B School Confidential

SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY

If you're planning on attending SMU's Cox School of Business, you'd better bring your passport. Starting with the class of 2001, all MBA candidates are required to participate in the school's brand-new Global Leadership Program (GLP), which will take them to either Asia, Latin America, or Europe for two weeks at the end of their first year.

The GLP is the pet project of the Cox School's dean, Albert W. Niemi, Jr., who arrived in 1997 following fourteen years as the dean of the University of Georgia's business school and one year at the University of Alabama. In the past Cox did "global" like most MBA programs: by requiring a course in global business. "No one is really doing the global thing very well at all," Niemi says. So he decided to take his students out into the global economy--literally. "We'll be able to say that we do global differently and hopefully better than any MBA program out there," he boasts. And the best part for students is that they won't have to pay for it: Niemi plans to raise corporate money to foot the bill.

The Cox School's efforts to establish an international reputation haven't gone unrecognized. Its global focus was one of the criteria considered last January by London's Financial Times in its ranking of the top-fifty MBA programs in the world. Cox, which ranked thirtieth in the world and twenty-fourth in the U.S., was the only Texas business school to make the list. (UT-Austin declined to provide the necessary data and therefore was not ranked.)

Another noteworthy offering by Cox--whose course of study went from one year to two years in the early nineties--is its longtime Executive Mentor Program. Following a mentor-student mixer early in the first semester, Cox students select their top-three choices from among some two hundred volunteer corporate executives and soon after are paired up. The mentors--about half are Cox or SMU alums--are professionals from such big companies as Bank of America, Sprint, and Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, as well as entrepreneurs who provide everything from personalized career advice to all-important business contacts. And contact with the business community doesn't stop there. SMU's Business Leadership Center (BLC) offers non-credit professional development courses taught exclusively by corporate leaders. The BLC was established to provide Cox students with the skills employers identified as lacking in their new MBA hires, including team building, presentation techniques, business writing, and negotiating. Currently the BLC offers more than thirty seminars.

By carving out a niche in global business, burnishing assets like the BLC and the Executive Mentor Program, and keeping enrollments small--there is a cap of 120 students per entering class--Niemi believes Cox will thrive. Continuing to boost the GMAT scores of its students will help: The goal for this fall's entering class is an average score of 650 and higher thereafter. "We're in everybody's top forty," Niemi says, referring to the U.S. News, Business Week, and Financial Times rankings. That's good but not good enough. Three years from now he predicts Cox will be in the top twenty nationally. And number one in Texas.