Ploughing a new furrow: insights from the Global MBA Singapore
Published 25 March 2010
In June 2009 14 students met for the very first time in a seminar room in the Leadership Management Centre in Singapore. A little apprehensive perhaps, excited certainly, for they were about to embark on a totally new venture – the first Lancaster Global MBA.
The Lancaster Global MBA programme is run by LUMS in conjunction with local partners. In Singapore that partner is the Leadership Management Centre, and the students on the two-year part-time programme (since joined by a dozen more) are all full-time employees, drawn from many different sectors.
Nine months on, what has the experience been like, and is it living up to their expectations? We talked to two students from that first intake, Wai Leong Mook, a principal engineer with a micro-electronics company, and Ian Huggins, a Brit who has lived and worked in Asia for the past 15 years.
New ways of thinking
‘I came into it with my eyes open, as I knew from discussions beforehand with people who’d done an MBA that it would be demanding, but I still underestimated it,’ says Ian Huggins, a former Royal Marines Commando who is now business development director for a company that manufactures sub-sea diving equipment used in the gas and oil industry.
The demands of his job, which requires frequent travel across the whole of South East Asia, meant that for Ian the programme’s modular structure, with its four-day teaching blocks, was a star attraction:
‘The way I work, and the kind of person I am, I knew that trying to do a distance learning type course would have left me in the wilderness. I like the way this programme is designed so that we come together every couple of months or so for a long weekend – it’s great timing for me, with the amount of travelling I have to do, and it’s also great to be able to question people face-to-face.’
While friends have questioned whether he, at 48 and already at director level, really needs an MBA, Ian is in no doubt of the benefits for him, both personally and professionally.
‘It is an investment in myself – admittedly a fairly sizeable one but one I can afford at this stage in my career. Having gone straight from school into the military, without stopping to get a degree, I’ve done well to get where I am without any formal education, but I want to go higher.
The Leadership Management Centre, Goldbell Towers
‘I’m an operational guy, and I’m highly experienced in project management. But I also knew there were other aspects of the business that I didn’t normally have exposure to. I had no formal training in areas such as economics, for example. So I wanted to fill some of those gaps – the MBA is helping me to do that.’
What has surprised him is both the amount he has learnt, and the extent to which it is already shaping his everyday work and his way of thinking:
‘The programme is a continual eye-opener, as you see how the various functional elements each contribute to the business. Obviously I knew that before, but looking at those elements in depth really brings that into sharp focus.
‘Every time we move on to another assignment – and I typically write about my own company – I find there’s an area I’ve suddenly become aware of, and that will have an effect. I start questioning what’s going on in our company. Normally we’re so busy managing and making decisions: what the MBA does is make you step back, look at other options. It makes you see ‘red flags’, allows me to realise when I actually need to find out more, seek out the local expert. Prior to my MBA, that might have gone right over my head, and I might not even have recognised the issue.’
‘The theory we are learning is putting it all into perspective. You can reflect back on decisions you’ve made, going on gut feel. Not necessarily bad decisions, but now, using the theories, you can see just how problems or opportunities developed. Then maybe, going forward, you’ll be able to head off issues in advance, prevent them ever occurring. Maybe I’m better placed to do that now.’
New ways of learning
Malaysian-born Wai Leong Mook did his engineering degree in the US, joined the US firm Micron Technology eight years ago, then moved with them to Singapore. When researching where to do an MBA, he deliberately selected a UK programme as he wanted to try something new.
His rationale for doing an MBA was to broaden his professional expertise and knowledge, and, not surprisingly, to extend his career opportunities.
‘As a principal engineer, the nature of my work is essentially engineering-based and technical. I wanted to know more about business side of the operation – the management, finance and economics. My goal is to move up gradually through the management path, and the Global MBA will help prepare me for future opportunities as they come along.’
The Lancaster Global MBA struck him as being different on various dimensions, but has offered more than he had first bargained for.
Lancaster Global MBA students in Singapore
‘It’s definitely a little different from any other programme I’ve been on, or from others I’ve heard about from friends doing MBAs at other schools,’ says Mook. ‘It’s not so task-intensive – and the way the modules are organised, it gives you a very fresh and different view of learning. That’s one thing I hadn’t expected: how different learning could be, just by changing the way the courses are structured and also how we are being evaluated as students.
‘Doing assignments, rather than purely tests and exams, means that we get to focus on reading, analysing and critically taking on a subject and working on it. I think more about what I’m learning than I did before.
‘With this programme you’re encouraged to be critical about what you are learning, and to give your opinion of whether you agree or not. We’re taught not to take things at face value. That’s very different from what I learnt during my undergraduate studies. It’s what I was expecting from an MBA programme like Lancaster’s.
‘Most of the assignment topics are based on what I’m doing right now, at work. So in terms of management aspects or economics, I’ve started to look at the business side of my work. Looking at my current organisation is giving me a broader view of what I’m currently working on. That helps me a lot in approaching my work and understanding it from a different perspective.
Like Ian, Mook was drawn by the modular approach of the Lancaster programme:
‘Doing one module at a time is very different from doing two or three modules in a single semester. It gives you more time to learn to think about subjects – freedom to study subjects that interest me more, rather than going through three or four months on multiple courses.
‘What I most enjoy is learning new stuff. But besides the academic work it is great meeting the students in the class, working with them and sharing ideas. They come from different backgrounds and are very interesting, as they have different ideas. People are pretty outspoken. They don’t shy away from giving their own opinions, so it keeps it pretty exciting.’
Students from the first cohort of the Global MBA Singapore
The Lancaster Global MBA is now being offered in two locations: Singapore and Jordan. To find out more, see the Lancaster Global MBA web pages.
