The magazine for alumni and friends of the UB School of Management
Issue link: http://ubschoolofmanagement.uberflip.com/i/168939
Autumn.2013Final_layout 8/1/13 12:47 PM Page 14 Photo: Douglas Levere The Jacobs Management Center on UB's North Campus opened in 1985 Approaching the millennium and replaced Crosby Hall The school's global reputation was burgeoning, and the early '90s were marked by the creation of several international partnerships. With funding from a series of federal grants, the school provided instructional and consulting services in Hungary. The school also partnered with UB's English Language Institute and the University of Ottawa in 1994 to help establish a new business school at the Riga Technical University in Latvia. The Riga Business School awarded the first MBA degrees the next year. Frederick "Rick" Winter was named dean in 1994, succeeding Howard Foster, who served the school from 1990 to 1994 in what seems to have been the longest interim dean appointment in the school's history. That same year, the school introduced the Executive MBA program, and the first class of 21 students graduated in 1996. In another global collaboration, the school reached an agreement with the Singapore Institute of Management to offer an Executive MBA in Singapore that began in 1996. Dean Winter identified five "megatrends" that were shaping business education: globalization (and our duty to prepare students to be competitive in any market); the need for skills beyond classroom experience (with skills in communication, leadership, team building, creative thinking and understanding diversity topping the list); increased competition (including the proliferation of media rankings); strategic alliances (the need to collaborate with on the South Campus as the School of Management's home. 14 Buffalo Business Autumn 2013 corporations, nonprofits, alumni and even other academic institutions); and declining state and federal support (specifically how UB, like most state universities, received less than 30 percent of its budget from the state, and that was rapidly declining). Winter reconstituted the school's Corporate Advisory Board to include distinguished alumni as well as local executives, and renamed it the Dean's Advisory Council. In 1997, the school's part-time MBA program was transformed into the Professional MBA program, creating a more convenient and streamlined evening program for working professionals. With the 1998 launch of the first-ever Executive MBA program in China, the school made a historic return to the country where it forged its reputation as a leader in international management education. Offered at Renmin University of China in Beijing, the new program was created to provide top executives with an education in Western-style management practices. All 51 students in the inaugural class were Chinese nationals. "Our first class is representative of the complex, changing economic climate of China," said Lewis Mandell, who had taken the helm as dean that year. "We have a mix of executives from U.S. corporations, European corporations and Chinese state-owned enterprises. For business to compete in the world marketplace, it is imperative that the country's top executives learn new ways of thinking and working." The school was praised by BusinessWeek as "a pioneer in the Asian market for management education." Back on American soil, the school launched an innovative new competency-building course for its MBAs called Leadership PACE (Personal Achievement through Competency Evaluation). The course was created to help MBA students develop the intangible skills that make the difference between being a good executive and a great executive. "We went directly to corporate recruiters and asked what traits they most desire in their employees," explained Jerry Newman, SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus and champion of the