Doug Guthrie, a China business expert at New York University, said, ‘China has a real leadership development crisis right now, mostly because of the unique circumstances of the Cultural Revolution.’
Guthrie was referring to the period from 1966 to 1976, when Communist leader Mao Tse-tung closed the universities and sent the country’s brightest young people to the countryside to be ‘reeducated.’
When Rafael Pastor, chief executive of Vistage International Inc., an organization of CEOs, interviewed people to run his new office in Shanghai, he was shocked at their youth. His top candidate for the managing director’s job is 39 years old.
‘He’s great,’ said Pastor, a former investment banker and executive at News Corp. ‘But he’s only got as much experience as a 39-year-old person can have. There’s no way I can find a more seasoned person.’
For the record I was a CEO at 25 and I think Rafael Pastor is talking a lot of nonsense. Bill Gates started Microsoft instead of finishing university. Does Rafael Pastor think Bill Gates was too young at 24 to start his company? Benjamin Disraeli, who is shown above, wrote: ‘Almost everything that is great has been done by youth.’
Damn right. And damn good, too.
In 2004, China graduated about 10,000 MBAs, compared with 139,000 such degrees in the U.S.
But Chinese universities, like the companies they are serving, can’t expand fast enough
Despite Mao’s declaration that under communism women should be equal, the business world in China is still male-dominated. About one-third of MBA students are women, though their numbers are increasing.
Source: LA Times