Melbourne Business School’s (MBS) MBA has been ranked #1 in Asia by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).
Not only that, the MBA has been ranked #17 in the world (up from #26 last year) and this puts it ahead of INSEAD in Asia and even Columbia and MIT Sloan in the US!
Good job, MBS!
Joshua Gans has written an excellent post on the proposed merger between Melbourne Business School (MBS) and the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Economics and Commerce (FEC) that didn’t go through.
In it, he lists some of the factors that contributed to the merger being blocked; such as the differences in organizational culture, teaching culture, and industry engagement between the two schools.
He isn’t as concerned about competition from the FEC as I am (more on this some other time) but, like me, he is very optimistic about MBS’s future and place in Australia and the Australian education industry.
In an interesting turn of events, Melbourne Business School (MBS) announced today that its proposed merger with the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Economics and Commerce (FEC) will not proceed. (Go here for background.)
Indeed, this won’t even been put to vote at the 7 October Extraordinary General Meeting of MBS Ltd’s members (read: shareholders) because the resolution is bound to fail. That’s because enough members have already told the Board they will vote against the merger so there’s no way the Board will get the majority needed to proceed.
I’m not exactly sure because they haven’t said.
I can speculate, though. Maybe they don’t want to dilute MBS Ltd’s focus (or brand) because, post merger, they would have had the added responsibility of managing the undergraduate economics and commerce programme. Maybe it’s less about the lack of focus and more about sticking to what you know you’re really good at (i.e. graduate-level teaching). Maybe they think the merger is good in theory but would be impossible to pull off in practice. Maybe it’s lots of separate little issues that, collectively, become one big one. I don’t know.
Regardless, the members are obviously not convinced that the merger is good idea and, since they have the deciding vote in the matter, it’s been called off.
As MBS Chairman Ron McNeilly said:
“Ultimately the continued success of MBS depends on the support of its members, alumni, students, clients and the broader business community. The Board has accepted that without the overwhelming support of these stakeholders, a merger at this time would not be in the best interests of the School.”
Meanwhile, the University of Melbourne’s Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis had this to say:
“Over time this will be judged a missed opportunity for the University and the MBS to create the strongest business school in our region.”
That may be true and, who knows, the merger could still take place a year from now or three years from now. All we know is that it’s not happening now.
Both MBS and FEC will continue to operate they way they’re operating now.
But, of course, they won’t. They’ve just gone through a process in which they identified their gaps, overlaps, and opportunities for growth. Their conclusion was that they should work together and they went as far as to plan exactly how they’d do that. And now they’ve been told it’s not going to happen. So, yeah, things won’t go quite back to normal.
Meanwhile, the confusion in the market of whether you should do a masters in business from FEC or a masters in business administration from MBS will remain. Here’s hoping they start by making things like that clearer because, if they don’t sufficiently differentiate themselves from each other, the competition won’t help anyone…least of all potential applicants to both institutions.
The AFR’s BOSS magazine recently published the results of its biennial rankings of MBA schools in Australia:
I haven’t bought the magazine and read the detailed results myself yet but Manns’ article lists the top five schools as follows:
The rest of the article was too painful to read online so I only skimmed through it and, therefore, have nothing further to say. Clearly they want us to go buy a copy of their magazine.
By the way, 22 business schools and 1,732 b-school alumni took part in the survey that these rankings are based on.
I haven’t been blogging much these last few months. That’s because three months ago my wife and I moved into an apartment that has no land line and only a satellite cable TV connection. (We didn’t think to ask about the former before moving in here because, really, when was the last time you heard of a house that didn’t have a land line connection?) What this means is that, till just recently, we didn’t have Internet access at home; certainly not cable and ADSL, but not even dialup!
It took Telstra (the only phone company that services this area) about six weeks (yes, six weeks) to give us a connection from the telephone exchange to our apartment building. However, we don’t have an outlet in the wall for a phone jack so we can’t actually use that line. Even worse, the electrician who came in to install that outlet couldn’t find where in the wall our telephone wire was so he wasn’t able to connect us. That was about a month ago and, since then, we’ve been waiting for our real estate agent to do something about this – specifically, getting the building plans from the owners and giving them to the electrician – but nothing’s happened yet.
I finally got sick of the situation so, a couple of weeks ago, I went and got us a mobile broadband connection from 3 (specifically, a USB wireless modem) and that’s what’s letting me access the Internet now. We then went a step further and bought a wireless router for the modem so now both my wife and I can access the Internet at the same time. It’s slow, but at least it works.
What about blogging from work, you ask? Unfortunately, work has been really busy (though incredibly enjoyable) so I haven’t had the mental energy to do any writing in the evenings (whether at work or offline from home). The only blog posts I have managed to finish are the ones I wrote on a weekend and published from the office the following work week.
What all this is leading up to is the fact that I have lots of catching up to do. The way I’m going to do that is by giving you a bulleted list of all the stories I’ve wanted to talk about these last few months but haven’t been able to discuss. The stories range from basic, on-the-ground advice (and lists) to more high level discussions on a particular topic. They’re all good to read, though.
UPDATE (1-Oct-09): This merger will no longer proceed. Details here. Also read Joshua Gans’ post on this.
The last time I talked about the merger between Melbourne Business School and the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Economics and Commerce (FEC) the two schools had:
Since then, they have agreed on the proposed merger and are now waiting on approval from the Members of MBS Ltd – which is the not-for-profit organization that governs Melbourne Business School – before they can go on.
This was announced by both MBS and Melbourne Uni:
And has also been discussed in the media:
Yes, the jobs angle was a funny one for The Age to take but I presume they did that because the timing of the merger announcement was unfortunate: Melbourne Uni had only just announced that they were going to cut 220 jobs because of the financial shortfall brought about by the global financial crisis.
In order to give us stakeholders a chance to find out first-hand what was going on with the merger, MBS invited students and alumni for a Questions & Answers session with Acting Dean Jennifer George and Professor Richard Speed.
It was hugely encouraging to know that a session like this had been planned. Mergers are difficult times for both organizations and, during this period, it’s crucial to have this kind of stakeholder communication and engagement. And by ‘stakeholder’ I mean everyone involved in the organization so that includes employees, students, alumni, prospective students, faculty, academia, industry, government, accreditation organizations, suppliers, employers, partners, the media, and so on.
Further, this communication and engagement needs to be:
Fortunately, that’s exactly what MBS is doing and this session was an excellent first step.
What was also good was the kind of session that Jenny and Richard ran: it was completely open, honest, and we could ask them anything we liked. They didn’t, of course, know the answers to all our questions – there are still numerous details to be worked out – but they did manage to cover all the important points.
What I liked most about the session, though, was the sense of excitement and realistic optimism that everyone seemed to have. This merger is an exciting opportunity and, though everyone knows it will be difficult and complicated to pull off, we are looking forward having a crack at it.
So what have we learnt so far about the proposed merger?
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As you can imagine, most of the synergies of this merger will occur in the graduate area where there are numerous win-win scenarios. For example, MBS students will get access to a wider range of electives while FEC students will get access to the specialist electives that only MBS offers.
The next important date for the merger is 26 August, which is when Members of MBS Ltd will meet in an Extraordinary General Meeting to vote on the merger proposal. There is no real reason for the proposal to not be accepted but that is the last formal step that needs to be taken. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes.
Over the next few months, I hope to write more about this merger in particular and about mergers, cultural change, and stakeholder engagement in general. Stay tuned.
Ed Cook, who is both an MBA student and a Career Consultant at Melbourne Business School, has recently starting his own professional blog.
He’s only posted three entries so far but they’re all interesting and I’m sure that, over time, his blog will become a useful resource and place of discussion. It will be particularly useful for MBA students and graduates from Australian business schools.
I’ve also added Ed to my list of MBS Bloggers.
[Note: If you’re an MBS MBA student or alumnus, Ed’s entries are cross-posted on the internal Career Services blog as well so you can also choose to conduct your discussions – should you want to keep them semi-private – there instead.]
Melbourne Business School continues to impress me with the way it is building its online presence because, last month, they started an internal Deans’ Blog.
The blog has three contributing authors:
And is hosted on the MBS intranet (so it’s not available to the public). The Deans write about things that MBS students, alumni, staff, and faculty are interested in, such as school-related news and events; commentary on current events; and discussions on things like school resources, exchange programs, alumni chapters, new faculty members, and so on.
Some of the posts are information dissemination type posts while others are more discussion oriented. Presumably, there is a communications strategy in place that will guide the blog’s growth over the next few months and, most likely, the intention is to continue publishing both kinds of posts: the kind that provide management-level information to the whole school (but don’t generate much of a discussion) and the kind that seed discussion among the blog’s readers (including the “what do you think?” type of posts that you see on many blogs).
All in all, this is an exciting new addition to MBS’ online presence. Hopefully, once this blog becomes a regular feature its authors will start itching to write an external blog as well – maybe even one like the long-running Dean Bruner’s Blog at the Darden School of Business – but that’ll probably take time. Writing an external blog is hard work and you really have to commit to the idea before getting into it. Which is why an internal blog such as this one is a great way to start.
Here’s hoping the blog grows really well and that both the authors and readers enjoy participating in it (I know I will).
Core Economics Becomes a Multi-Author Blog
Speaking of MBS blogs, Joshua Gans’ Core Economics blog has also gone multi-author with four of its nine authors hailing from Melbourne Business School. So, if you want to see what MBS professors are blogging about, take a look at that. They write on a lot of interesting topics and they have a really good readership as well.
Of course, no discussion of MBS professors who publish their work online would be complete without mentioning Paul Kerin who writes a regular business column for The Australian.
The 2009 Financial Times global business school rankings are in and Melbourne Business School has jumped 23 places to be ranked 52nd in the world (details on this page).
MBS’ Dean John Seybolt discusses this and a presents a more detailed analysis of the results on the MBS website while Andrew Trounson discusses the effects of regional competition among Asian and Australian business schools in The Australian’s Higher Education section.
More details have emerged regarding the proposed integration of Melbourne Business School (MBS) and the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Economics and Commerce (FEC).
According to Christina Buckridge, writing in the MUSSE newsletter, the integration has already been agreed upon in principle and the University Council is now establishing a due diligence committee that will carry out an “intensive consultation process” on the integration proposal. In other words: Now that they’ve decided that they’re going to integrate, they’re going to sit down and decide how they’re going to integrate.
The consultation process that Buckridge refers to works as follows:
The proposed structure of the resulting integrated entity is what we thought it would be: a new Faculty of Business and Economics (FBE) under which all graduate degrees will be offered by MBS and all undergraduate degrees will be offered by the School of Economics and Commerce. It is still unclear how Mt Eliza is going to fit into this new structure.
The most interesting thing in that post, however, is the last paragraph which states:
A Heads of Agreement is under negotiation which, with the results of due diligence enquiries, will inform a Coordination and Management Agreement, with a view to integration by the end of March 2009.
If I’m reading that correctly, once the due diligence is done and the integration agreement is written and signed, they’re hoping to complete the actual integration by the end of March 2009. That’s a lot quicker than I expected but it makes sense that they’d want everything done as soon as possible.
So what now? Well, we first see what committee gets formed and we then wait for the consultation process to begin. I’m not sure whether this will happen before the Christmas break of after…but considering the speed at which they’re already going, it’ll probably happen very soon.
