Look to Youth

There's a huge need for developing business leaders with practical experience and good education. While China's universities have grown rapidly, business schools lag behind, mostly because of a lack of qualified teachers. Business training is a great field for development, as noted in this LA Times article.

...MBA[s]... are highly sought after in China, whose scorching growth has left companies scrambling to fill management positions. Foreign firms complain of high turnover and poaching wars in their executive suites.

"China has a real leadership development crisis right now, mostly because of the unique circumstances of the Cultural Revolution," said Doug Guthrie, a China business expert at New York University.

Guthrie was referring to the period from 1966 to 1976, when Communist leader Mao Tse-tung closed the universities and sent the country's brightest young people to the countryside to be "reeducated." Instead of managing companies, these now 50- and 60-year-olds are toiling in factories and driving taxis.

When Rafael Pastor, chief executive of Vistage International Inc., an organization of CEOs, interviewed people to run his new office in Shanghai, he was shocked at their youth. His top candidate for the managing director's job is 39 years old.

"He's great," said Pastor, a former investment banker and executive at News Corp. "But he's only got as much experience as a 39-year-old person can have. There's no way I can find a more seasoned person."

In an effort to close this experience gap, Chinese universities such as Tsinghua are reaching out to U.S. institutions such as MIT's Sloan School of Management and USC's Marshall School of Business for help establishing programs to teach China's first generation of professionally trained business leaders. Universities have formed transpacific partnerships, sharing professors, students and curriculum.

That infusion of foreign assistance has helped boost the number of Chinese MBA programs from nine in 1991 to more than 100 today. In 2004, China graduated about 10,000 MBAs, compared with 139,000 such degrees in the U.S.

But Chinese universities, like the companies they are serving, can't expand fast enough because of a shortage of teachers, Pastor said.