E-MBA Programs - Key to Digital Era

Home > Opinion > Columns

print dictionary print

E-MBA Programs - Key to Digital Era


The issue of separation of medical and pharmaceutical services has become a focus of our society. Doctors and pharmacists are continuing their long-time "zero-sum game," in which one side must lose for the other side to win. Neither party sees any value is a new paradigm, and each demands the other''s sacrifice based on the perspectives of the old era. If this standoff continues, the public will have no choice but to consider both as ignorant.

The recent medical reform overlooked some extremely important issues which new computer technology could solve. For example, a doctor inputs a prescription into a computer system and also provides a written prescription to a patient. Then the patient shows the prescription to a pharmacist and the pharmacist, again inputs the prescription into a computer and prepares the medicine. Under this current system, doctors have to provide hard copies of data from their online data, and pharmacists need to input the data from hard copies into their computer systems. The work is overlapping, and the amount of work is doubled.

What an irony it is! If the two parties had the right perspective on networking, not only both groups but also the people could play a positive-sum game!

Many issues, including ones related to medical service reform, seemed to arise from the lack of new perspectives which would enable people to understand how technology can help us solve problems. It can be the same for the high-tech startup companies, which have seen success and failure side by side. Even among CEOs of these startups, there seem to be few with a real understanding of constructive risk and how to use it in our networked era.

The recent illegal loan scandal -a case caused by speculative management rather than following the right path - again made the people doubt how many business leaders in our society can call themselves new thinkers.

Until now, many colleges of business administration have run MBA programs to educate the leaders of industrialized era; in other words, people with skills needed in traditional companies. However, this old concept of an MBA program should be turned into so-called "e-MBA" programs to meet the new era.

People describe the new era as the digital or network era. E-MBA programs are surely the education needed by business leaders; those leaders must integrate the new technology into the existing infrastructure. In our society, e-business is not just a simple improvement in information management; it is a progressive revolution.

The corporate management environment is reorganizing itself based on these new technologies, and customer expectations have changed. Because of increased competition and cooperation between networked firms and the diversified needs of the wired public, digital customers expect a degree of satisfaction in their business dealings far beyond such expectations in an earlier era.

Therefore, it is important to develop business leaders who have a new perspective based on the special characteristics of Korean culture to lead the global market in a rapidly changing era. This can be compared to the procedure necessary to change the shape of ice-for example, from a cube into a star. In order to do so, one must melt the ice, pour the water into a star-shaped mold and then freeze it again. If universities refuse to change their programs toward the direction of an e-MBA, it may be the same as simply melting the ice, rather than freezing the water again to form a new ice shape.

Many schools specialized in business administration have learned the process of melting the ice and pouring it into a star-shaped frame. However, they still cannot re-freeze the water.

As Spencer Johnson pointed in his recent book, "Who Moved My Cheese?" I hope that business schools which fail to change will not, a few years from now, still be repeating ignorant and obsessed questions from the past.
Log in to Twitter or Facebook account to connect
with the Korea JoongAng Daily
help-image Social comment?
s
lock icon

To write comments, please log in to one of the accounts.

Standards Board Policy (0/250자)