AMP Treatise

You can read all seven of them in their entirety here.

Skeptics might also ask: Is it really a good idea to attend a business school that no one has ever heard of? The short answer is yes: I want to work in China, where CEIBS is widely considered the nation's top MBA program. A lot of business schools claim to be on the rise, but CEIBS almost indisputably is. The school is only nine years old, but is already ranked No. 1 and No. 3 in Asia by the Economist Intelligence Unit and The Financial Times, respectively. Average GMAT scores (665) are about equal with U.S. schools ranked 20 to 30 by BusinessWeek, which is pretty impressive considering almost none of CEIBS' students are native English speakers.
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Like everything else about Shanghai, where new buildings are added to the city's mind-blowing Blade Runner skyline almost every month, CEIBS feels like the future-especially since it's located at the epicenter of China's white-hot economy. I'm not sure what I want to do with my MBA, but I know I want to be in China to take part in the free-market madness. CEIBS is the right starting place for that. Some of China's top students are here, the facilities are new and impressive, and the school is apparently able to attract some very high-quality professors from the U.S. and Europe.
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One major advantage of Shanghai is the low cost of living. While CEIBS itself is no bargain-tuition is $25,000 for the whole program-everything else is. My one-bedroom apartment rents for $250 per month, and it's fully modern and has a great view. Taxis are cheap, restaurants cost as little as $2 or $3, and pirated CDs and DVDs sell for $1.

Getting an MBA at CEIBS definitely has its risks. Until very recently, the school didn't enroll non-Chinese students, so it's not clear what jobs will be out there when I graduate. But I'm not going to dwell on the doubts. It's time to find some weird new situations to get into-and for that I have no doubts about whether CEIBS can deliver.
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CEIBS is on the east side of the Huangpu River, a 20-minute drive from Shanghai's financial center. Psychologically, it's a lot further away: It's adjacent to some empty fields and a ramshackle village where people live without running water (but with DVD players). The school is also on the edge of Jinqiao, a fast-developing area of Shanghai that is home to a lot of wealthy expats, international K-12 schools, western restaurants, and a Carrefour (the French equivalent of Wal-Mart). So, in one direction there is poverty, in the other direction great wealth. CEIBS definitely belongs on the wealth side. The campus is newly built, and a lot of money was clearly spent on it.
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On the first day of orientation, the new class gathered in the auditorium to hear a speech by one of the school's top Chinese officials. The international students were given ear pieces so we could listen through an interpreter. What we heard went something like this: "You must study hard. Very, very hard. Do not disappoint the Motherland. Do not disappoint the Party. Do not even think about not studying hard." When this inspirational speech was over, several international students were ready to get back on the plane and head home. Luckily, things got much better from there.
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My first few months at CEIBS were probably the most intense months of my life. Back then, the MBA program seemed as if it was designed by a sadistic genius, someone who had made a deal with the devil in order to achieve breath-taking depths of inspired, curriculum-based malevolence. How else to explain the fact that each element of our program worked in concert to maximize anxiety and sleeplessness? How else to explain the fact that CEIBS was a perfect storm of academic insanity?
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I think the most efficient way to summarize the first year is to go through a typical day. What follows is, I hope, a representative composite:

7:30 a.m.: Wake up and scan the bedroom for vermin. This is not a problem for the other students, but conditions in my apartment building are a little different. I have recently seen a couple of rats in the hallway outside my apartment door, and I fear it's just a matter of time before they're gnawing on my face while I sleep.

8:30: Catch a taxi for the 15-minute ride to school. Tell the driver I want to go to China Europe International Business School. "Where?" he says. I explain. I study Chinese vocabulary flash cards on the way.

8:48: Arrive just in time for Operations Management, taught by Linda Sprague, one of our best professors. Before the class starts, I talk with Edmund Wang, a classmate sitting to my left, about a biotech lecture he's organizing that night.

8:50: Prof. Sprague leads us through an HBS case study about Fabritek, a machining castings manufacturer. Sounds painfully boring, but in fact it is fascinating and revelatory. The woman is a fount of business wisdom. The teaching quality at CEIBS has been one of the things that has impressed me the most about the school. The small permanent faculty is especially good, and the school tries to bring in interesting visiting professors. But there have also been some major exceptions (keep reading).

11:45: Class is over. Most of us head to CEIBS' cafeteria.

11:49: Several of the international students look at the little metal bowls lined up on the cafeteria counter, each bowl filled with its own flavorless, room-temperature Chinese dish, and decide to go off campus for lunch.

Tyrrell: Let's go to the village.
Everyone else: No!!!

The village is the crumbling shantytown next to the school. Inside the village, there are several shacks that serve food. They are not exactly restaurants, since they don't have menus or running water, but they are close. To order, you go up to the cook, who's standing right there outside the shack by a gas grill and a table piled with vegetables and raw meat (the blood from the meat trickling onto the ground), and you say, for example, "pork, eggplant, beans." And he or she will take those minimalist instructions and turn them into an excellent $1 lunch.

So why does no one want to go there on this particular day? Well, the village is always a hard sell because it is too hot in the summer and it's too cold in the winter. Also, no one wants to risk contracting hepatitis A, salmonella, cholera, or river blindness by eating there.

11:51: We go to Papa John's instead – which is just down the street and serves the best pizza in Shanghai.

1:10 p.m.: I meet my study group to work on our Micro presentation. (The school assigns us to groups of five or six each module.) This module my group includes Alan Xu, Kevin Chen, Angela Liu, and Gavin Du. They are very easy to work with because everyone is smart and extremely willing to pitch in. No free-riders here. (Actually, one of the best things about the school is that almost all the groups are like this.)

Kevin: I propose that we add a chart to this section so our report is very special.
Tyrrell: Hey, that reminds me: Congratulations on your wedding, Gavin!
Gavin: Thanks. Now, if I get married three more times, I will have as many wives as Alan.
Kevin, Gavin, Tyrrell, Alan: Ha ha ha ha!
Angela (pounding the table): Hey! Be serious!

1:50: Time for IT class. Sweet Information Technology! The course is taught by a visiting professor. He is a really nice guy, but the course is a bit too simplistic. Part of his lecture on the second day included a PowerPoint slide of a mouse. "This is a mouse," he said. He was not joking. Today, I'm relieved to discover, we will learn about the exciting new world of the Internet. It seems there are these things called "Web sites" that...well, never mind, it's kind of complicated.

4:50: Class ends, finally.

5:00: Study in an empty discussion room.

6:30: Chinese class. Satoko, a Japanese student, and I, along with several international students from the year ahead, meet with our cheerful and energetic Chinese professor, Pao Laoshi. Because Chinese class is a non-graded, non-credit class, it is the first thing that gets short-changed when the work piles up. This is unfortunate because it's probably our most important course if we want to actually work in China after graduation. Today, we start a new chapter of our Business Chinese textbook. I learn the words for "joint venture" and "strategic alliance."

8:00: Chinese class ends.

8:10: Take taxi home. Eat fried rice in a neighborhood restaurant with an Organizational Behavior course pack propped open on the table.

9:00: Get home. Study some more.

12:30: Sleep.

So that's a sample of how the exhausting, overwhelming, satisfying first year went.
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I think not many MBA students in the U.S. would pass up an internship, especially in the tough current job-hunting environment. But things are a little different in China. The country has a massive shortage of well-trained managers, so CEIBS students have typically had very little trouble getting jobs. According to the 2004 Financial Times rankings (in which CEIBS MBA program shot up 37 places to No. 53 worldwide – and No. 1 in Asia), CEIBS pretty much leads the world in the percent of its graduates who have jobs within three months of graduation.
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I can sense your growing alarm. You are thinking, "But, Tyrrell, if CEIBS requires you to either do an internship or an exchange, and if you have spectacularly failed to do either, then what are you going to do?" This is an excellent question. Luckily, there was a third option: the China-specific Program (CSP). The CSP is a program for CEIBS' international students and for other foreigners visiting the school on exchange. During the CSP, 13 of us have been studying Mandarin, Chinese history and culture, and how to do business in China as a foreigner. It's only April, but here on campus it feels a little bit like summer vacation. The weather is sunny and warm, the classes are more leisurely, and the campus is basically empty except for us.
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Escorted by a couple of armed guards, the two bikini-clad women walked across the dance floor and took their positions on separate raised platforms. When the music and the smoke machines kicked in, these pole-dancers started to put on a show. A great show. There was nothing technically obscene about it, but it was still surprising to witness in a place like Wenzhou, a strait-laced industrial city about 350 km southwest of Shanghai.

Kook, my Korean classmate, stared at the girls for a long time in a slack-jawed trance. Finally, he spoke: "You know, guys, this is an excellent start to our study tour." And though the beer was not especially cold, and though the music just then sounded like a techno version of the Barney theme-song, I could see his point. (But I should stress that the pole-dancing was NOT part of the school's official itinerary.)
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On my first day, Stanley, the CFO, showed me around the amazing headquarters. Each office had its own tree-lined deck, allowing staff to work or hold meetings outside. Then he showed me the back room. It was a huge area with a bunch of couches and carpets on the floor and vaulted ceilings with skylights. With a dramatic sweep of his arms, he threw open a sliding door on the far end to reveal... an enormous Buddhist shrine! "One of the founders sometimes holds spiritual retreats back here," Stanley explained. You are kidding me, I thought. This is the kind of unexpected stuff that makes life in China so entertaining.
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One reason the Nestlé receptionist was so perplexed by us is that cold-calling doesn't really occur in China. If you want to meet with someone new, you usually have to find a mutual acquaintance to introduce you. The one thing we had going for us was that we had printed up some official-looking questionnaires with the World Bank logo on them.

So, our talk with the Nestlé receptionist, all in Chinese, went something like this:

Me: Hello, we would like to speak with the purchasing manager!
Receptionist: Yes, what is your honorable surname?
Me: I am Tai Li and this Israeli woman is Miss Lu Ling.
Receptionist: What time is your appointment?
Me: We have no appointment! We are CEIBS students hired by the World Bank to do a consulting project.
Receptionist: Umm…
Inbal: Look at our nice questionnaires!
Receptionist: They are indeed beautiful. Let me see if the purchasing manager is available.
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The first-year students are truly blessed. First, they didn't have to start school under quarantine in their dorm rooms (due to SARS) like many of my classmates did. Second, they benefit from all of the bounty that CEIBS now offers: a beautiful, just-finished gymnasium with weight machines, cardio equipment, basketball and badminton courts, and snooker and ping pong tables. Then there's the new campus snack bar (with make-believe Western food and a giant flat-screen cable TV) and new classrooms. They also benefit from the many restaurants and bars opening in the neighborhood, food choices us second-year students could only dream of. At the same time, their workload has been significantly reduced from the brutal levels of our first modules.

The result has been a flowering of campus life among the first years: It's like 16th century Florence around here, but without the sculptors, painters, and debauched clergy. The new students have founded an excellent school newspaper, and numerous student clubs. They have more time for bar-hopping and Frisbee. They still work hard, but now there's some balance.

Actually, the workload has dropped for us, too. And many of us have channeled the extra time into finding jobs. For some, no extra time was needed, as employment has come ridiculously easily. The most extreme example was by a classmate who attended CEIBS' Beijing job fair. I still can't believe this story, two months after first hearing it from the woman herself:

At the job fair, each student gave a two-minute introduction to the assembled recruiters. When this particular student finished her two minutes, the head of a modern hospital chain walked up to her and offered to make her the general manager of one of his company's hospitals – this was despite the fact that my classmate had no background in health care. The guy didn't even interview her before he made the offer, which included a generous salary, free housing, and a driver. There were no obvious extenuating circumstances for the offer (e.g., her father is not President Hu Jintao's daughter). And it wasn't a scam: The guy's company is well-known and growing fast. He simply liked what she had to say during her two minutes.