Shaping Business Education Around Asian Business Culture

President, CEO, dean, and MVP professor of marketing at the Asian Institute of Management (AIM), as well as member of AACSB's board of directors, Jikyeong Kang, shares with Dan LeClair, EVP and chief strategy and innovation officer at AACSB, how AIM combines all the basics of global business education with the complexities of Asian business culture.

Transcript

Dan LeClair: [00:00] One of the things that I've always admired about you is your global experience. You're Korean. You went to school not only in Korea but you came to the U.S. to study and you went to graduate school at Minnesota. You've also worked in Europe.

[00:33] I know one of the tensions that many schools face today is this tension between, are we a global organization or are we a regional organization? Or are we a national or local organization or business school? I always admired the boldness of the Asian Institute of Management to be about the region, not just about the Philippines.

[00:58] I wonder if you could talk to me about this tension between the globe and the region.

Jikyeong Kang: [01:03] When you say we are the Asian Institute of Management, we don't necessarily restrict our students or stakeholders to Asia. We sometimes, not many, but we sometimes get students from North America, this year we have students from Africa, of course Europe. But what we are all about is, we know how to do business in Asia. We know what it takes to be the manager and a leader in Asia.

[01:37] It's combining all the basic principles of what American or European business schools teach the students. Also we're trying to add the complexities of the culture, economic systems, political environment, the history, even the relationships between people because Asia is growing so fast. It's changing so rapidly. In some ways they are more westernized than the West that I know of.

[02:11] Then underneath that is a very, again, complex... Everything going on there, in terms of how those complexities affect the way the businesses are conducted. I think it's one of those things if you know with experience, you get it. But just reading in the book, or listening to somebody talk, it's not something that you can grasp that easily.

[02:38] I think the fact that we are in the Philippines, in the heart of the emerging market, we are in a very good position to be able to combine all these theories, and principles, and wonderful knowledge that are generated all over the world; a very good playground, if you will, in terms of how these things apply, or sometimes don't apply.

 

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Filmed April 2017 on site at AACSB's International Conference and Annual Meeting (ICAM) in Houston, Texas, USA.