CKGSB's global expansion plans were recently covered in this article on Hexun.com, which features an interview with Greg Marchi, CKGSB's Chief Representative in the Americas.
Summary of an article written in Chinese for Hexun.com.
A source for Hexun.com has told us that entrepreneur Xiang Bing is bringing Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (CKGSB) to the rest of the world.
Dean Xiang’s vision is that CKGSB will become more globalized in the coming decade by expanding its operations to London, New York, Singapore, Tokyo and even South America; it will cover a wider range of fields, integrate the education resources of partners such as the Harvard Kennedy School and the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, and expand beyond business administration to social administration. The school plans to establish the global authority of its academic platform in related research fields such as East Asia’s “10+3” and BRICS; pool more full-time world-class professors, and produce an array of original academic results, thus ranking among the world’s most influential business schools.
CKGSB’s New York Office will open in November 2013. In the future, the office will promote CKGSB’s development in North America and South America in order to offer foreign enterprises, especially multinationals with Chinese branches, a deeper understanding of China, according to Greg Marchi, the office’s chief representative, who spoke with Hexun.com recently.
During the ten years prior to joining CKGSB, Marchi held several senior posts for Duke Corporate Education, a program that provides customized executive training, development and teaching services to customers worldwide, and has been ahead of its peers on lists released by the Financial Times and Business Week.
“Dean Xiang is a farsighted leader. I was affected by him in the conversations I had with him, and in CKGSB I saw similarities with the Duke Corporate Education of ten years ago. So I am confident of doing well at CKGSB. In addition, it is a rare opportunity for me to feel the cultural fusion of Oriental and Western cultures,” Marchi told hexun.com.
Marchi joined Duke in the third year after the establishment of Duke Corporate Education, when the program had only 35 employees and 1 office. When he left, the program had earned 63 million US dollars annually, and owned 6 offices with 135 employees worldwide. The results have been inseparable from his contribution as a senior leader.
Many people have been influenced by Dean Xiang. In 2002, accounting professor Liu Jin obtained lifelong tenure from the University of California, Los Angeles. He had many papers published in key international academic magazines. Then one day, a person claiming to be CKGSB’s president sent him an e-mail, saying he would leave Beijing for Los Angeles to discuss the possibility of returning with him to work in China. After a three-hour chat, Liu was overwhelmed with excitement. That autumn, he decided to join CKGSB.
You can imagine how difficult it was to convince a professor to resign from lifelong tenure at a distinguished university in order to join an unknown business school, with less pay than at other elite schools. Xiang’s most persuasive reason is “patriotism”, which can find an echo in the hearts of scholars joining CKGSB regardless of generations.
“You know many of the world’s top business schools are studying China, but most of CKGSB’s professors were born in China and returned to China after being educated in the West, so they know China better than any foreign scholar does and are capable of linking their values to the West’s,” Marchi told Hexun.com.
China’s economy is expected to grow continuously for the next two decades and will overtake the US as the world’s largest economy in the near future. New business institutions will emerge as economic growth generates a huge demand for executive education. At least three to five top business schools are expected to emerge from this process and Dean Xiang believes CKGSB would be one of them.
Read the original article in Chinese.
