I’ve never met a GM in China who hired a Chinese local because she had an MBA degree; though I have met GMs that have encouraged local staff to obtain an MBA to broaden their knowledge of how their patron-company works and improve the local’s chances for eventually taking over the top position in the foreign-invested company. I recently told a journalist in an interview for the China Economic Review (July 2009 issue) that the expat managers in the manufacturing sector in China have a deep distrust of new hires with MBA degrees, due to what I call “expectation mismatch”: the GM expects the new hire to do a specific job and the MBA-holder believes the specific job is to tell the GM how to run his company. Down-to-earth nuts-and-bolts types do not take kindly to that sort of attitude; and the further away from Shanghai an operation is placed the less welcome MBAs seem to be.

However, during a panel discussion in which I participated at the University of Chicago’s MBA program on business in the Asia-Pacific several years ago, one of the other panelists – herself an MBA and an executive at a global recruiting firm – made the valid point that in the professional services like Finance and HR in a Shanghai or a Beijing the MBA degree lends some credibility to the training and experience a recruit may actually have. In other words, it adds polish and fills some of the holes in an individual’s otherwise patchwork background.

The MBA degree for Chinese nationals, though, serves an additional role: it helps them with communications and facilitation skills they otherwise do not develop. The traditional Chinese education system does not prepare them with the participatory skills that help them get ahead in Western organizations. Also, international MBA programs in China acculturate locals to international standards, processes and procedures for rationalizing business processes. In other words, the degree is a great primer for understanding the dynamics of organizations. The clash between newly-minted MBAs and the rest of us is that MBAs more often than not mistake “the map for the territory;” in other words, they tend to fit real world challenges into the templates they learned in school. And therein lies rub.

With that said, I always enjoy speaking at MBA programs to which I am invited in Shanghai and back in the States. No matter the age of the student – whether a straight MBA in her twenties or a more senior manager in a EMBA – the audience is consistently open-minded and energetic. They seem to genuinely want to “get it right” when they re-enter the corporate world with their newly minted degree.

I’ll next be speaking in Shanghai to a group of MBA students from the University of Reading (UK), on July 14, 2009.

Nevertheless, the China Economic Review interview was fun (and the reporter charming), and helped me to express my belief that MBA’s are not spawn of the devil – but neither are they saviors of corporate humanity.