Regional focus
russia

Russia starts to beat its own path
By Ross Geraghty
With any fast-developing economy comes a need for skilled leaders, strategists and
managers to take that economy forward. With a country as vast and well-resourced as
russia the need is paramount and the country’s ambitious MBAs have always looked
overseas for their business education. until now.
N
ot long ago the idea of a Russian MBA
would have been met with a polite shake
of the head from many western
academics and businesspeople. Many felt the roots
of the long-entrenched planned economy would
take more than two decades to sever. Meanwhile
case studies, the core of MBA learning methods
for top business schools from Harvard onwards,
were harder to find from recent Russian history.
Unless it meant chewing over the bones of the
defunct socialist system, Russian business education
would have to look abroad for case studies; so why
wouldn’t a Russian study an MBA course abroad?
The foundation of quality education in most
of 20th century Russia was rooted in the sciences,
driven largely by political interests. While the
west developed market economies, Russian
business education took a different tack.
“Economics was about studying the
principles of the socialist system,” says Ruben
Vardanyan, President of the Moscow School of
Management Skolkovo and CEO of Troika
Dialog. “It didn’t give any sufficient understanding
on how the capital market economy operates.”
As the Cold War thawed and ex-USSR
nations moved towards market economies, the
need for business leaders radically increased.
However, as Andrei Movchan, CEO of
Renaissance Investment Management, a part of
Renaissance Group and Chicago GSB Executive
MBA alumnus, observes, business education
often takes time to catch up: “[Most] local
business schools are composed around the old
economics departments of universities with the
old tradition of teaching economics of socialism
and hardly changed professorial staff.”
For Movchan, clearly, the level of education
is not as a satisfactory level yet. “[They] are often
farther from real economics and management
than astrologists from astronomy, full of ‘planned
economy’ ideas and teaching local accounting
standards as a main subject.”
The Kremlin
40 TopMBA CAreer Guide www.topmba.com
MBA_FALL_08_pp_002-065.indd 40 11/8/08 18:29:30
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