Asian Management Education: Some Twenty-First-Century Issues

Abstract

David B. Montgomery is Dean of the Lee Kong Chian School of Business, Singapore Management University, and Kresge Professor of Marketing–Emeritus, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University (e-mail: dmontgomery@smu.edu.sg). 1This article is largely based on a paper presented by the author at the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) conference in Seoul, Korea, in October 2004 (see Montgomery 2004). 2Singapore Management University opened its doors to students in fall 2000. The School of Business was the first of four schools at the university, and it enrolls more than 1800 undergraduate business majors and approximately 100 master’s students. The 85 (which will be more than 100 by 2006) international faculty are from 15 countries, and no country has a majority representation. In April 2004, a grant from the Lee Foundation, which was multiplied by the Singapore government, came to more than US$130 million. It is the first private university based in Singapore and is designed to be a U.S.-style research and teaching university with a totally merit-based promotion system. Wilkie and Moore (2003) suggest that there have been four major eras of marketing thought. As a participant in Eras III and IV, I have observed the shifting forces that shaped marketing in the latter third of the twentieth century. I have recently reported on some of the important events of Era III development that are related to management science in marketing, a subject near and dear to my heart (Montgomery 2001). Furthermore, I have reported at least a partial vision of the direction in which marketing thought is heading (Era V?) (Day and Montgomery 1999; Montgomery 2003). As a long-standing global participant and currently an expatriate marketing academic, in this article, I want to explore something of the global dimensions of Era IV marketing.1 This article focuses on issues related to professional management education in Asia at the beginning of the twentyfirst century, but I contend that these also tend to be globally important. These are issues that the public and private sector must address in the coming decade. This discussion is by no means exhaustive, and I do not present a total action plan. Rather, the goal is to note at least some of the agenda for government, not-for-profit institutions (e.g., most education institutions, despite the growing move toward for profit education), and the private sector, the vast consumer of the output of such education. Because my current position is dean of the upstart Lee Kong Chian School of Business at Singapore Management University, these are also issues that concern me professionally in a direct way.2