by ALEJANDRO REYES
Beyond Hong Kong's towering skyline and ship-filled harbor, the Kowloon Peninsula gives way to the verdant hills and peaks of the Chinese mainland. The bustling international business center is a natural gateway to an area that has experienced phenomenal postwar growth and dynamism. Despite recent financial turmoil, there is no denying how far the Asia-Pacific region has come - and how promising its future remains.
Camille Tang Yeh (MBA '80) is acutely aware of the region's potential. As executive director of the Hong Kongbased HBS Asia-Pacific Research Office, she has been charged with coordinating the School's ambitious research efforts in a daunting list of culturally diverse countries such as Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Pakistan. Officially opened last October, but inaugurated with a festive dinner in January, the office demonstrates "the depth of the School's commitment to building intellectual capital in the region," says Yeh. The former investment banker and longtime Hong Kong resident has already welcomed several faculty members to this "home away from home" in the Bank of China Tower, which HBS researchers can use as a base of operations for work in the twelve countries in the region. Yeh and her small staff are set up to provide a significant part of the intellectual and logistical support needed by visiting HBS scholars.
Yet logistical help is not the main reason for setting up the Asian outpost. The office is part of the HBS Global Initiative spearheaded by Dean Kim B. Clark to ensure that the School fosters a global culture in its curriculum and programs and instills an international outlook among its students. Even though HBS faculty have been active in Asia for decades, "This is the beginning of a new phase," said Clark at the opening dinner, which was attended by Hong Kong chief executive Tung Chee-hwa and over two hundred alumni and friends of the School. "Our research and teaching are fundamentally grounded in and connected to the world," said Clark. "We hope that this will be an intellectual center that will stimulate engagement."
"There is a need to look for ways to blend Asian and Western
approaches."
Underscoring just what Clark meant by engagement, HBS convened a two-day research conference to coincide with the office's January inauguration. By bringing together nearly sixty business and management academics and about twenty CEOs and managers from across Asia, the forum provided an opportunity for HBS professors working on Asia-related research to present their work in progress and exchange views with colleagues and practitioners. The event's overriding message, according to organizer Karen Wilson (MBA '91), executive director of the HBS Global Initiative, is that the School is open to new ideas, new technology, and new ways of thinking. More research centers will follow, with the next one likely to be opened in South America.
"We're in the midst of profound changes that will be of lasting consequence," said Clark at a luncheon address to participants. "Long-established paradigms are now becoming inadequate. As we think about our mission to educate leaders, we are driven by a strong belief that to prepare managers well, we have to change. What we're doing in Asia has grown out of that belief. We need to create new intellectual capital to underpin our goals at HBS. Thus, we must deepen and extend the quantity and quality of research in Asia and the world."
Building Relationships
The value of building wider connections became even clearer on the afternoon of January 7 when conference delegates sat down after lunch in the ballroom of the harborside Grand Hyatt Hotel. Calling the brainstorming session to order was conference chairman Professor Robert H. Hayes, a key figure in the development of the new Asia-Pacific Research Office. As the HBS faculty increases its activities in Asia, the School must stay in touch with academics and practitioners who live there, Hayes observed. "Perhaps in the process of getting to know each other better," he said, "we can also facilitate the building of closer relationships among those of you who - like our faculty - come from many diverse countries. The issues facing Asia today are too big and complex for any single person, university faculty, or company to comprehend fully. Making progress in the Asia-Pacific region will require the cooperative efforts of many of us. This will contribute to the future prosperity of the region."
Hayes's remarks were something of a starting gun that set the assembled minds racing. As HBS faculty took the floor in succession, participants freely contributed comments and suggestions for additional research, drawing parallels with their own work or experience. A case in point was HBS professor Rohit Deshpandé's presentation, the first on the agenda. He reported on the initial results of a multination study of factors driving business performance in Asia. His findings were based on data gathered from interviews with senior executives at about five hundred major companies in China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam. Deshpandé and his team discovered that many of the "strategic levers" essential to high performance in Asian firms were identical to those found in a separate study of companies in Western countries. But while innovation was the most important driver of high performance among the corporations in the Western economies, in Asian companies the key element was how customer-oriented firms were.
That prompted computer entrepreneur Stan Shih, cofounder and chairman of Taiwan's Acer Group and a pioneer Asian brand-builder, to raise his hand. (Throughout the conference, Shih was a case study of the dynamic CEO: when he wasn't in his seat listening attentively or in front of the audience imparting wisdom, he was in a corner whispering into his cellular phone.) In Europe and the United States, he said, "they have already reached a threshold in customer orientation, so you have to do different things to succeed." That's not the case yet in Asia, he pointed out, as Deshpandé listened intently.
HBS professor Paul M. Healy spoke on the role of accounting and auditing standards in China, while Associate Professor Huang Yasheng closed the first session with a detailed briefing of his ongoing study of foreign-invested enterprises on the mainland. The afternoon concluded with an open discussion at which many other academics described their research. There were special pleas, too. Ehsan-ul Haque of Pakistan's Lahore University of Management Sciences cited an overemphasis on policy-driven studies at Asian institutions. "The immediacy and urgency of decisions [on policy] are so great that we cannot afford the time for more rigorous research," he said. Jacinto C. Gavino of the Asian Institute of Management in Manila suggested that, given such constraints, there should be an evaluation mechanism developed to help focus research on the most important issues.
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