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Malý and CAMBAS help shape leaders

Professional degrees are gaining importance in Central Europe

By Brooke Edge
For The Prague Post
April 25th, 2007 issue

VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST
CAMBAS Chairman Milan Malý works toward bringing MBA degrees up to Western standards.
Some might consider Milan Malý, a popular professor at the University of Economics in Prague, the MBA go-to guy for the Czech Republic. After all, he has worked in the business administration field for nearly half a century. And he has also witnessed firsthand how the market has changed since the fall of communism, not to mention the rapid commerce growth in Central and Eastern Europe over the past two decades.
So it seems appropriate that Malý has found himself sitting at the helm of the country’s official watchdog group for Master of Business Administration programs.
The Czech Association of MBA Schools, or CAMBAS for short, was founded in 1998 to regulate the teaching standards of MBA programs around the country. Malý was tapped as the original chair of the group, a position he continues to hold today.
“The primary aim was to ensure, maintain and further the development of MBA programs in the Czech Republic,” explains Malý, who also teaches at Prague International Business School.
The three founding universities — the University of Economics, the Czech Technical University in Prague and the Technical University of Brno — recognized they had an international responsibility, Malý says, to build an organization that would provide some oversight of Czech MBA schools, in much the same way as it is done in the United States and United Kingdom.
The Education Ministry refuses to automatically recognize these professional degrees but has given CAMBAS its blessing. CAMBAS requires its member programs to partner with a school, usually in Western countries, that can offer accreditation.
“We have a special evaluation committee to work with schools on attaining accreditation,” Malý says. “We tell them what are the norms, what are the necessary preconditions and paradigms.”
CAMBAS’s system of aiding students in their search for a good education was shaped by what Malý and other members saw working in similar international MBA accreditation bodies, such as the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) in the United States, and the Association of MBAs (AMBA) in the United Kingdom.
AMBA currently accredits 129 programs, while AACSB says it takes about 550 schools through the accreditation process.
Noting that East European countries are still playing catch-up with Western business practices, Jeanette Purcell, AMBA’s chief executive officer says she thinks CAMBAS’s mission is admirable.
“I think [this setup] is becoming increasingly important,” she says, pointing out that more and more schools are turning to her organization for accreditation.
CAMBAS, along with its counterparts in the West, agrees that the popularity and increased importance of accredited MBA programs is driven largely by students and their employers.
In an increasingly crowded market, Purcell says students and employers are “completely overwhelmed.”
“What they’re getting from accreditation,” she says, “is a guarantee that this school has been independently scrutinized” and that “the huge investment they’re making will have some payback.”
Jerry Trapnell, AACSB’s executive vice president and chief accreditation officer, echoed those sentiments in a recent interview with European CEO magazine, saying, “Companies that reimburse employees for their educational expenses are becoming increasingly more sophisticated consumers. They are taking a closer look at the choices employees make when they enroll in degree and nondegree programs.”
Meanwhile, interest in MBA degrees in the Czech Republic is increasing every year, according to Malý.
“I think the reputation of CAMBAS is growing because we have many requests from students wanting an MBA, asking which schools we can recommend to them,” he says.
“They see CAMBAS as a certain guarantee of quality.”
He admits some Czech students may not be as concerned with a program’s accreditation when compared to their colleagues in the States or other European countries. Rather, Malý says, some Czechs place more emphasis on the title that comes with a degree than actual knowledge.
“This country has a heritage of titles,” he notes. “People with more titles are more highly evaluated and have a higher reputation.”
Given this, CAMBAS undoubtedly needs a strong leader for a concept that is in many ways still evolving not just in the Czech Republic, but in many other East European countries.
Malý has dedicated many years to this mission of how to best educate students and others in the practice of business.
Originally from Opava, north Moravia, he received a graduate degree from the Technical University of Ostrava in business administration and economics, with a focus on the steel industry, in 1959. After time spent working for a large steel company in Ostrava, Malý relocated to the capital to work at the Prague Research Institute, concentrating on economics and management practices in the steel industry, for decades a major focus of the Czechoslovak government. While in Prague he returned to school for his Candidate of Sciences degree, the equivalent of a Ph.D., at the University of Economics, where he joined the faculty after graduation.
In 1984, Malý’s international career was jump-started by an invitation to work for three months on a United Nations technology research team. The exposure to experts in his field from other areas of the world, he says, was a tremendous inspiration.
So, when he was offered a three-year job at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria, not long after his stint with the UN, he wholeheartedly embraced the opportunity.
The institute was established in 1972, the result of a joint U.S.-USSR partnership for international scientists from the East and West to discuss “technology, economy and society,” Malý says. There, he was on a team to discuss international economic issues led by a professor from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Of particular interest to his team, Malý says, was the impact of flexible automation, or robots, on management and society.
When he returned to Czechoslovakia in 1989, Malý found that his ways of thinking about economics and business had been forever changed by the international exposure. This new outlook, however, did not find a comfortable home in the communist regime overseeing the universities.
Luckily, the revolution came only two months after his return.
“I was very happy with this,” he says, “because when I came back I tried to teach in a different way and it was not supported.”
Shortly after, Malý found himself in high demand. “This was a very useful time for me,” he recalls. “I felt my responsibility for the new things, to give my knowledge to the students.” He drew on the international contacts he’d made abroad to stay up-to-date and provide the best resources for his Czech students.
Business terms, he says, inherently changed in this country after 1989. For instance, “the term ‘management’ didn’t exist before,” Malý explains. The idea of democracy in business was also a new concept.
Given all this, as well as the Czech Republic’s accession to the European Union, MBA degrees have started to take on a new importance in the business community. University administrators say their programs provide students with a global management approach that they will be able to take with them anywhere they go in the world.
“We can say about a MBA graduate that they will have a global outlook,” says AMBA’s Purcell.
Malý, for one, says he likes to keep his courses as global as possible. He enjoys teaching foreign students and giving Czech students as much exposure to the rest of the world as possible. In addition, he helps organize an international student exchange program at Prague International Business School.
“I think there is no other way,” Malý says. “It is very interesting when you compare the students from other countries.”
Besides, it fits in with what has driven him in teaching, in research, and in CAMBAS for decades — “I think it is our duty to share knowledge,” he says.

Brooke Edge can be reached at specialsection@praguepost.com


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