The business world has profoundly changed since 2000. It’s seen the emergence of the global collaboration economy, where traditional forms of economic might, social status and power no longer hold. The old rules have been unwritten in a world now characterised by reduced barriers to entry, shorter product and idea life cycles, endless data and information, and too many distractions – resulting in harder and more complex problems.

All these have changed the way we must approach management education in the 21st century, says Sally Blount, dean of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management – the Illinois-based North American partner of the Kellogg-HKUST EMBA Program.

Amid this shifting landscape, Blount adds, the Kellogg School of Management has pioneered the international expansion of management education for more than 20 years. It has formed a global network of partnerships, which includes the Kellogg-HKUST programme, offering an integrated delivery model that gives students a chance to study at six campuses across four continents, at some of the world’s best business schools in Canada, Germany, Israel, Hong Kong and the US.

“Our students work collaboratively across continents and schools to learn from each other. The combined strength of our HKUST, Kellogg and three other partner school faculties bring incredible breadth and depth to the classroom – in terms of practical knowledge, intellectual thought leadership and international experience in professional management problems and practices,” Blount says.

Besides HKUST, the Kellogg network includes the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto, the WHU-Otto Beisheim School of Management at Vallendar in Germany, the Leon Recanati Graduate School of Business Administration at Tel Aviv University in Israel, as well as Northwestern’s campuses in Chicago and Miami in the US.

“At Kellogg, our mission is to educate, equip and inspire leaders who build strong organisations and wisely leverage the power of markets to create lasting value,” she adds.

“To do this and be successful in today’s complex global marketplace – which requires working across functions, borders and cultures every day – leaders must have clarity of purpose. This clarity comes from being laser-focused on who your customers are and how you can most effectively meet their needs, having deep collaboration skills as bridge-builders and silo-crossers, and being incredibly agile and resilient. Kellogg-HKUST and all of our partners share a commitment to and focus on delivering a premier global experience that builds these skills,” she adds.

Professor Vidhan Goyal, Kellogg-HKUST EMBA academic director, says that the programme is designed for executives who are seeking to move up into general management. The programme integrates the study of management with markets, so that future business leaders will have the tools necessary to not only build strong organisations internally, but to also recognise the external forces affecting their companies and take best competitive advantage of them.

“Businesses are constantly interacting with the outside world, and executives have to develop skills to lead the organisation and know how to leverage their strength to create value by interacting effectively with markets,” he says.

Goyal adds that they help provide business leaders with an analytical framework – putting in place and structuring processes that generate good answers to important questions that any organisation needs to ask and address.

“We are providing a deeper understanding of the analytics that form the structure of the framework required to make decisions, and making sure that business leaders have the leadership skills and social acumen required to effectively lead organisations,” he says.

To achieve this, he says, the core curriculum delves into a wide variety of functional areas, such as marketing, finance, accounting and economics.

“We’ve added extra functional depth into our economics and finance offerings because we feel that, increasingly, business leaders need to have a deeper understanding of the implications of issues in these two fields,” he adds.

“Our faculty members are also moving deeper into these topics by challenging programme participants. We want to prepare business leaders so they can effectively lead organisations in this increasingly complex world,” Goyal says.