By Cho Jin-seo
Are good managers born or made? Management skills are not necessarily learned in classrooms as witnessed in many great entrepreneurs and CEOs without college degrees. But expensive executive education programs can bring valuable lessons to even highly experienced corporate managers. Janice Lee believes Korean firms should have more executives with MBA or EMBA degrees from good schools.
Lee is now an executive vice president of SC First Bank, a major commercial bank owned by the Standard Chartered Group. She went to the executive MBA program at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business at its Singaporean campus between 2002 and 2004.
“Business management is about making binary decisions of yes or no. But in most cases you don’t have enough information to make a perfect decision. So there is a lot of pressure on the decision-makers,” she said. “At the EMBA, we did a lot of simulations on such scenarios of decision-making with insufficient information. This helped me secure the confidence when making important decisions at work.”
In the male-oriented business culture of Korea, most well-known businesswomen are in family businesses. Lee is a unique woman who has climbed to almost the top the corporate ladder solely on her merit and efforts. Her experience is stretched over various industries. She was the CFO of Volvo Korea, the Korean arm of the Sweden-based automaker, the CFO of Hanarotelecom, a now-merged major internet service provider and then CFO of SC First Bank.
At the center of her executive career is the Chicago EMBA. A certified public accountant, Lee was the chief financial officer of Volvo Korea when its CEO Eric Nielsen recommended she do an EMBA.
She had reasons to feel hesitant. First of all, it was expensive (2011 tuition is $148,000). And she already had an MBA from Ohio State University along with another master’s degree in accounting from the University of Cleveland. And she thought the Singaporean campus may not have the class quality of the main campus.
On top of all these concerns, she had two children to take care of, one of them preparing for the college entrance exam. But Nielsen, a Booth alumnus, pushed her on. He had Volvo Korea sponsor her for the program, and once enrolled she never regretted it.
The Chicago EMBA course was intense that she did not have much of an opportunity to enjoy the sun in Singapore during the 22-month course. Lunch meant microwave food. Every month she spent one week in class — a Sunday morning flight out of Korea and returning flight the following Sunday evening. “A boot camp,” she said.
Her job as CFO continued, which meant she sometimes had to attend teleconferences in between classes. Was she able to be a good mom? “He had given up on me,” she jokes about her son. But she probably set herself as a good role model. Both her children went to good schools, she smiles.
Meanwhile, the quality of the classes proved to exceed her expectations. The Booth School of Business relentlessly carried high-profile professors between Chicago and Singapore so there was no discount on education at the Asian campus. Students also spend one week in Chicago and one week in a site in Europe during the course, during which time they can network with their American and European peers.
What surprised her was the intensity of the classes. With a CPA, a master’s degree in accounting and years of experience as a corporate finance expert, she thought she had little to learn in the Chicago accounting class no matter how famous the school was in the fields of finance and economics. But Ray Ball, a veteran professor, genuinely surprised her by showing “the other aspect of accounting.”
“He showed us the big picture. For example, for him, a country’s accounting practice was closely related to its culture and history. It was never boring to me.” And discussions among classmates often reached boiling point, living up to the school’s academic reputation.
Two years flew by and Lee had to make a tough decision upon graduation. She had the choice of leaving Volvo, which had been her generous sponsor, to work for a private equity partnership of AIG and Newbridge Capital, which was looking for a qualified CFO to run Hanarotelecom.
She admits that it was a “morally difficult decision” to leave Volvo right after the company sponsored the prestigious EMBA course. But this does not mean that the money was wasted. She feels she had more than compensated the investment as she studied for one week every month and utilized the skills in the remaining three weeks. And during the time in Seoul, she opened her own classes for middle-level managers at Volvo Korea to teach what she had just learned from Booth.
Most of all, it was a personal decision. Volvo Korea was a large operation with factories that make trucks and construction equipments. But it is not listed in Korea so the scope of the work was focused on manufacturing operations, not on finance, she said. On the other hand, Hanarotelecom was a company that was much more interesting for a CFO. It was a large listed firm and was under a financial restructuring program.
Between 2004 and 2007 at Hanarotelecom, she performed many roles such as fundraising, bond issuing, as well as launching an employee early retirement program. The last thing she did at the firm was selling it. The AIG-Newbridge consortium ended up with a deal to merge Hanarotelecom with SK Telecom that brought an estimated return of around 500 billion won.
But her kind is still a rare species in Korean corporate culture where executives seldom move around. Like in Japan, big companies generally do not sponsor its employees for expensive executive education programs overseas, preferring to believe in the power of on-the-job training, field experience and networking involving heavy drinking. Lee says that this culture needs to change, at least to some degree.
“Networking was not everything for me during the EMBA. The Chicago program gives you the ability to think in a bigger frame. To be a senior manager, you need to think outside of your expertise and I could learn that from my EMBA course.”