreneurship modules, foreign language courses etc. etc. etc.

If management education really is moving "irreversibly, towards convergence", I hope that these more European features survive in the shakeout.