By Ayanna Kirtonm, Staff ReporterPROFESSOR NEVILLE Ying has been appointed by the University of the West Indies (UWI) to act as the executive director of the Mona School of Business during the absence of Professor Gordon Shirley, the school's former director who has been appointed Jamaica's ambassador to the United States.
Professor Ying began his academic career at Mico Teachers' College where he became a trained teacher in mathematics, physics, and physical education. He then pursued mathematics and physics at the bachelor's level at UWI. He pursued his graduate studies at the University of Maryland in the United States where he earned a master's degree in measurement and statistics and a Ph.D. in psychometrics.
Employed by the ICD Group for 21 years before leaving that company as a corporate vice-president in the early nineties, Professor Ying was also instrumental in setting up the Worthington Road campus of the former Institute of Management & Production (IMP) now renamed the University College of the Caribbean IMP, which started as an in-house training centre for the ICD Group. There, Professor Ying worked as the executive director and chairman of the board. He then served as project manager in the establishment of the Mona School of Business, the product of a US Agency for International Development (USAID) grant awarded to UWI in 1987 to fund a management education project in Jamaica.
SELF-SUFFICIENT PROGRAMME
According to Professor Ying, the grant was awarded to undertake the following:
the establishment a financially self-sufficient MBA programme on the Mona campus, the selection and training of young graduates, and the physical expansion of the department. The programmes offered by the
Mona School of Business (MSOB) are
concentrated at the graduate level, though diploma courses in various specialisations are provided. The Master's in Business Administration (MBA) and the EMBA
(the Executive Masters in Business Administration) are the two degrees awarded by the MSOB.
The MBA programme has a functional orientation, which enables students to cover several core courses and then move on to specialise in the concentration of their choice, such as marketing, human resource management, international business, banking and finance.
YOUNGER GRADUATES
Typical MBA students are those people "with less years of experience younger graduates," says Professor Ying who notes, "There is a market need for (higher education) since the work place has changed dramatically."
"People are not waiting around for 10 years for promotion and graduates have found that there is a need for additional
qualifications in order to become upwardly mobile in an organisation," he says.
The school's flagship programme, the EMBA, is offered to those managers with ten or more years of experience and a bachelor's degree. "It is a lot more experiential, people can bring their business experiences to the class discussion," says Professor Ying.
The EMBA is a general management programme that provides senior management personnel with the human, technical, administrative and organisational skills necessary for top class performance.
The school also offers an EMBA in Management Information Systems, which is a variant of the EMBA programme and the Master's in Computer Based Management Information Systems and plans to introduce doctoral programmes in the near future.
In addition to strengthening opportunities for upward mobility in the corporate world, Professor Ying says graduates find that an MBA increases their marketability locally and abroad. "Many students have their sights set on migration," he says. "This can be particularly challenging since many UWI graduates have told us that they would prefer to pursue an MBA with Nova or the University of New Orleans because it will make finding employment easier in the U.S.," Professor Ying says. The executive director points out, however, that the international nature of MSOB's programmes makes them relevant in the United States and notes that in former years, courses at the business school were taught solely by lecturers from Penn State University.
"Over the years we've moved it from that structure to predominantly Jamaican lecturers but we still maintain our core international persons from the United States, the UK, and Canada," he says.
A GOOD BALANCE
Overall, the courses offered by the business school are those that are readily applicable to real corporate situations but Professor Ying suggests despite academic qualifications "only the highest performers will rise to the top". "The bottom line for most companies is how well you perform on the job," he says. "The rigorous nature of our programmes is a common complaint from students but though it is a strain on them we feel better about it because when they go on the job their employers acknowledge that really they learned from the programme," says Professor Ying.
Describing the nature of the curriculum, Professor Ying says the school endeavours to strike a good balance between the practical and theoretical. "There is practical application through the various projects that students are assigned," he says. "The emphasis is on group work which is deliberate since most operations are now based on team work (so much so) that the first course is (in the programme) team building, which is ongoing throughout the programme," says Professor Ying. He notes that in the past, on -the- job performance was based largely on individual effort.
TECHNOLOGY
Today, however, " with the changes in IT, data is no longer the purview of one individual," says Professor Ying. "Technology forces you to work as a team. Gone are the days that you could keep a file of information and not share it with anyone. People now have access to all kinds of information, in real time, on and off site," he observes.
" Plus the complexity of business decisions means that a team has to be put to work on solutions as well as strategic directions
forward so the exercises we give to our
students in the team building courses
imposes that kind of mindset on them,"
says Professor Ying.
Although MSOB has experienced a 43 per cent (or 259 students) increase in enrolment for the next academic year, Professor Ying says competition remains a challenge.
"The education market is becoming more and more liberalised, not only from overseas institutions located here, but new entrants
to the market, as well as distance education programmes," he says. There are 618
students currently attending the MSOB
and the additional enrolment means
additional spatial requirements, another
factor that the executive director says will need to be addressed.
INTERNATIONAL ACCREDITATION
In order to be recognised as a credible institution internationally, the school recently became a member of the Association for Advanced Collegiate Schools of Business (ASCSB), the international accrediting body for schools of business. "The ASCSB will take us through the process of accreditation based on international accreditation standards by helping with faculty development, programme quality, and students services," says Professor Ying. "This will help us to address the challenges we face by giving us practical measures."
In addition to the establishment of academic programmes and other university related contributions, the MSOB's role extends beyond the Mona campus. The business school also acts as a consultant to both private sector and public sector companies. Its most recent work involves guiding companies through what the professor describes as the "strategic thinking process."
"For years Jamaican companies have focused on strategic planning but have not necessarily employed strategic thinking," says Professor Ying. This, he explains, involves examining whether companies are generating creative and innovative ideas in order to make them competitive entities. "We have helped several companies in this process," says the professor, making reference to Cari-Med, TCL, H.D. Hopwood as some of the companies that have adopted strategic thinking.
"The idea is to walk companies through this process showing them how just how exciting the creative thinking process while ensuring effective planning, before getting back to the nuts and bolts of actually implementing strategic plans," he says.
