I. Mission
Backed by its parent Fudan University which is endlessly driven by its own sense of responsibility, the School of Management announces that its mission is to cultivate business leaders and professional managers who fit into economic development needs in China and are internationally competent. Meanwhile, in light of development progress in Chinese economy, the school tries to crystallize the management experience and thoughts achieved in China, carry out innovative research, and share its outputs with academic and business circles from home and abroad.
Our goal is clearly targeted to become one of world’s top-tier management schools in next 20 years.
Let’s put it specifically. Firstly in the field of teaching, we’d like to streamline our arrangements of curricular and the structure of students and faculty resources, in line with the world’s top-notch business schools. Our school faculty members are going to apprehend every step of disciplinary evolutions and academic transformations to take place in every research area around the world, and our students will emerge abreast with students from Harvard, Oxford, Standford, as well as other top-notch universities, as top priorities for various kinds of enterprises.
Secondly in the field of academic research, we encourage our faculty members not only to write English papers to demonstrate to the outside world what’s happening in China, but write Chinese ones to share their thoughts with domestic entrepreneurs and to help them expand their businesses, and only thus can they succeed in establishing the system of management theories with Chinese characteristics.
Our school settles the mission onto cultivating professional managers. About 80% of our students are deemed to become professional managers, with the remaining 20% to take up risks of business start-up. It is a considerable risk to start own business, and the society can not, in any way, afford the aftermath of a majority of MBA graduates thronging to do the same thing and start their own businesses. The main job of a business school is to provide training for the future professional managers. Besides, upon the success of our EMBA graduates in starting up their businesses, they are certainly in need of professional managers to sustain the development of their companies. Therefore, the role a professional manger is to play in the society is to make sure that the company he/she is working for is running in a harmonious, orderly way.
Furthermore, our school’s mission is to upgrade the socioeconomic status and wellbeing of entrepreneurs. Naturally born with motivation and passion in starting own businesses, those talented people need training to explore their potentials and optimize their structure of knowledge, which, of course, falls into the educational responsibility of our school. The life-long endurance of our professors in study and research contributes to up-leveling those entrepreneurs to otherwise unattainable heights in terms of business visions and potentials for future developments.
Certainly, our school, as far-sighted and full of sense of obligation as ever, spares no effort in motivating the students to take up risks of business startup, and our effort is to equip them with more knowledge and wisdom through education. They are more likely to claim success in business startup, other than those without being provided with training by the school. Also, the successful business people return to attend our EMBA and MBA classes, as they have realized that, the key to sustain their business life is to be aware of where the risk lies, and how to make decisions correctly.
II. Value
Two factors are crucial when exerting judgments on whether a management school is successful or not, and they are:
Firstly, whether the academic works created by the school enjoy influence on an extensive scale, or how many people have read our works, how positively our works have acted to affect management practices and governmental policies.
Secondly, whether the alumni of the school have helped push forward the development of companies they are working for, and become part of corporate executive management teams. We should focus on how to improve students’ thinking and learning abilities by means of specialized training. But now, more concerns are paid on convey of knowledge to students, rather than on their breakthrough of thinking abilities which is far more important than previous one. Eyeing that, certainly we should evaluate how far our school has gone on the right track from a perspective of development.
Students should learn to improve their abilities in the management school. Are our students able to earn 5 million yuan more? To study in our school is similar to have our professors play jigsaw games with students, without knowledge on how to contribute to the next step. And the professors unfold in front of you how a tool or skill is like toward making up a picture. In this regard, what our students would learn in the class is how to utilize a tool, or a skill, to enable them to create a clear picture about the future. And only that way can the students know how to make 5 million yuan or more.
Our school doesn’t promise you make profit, but ensures that you are of more possibilities of making profit through training. We often hear our EMBA students conclude that they’ve known how to avoid risks in corporate operations, like in internal controls, and prevent their mistakes from happening again.
III. Path
1. Innovation
The key issue at the core of our school’s development is how to advance with time and stick to innovation policy. To be specific, we have two areas to develop in regard to innovation. The first is to innovate on the educational system, and optimize the structure of curricula. The second is to innovate on our methods of exploring students’ thinking power. What our school is doing on the innovation issue is purposed to seize the development opportunities and try as best as it could to solve the problems to emerge along with further development of Chinese economy.
It seems that currently the development of our society and corporate growth has outpaced that of theories. If it continues to be what it is now, we would become anything but helpful to our students, and unable to meet their demands of solving unpredictable problems which might emerge in the future of their jobs. Therefore, the major task in front of our school is how to keep innovating on our educational system and curricula structure and components.
The second part of our innovation is on how to improve our methods of exploring students’ thinking power, enabling them to keep up with the pace of our times through self-study, short-term courses and lectures. In the eyes of entrepreneurs and corporate senior managers, the job of our school is to prepare them to optimize their business modes, overcome obstacles and limits, when confronted with challenges to show up during the process of corporate development.
There are three aspects of innovation which our school is willing to share with others.
The first is hardware conditions. Our school is heading forward to catch up with the world’s top-tier management schools, and dedicated to improving the fundamental facilities suitable to support the development of management-related disciplines.
The second is diversification of resources. Our school is seeking a road to the hall of world-class management schools, by trying to restructure the resources best available in China. For example, the school is bound to optimize the composition of its faculty team, by not only recruiting Chinese scholars who return from overseas study, but inviting domestic well-established experts to join us.
The third is advancements to go with our times. Our school is operating an extensive scale of innovations in, for example, research perspectives and topics, research methods, curricula system, teaching skills, and evaluation and management system of the school, all in all in light of rapid economic development of China. We are going to build “a university without national boundaries,” or “a campus without walls,” and in only that way is our school able to cement its status on the international stage.
2. Sustainable development
Under a market segmentation guideline, our school tends to identify different segments of the market in accordance with students’ requirements, and separately promote programs and services to these segments. The purpose of sustainability in our school’s development requires us to manipulate the accumulated resources to keep increasing our faculty’s levels of profession, enhancing their quality of research, and exploring the potentials of our students’ capabilities.
Our interpretation of sustainable development is that, we should take time to build up resources and capabilities, and expand our scale in a gradual way. Or, based on a scale unchanged, we should continue to hone our competitive edge in all aspects. We should never ever turn a blind eye on the plan and lead the school expansion in a wrong direction.
We lead the market, instead of being driven by the market. We are knowledge workers guiding academic and social developments, without being distracted by outside temptations for short-term purposes. It is true that our school is operating on a comparatively large scale and, more importantly, our operations are firmly backed by Fudan University and mesh well with market demands. We dare to conclude that we have a big more potential of choices, and we are waiting to see more and more top students to come to study in our school.
We tend to select top parts of the list of candidates who apply to study in our school. The EMBA students we want to enroll are those who are potentially competent of becoming leaders in various industries, while the MBA students to be enrolled are those youth elites who are part of future leadership. Our school strictly follows its own philosophy of student selections, eager to sustain and even uplift its unique status on the international stage. Gradually but steadily, we are certain to make progress until we brand our name in the hall of world-top management schools.
We pride in our solid foundation, up-to-date teaching facilities, highly competent faculty, and well-honed international image of the school, and we witness more and more Chinese and overseas students choose the school as top priority for their further study. Unwaveringly, we are picking up the pace in extending our range of resources and capabilities and following the right track of developing a world-class management school in a sustainable way.
3. Internationalization
We interpret “internationalization” in its core as that, we should make it possible for our educational achievements to be shared in academic and industrial cycles, and for our students, who are broad-minded and equipped with global visions, to live and work in any country without any fear of possible challenges. With a context of Chinese enterprises increasingly turning globalized, our school is also accelerating its steps in internationalizing process, taking measures such as to keep its curricula development up with the overseas progress, and send faculty members overseas to accept further training and learn from their overseas peers. Also, a double-channel method is applied to facilitate the efforts of domestic students and overseas students in exchanging with each other. In conclusion, the concept of internationalization has been materialized to enlighten every corner of our school.
Our effort of going internationalized is earmarked with those programs we are cooperating with overseas peers. There are so many global economic issues which deserve common attention of all of us, while many issues happening in Chinese market are the focus of worldwide concerns. Eager as they are to be part of Chinese market, many overseas companies have little knowledge of Chinese situation, and thus hope to hire local talents to work as senior managers in their multinationals. Talents are increasingly globalized, too, as we see many foreigners are working in China, and more Chinese are working abroad. In such a situation, cooperation is urgently needed to improve our education quality, considering that we have to develop future managers and equip them with global perspectives. It is why our international education programs are favorite ones for students. Our school is now housing numerous programs with overseas partners, and we hope to go further and set our cooperation footsteps outside China soon in the future.
On the cusp of our international partnership, Fudan-Washington University EMBA Program was ranked No.7 in the world by Financial Times in 2007, an evidence of our efforts of internationalization. Besides, the school enjoys PIM membership, an equivalent of a more extensive range of opportunities in cooperating and exchanging with world-class management schools. The membership also reflects the proud status of our school in the world.
Our road to go internationalized is to realize a “dream come true”: we want to become a heavyweight management school on the international arena.