Profile: Dr. Eden is internationally known within the field of Management Science through his research and publications in the field. In the last five years he has been an invited keynote speaker at numerous related high-profile conferences. Allied to this he has top-level consultancy experience with such companies as Shell and KPMG.

Q: What are the ideal characteristics you look for in someone wishing to do an MBA?
A: The key element for us is that they have a pretty substantial amount of organisational experience. In others words we are not looking for people who have 5 years of one type of experience, we look for a range of experience. We have also found from 35 years of doing the MBA that the best students are those that are highly motivated, so we try and determine that during the assessments we make of candidates.

Q: How do you establish whether someone is highly motivated?
A: We interview all of our students anyway. We have a permanent academic director based in Shanghai – and he will interview all applicants. Our local centre will interview applicants and sometimes we will interview by phone as well. Then we can also run assessment centres, where we set group exercises and see how potential students behave within that setting. The more uncertain we are about the qualities of an applicant the harder we will work to establish the important features.

Q: How competitive is it to get on the MBA course here in Shanghai?
A: It is difficult to establish, because obviously we try and initially filter out as many people as we can, through the procedure of telling potential candidates what it is we want from them before they apply. We don’t want to waste our time looking at applicants who are clearly not going to get through. One of the things we have been able to do over the last 35 years is filter out more and more applicants.

Q: What progression does the MBA offer?
A: Basically it makes the participants considerably better – that is something that all the students who qualify for an MBA will stress. We do a lot of executive development work where we are working with chief executives, you may say that they have already made the grade, they would say that of course they haven’t, and that what they need to do is become better at their job, particularly with the changing nature of the world at the moment – learning fast, and the ability to learn fast are an important characteristic of modern business. ‘How to learn’ is an important aspect. The essential skill is being able to assess situations fast and then act within them. What makes a distinctive business is being adaptable, that is reflected in management style and acting faster than competitors. If you are looking at mergers and acquisitions for the sake of argument – the ability to act fast is essential – saving time and money. It is those sorts of skills that we expect to develop.

Q: How difficult has it been transplanting the institution to Shanghai?
A: Not very difficult for Strathclyde, compared with the majority of MBAs in the world, if you’ve been running one for a significant time you develop a substantial amount of experience on how to change and modify an MBA program, whereas a lot of our competitors have only been in business for 5 years, and they simply don’t know how to operate in that way. Much more significantly we have other programs in Hong Kong area, Singapore, Malaysia, the Gulf, and a lot of other places in Europe, that gives us a substantial amount of experience of operating in other parts of the world.

Q: What are the important factors when entering a new country?
A: Partnership is probably the most significant aspect. Our program is a face to face program, it’s a part-time program not a distance-learning program. Our staff come out here any teach on that basis. We are therefore dependant upon the sort of support facilities we have out here, also part of that support facility is what we call local counselors – those are the people that can work with the students after our staff have flown out, which gives it a local context as well. We’re very fortunate in Shanghai as one of our partners is the Jiaotong School of Management, involving their senior staff, that relationship is very important. UKEAS are also very important as they are essentially the people who make sure that the administration and the facilities are all set up – we use a local outfit who know the area – even down to transport and accommodation for our staff – this all makes for an operation that works effectively.

Q: What are the main hurdles you’ve experienced setting up here?
A: Funnily enough this has gone more smoothly than most of the others. I would have to say we spent a long time yesterday just reviewing this first period with our partners and related staff – but inevitably in the first year of any operation there are some teething problems. Of course we needed to convince the local municipality and educational authorities of the quality of our program, this is something they grilled us on. What they didn’t want if they could help it was having poor quality programs being introduced to Shanghai, our program was open for them to explore, and they were very satisfied with the quality.

Q: What has been the feedback from the students so far?
A: The feedback has been positive, all the problems we’ve had in this first year have tended to be small administrative hic-ups. Which are understandable. The only real complaint is that the program is very demanding, which is not something we are ashamed of. We aren’t interested in the people that just want to have an MBA after their name, we want people who want to become better managers.

Q: Do you think that there are any natural advantages that you get from being based in an economic centre like Shanghai?
A: We deliberately chose Shanghai, in coming into China – we’d been thinking of putting a base here for some time. We obviously looked at Beijing or Shanghai. We saw Shanghai as the business centre for China, and it became very clear, very quickly, that this is where we should be based.

Q: Are there any unique aspects that you have noticed in relation to Shanghai’s business culture?
A: I think the most striking thing is simply the enthusiasm. There is a real motivation to do well. I don’t come out here all that often, but just seeing the changing nature of the city is extra-ordinary. Six months can pass and when you return the sky-line has a completely different complexion. I wonder what will happen when the car-ownership levels increase here!

Q: Looking into the future, how do you see the MBA program progressing here?
A: Well our philosophy as an institution is that we have no intention of high volume programs, we see ourselves as what you might call niche players, significantly focusing on the quality of the education we provide therefore we look for a balance between the number of students we have and the number of high quality staff we have out here. High quality staff are not easy to come by, we are talking about a total faculty of about 200, – with those sorts of necessary limitations we are not going to grow in Shanghai at a phenomenal rate, in terms of progress we don’t see ourselves as being a massive operator, although we will be moving forward with a much stronger relationship with Jiaotong, international exchanges – including facilitating parts of our program here with Hong Kong area, Switzerland, Glasgow and Singapore. At the moment we have people in Shanghai who are also doing part of their program in Switzerland, that’s an important feature of the Strathclyde program which no other school has, because it is clear that success in business now is related to the ability to do business on a global scale.