Who is the client of an MBA programme? The budding chief executives and entrepreneurs who fork out the best part of $30,000 to be drilled in accountancy, law and marketing 101? Or their potential employers?

The question caused a storm of debate at a recent function for Otago University MBA programme alumni. The result? Most former pupils resolutely dismissed former Otago MBA director David Bane’s assertion that an MBA programme’s customers could be anyone but them.

But the answer’s not that simple, says Ian Lafferty, Otago’s current MBA director. If New Zealand is to attract and retain our best talent, they need good jobs at the end of it. “And unless the business sector values the MBA qualification and what it brings the talent will go somewhere else as soon as it graduates.”

Retaining talent is key to New Zealand’s future, says Sir Paul Callaghan, founding director of the MacDiarmid Institute. Picking sectors is simply not getting us anywhere, the well known Wool to Weta author told the 150 or so participants at the Sustainable Future Institute’s StrategyNZ workshop. “Smart foods, cleantech are just things that sound good to politicians. But they are just complete and utter nonsense. Truth is what we’re good at is really weird stuff.”

Our top 10 technology companies produce $3.9 billion a year, making strange things that dominate niche markets. We need 100 companies doing the same thing, says Callaghan. To achieve that we need 100 talented people to create and foster those companies in New Zealand. The question is not about sectors but how we create “a place where talent wants to live”.

Wendy McGuinness, chief executive of the Sustainable Future Institute think tank and an Otago MBA graduate, says talent is key to the country’s future wellbeing. “It’s the ability to make connections, to be innovative and inventive.” It’s the country’s future thinkers; the ones who will keep New Zealand humming once we’ve finally got over our focus on milk powder.

So how does this tie into the country’s eight MBA programmes?

McGuinness says New Zealand’s MBA programmes, especially Otago’s - which attracts 75% of its intake from overseas - are a good way to attract talent into New Zealand. “The people who are attracted to an MBA here are already attracted to New Zealand. But more than that, people attracted to MBAs are committed to being educated, to being informed and to doing something with their life ... so they are naturally people who are interested in being the talent of the future.”

Otago has New Zealand’s only fulltime, campus-based MBA programme. It attracts about 35 applicants a month from overseas, with about 25 from India and most of the rest from China. Overseas places are limited as it’s important to maintain diversity to give New Zealand applicants a chance to meet and learn from international students about business practices overseas and vice versa, says Lafferty.

He's also a fan of using MBA programmes to attract and retain talent. All Otago MBA students get a business mentor who not only provide a sounding board through the course, but also introduce their student to the wonders of Dunedin and New Zealand, This might be as simple as participating in a family BBQ or attending a local rugby game.

The newly-introduced mentor programme is a hit with students, Lafferty says. So is the flexibility to do the business project part of the programme anywhere in New Zealand. This was changed to allow students to see more of the country and build wider business networks, with the hope of attracting them to stay, he says. “It’s not just about providing an MBA programme anymore; it’s about providing an experience ... an academic adventure.”

MBAs are also a good way to boost talent levels among our middle and senior management, where skills tend to rate poorly compared with overseas counterparts, says Lafferty. Somewhat ironically given our need to retain talent, a Ministry of Economic Development study last year found New Zealand managers were particularly poor on people management, “particularly when it comes to attracting and retaining talent and managing poor performers”.

Gerald Scanlan, another Otago MBA graduate, now relationship manager with the public sector’s Leadership Development Centre, says it’s important for New Zealand to have highly rated MBA programmes to demonstrate it’s at the cutting edge of business thinking. “MBAs have simply been seen as an education thing in the past rather than a magnet for talent. But if the focus was really to change, it would help drive expectations among applicants and eventual employers.” This would then drive the content of our MBA programmes, ensuring they were better designed to attract and foster the talent New Zealand needs, he says. Subjects like sales, project management, entrepreneurship, business improvement and productivity would become core, rather than electives graduates can opt for as they are currently.

The most pressing problem, however, in using MBAs as a way to drive talent retention in New Zealand is more basic, says Scottish-born Lafferty, with New Zealanders and New Zealand employers not rating MBAs as highly as most other countries. “I don’t really understand why, but certainly an MBA in New Zealand doesn’t get the recognition that it gets elsewhere.”

Which takes us back to the question posed to Otago MBA graduates about who the real customer of an MBA programme is, says Lafferty, because that is inextricably entwined with attracting and retaining MBA talent for New Zealand’s future.

There are a lot of countries vying to attract talent, says McGuinness. “So if you’re in the game, you’ve got to work hard at it. You can’t just sit back and hope it will happen.”

Fundamentally, says Callaghan, intelligent, creative people have a choice where they live in the world. “But imagine what we could achieve if we built a strategy around that ... gearing our education system accordingly. One hundred inspired New Zealand entrepreneurs can turn this country around. “This is the challenge for us all."

The big questions:

We need 100 more successful entrepreneurs to transform New Zealand’s economy. Could MBAs be the key to attracting and retaining talent we need? These questions were posed at a recent Otago MBA alumni function. Tell us what you think by leaving a comment.

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