THE GLOBE
Creating Leaders Through the Liberal Arts
The Chinese have come to
believe the mantra of many
American colleges that the
best leaders are those with
the broadest education in
the liberal arts. The goal of a
liberal education is not to train
specialists but to educate the
whole person to be curious,
thoughtful, and skeptical.
Today all Peking University
students, even in its Guanghua
School of Management, take
multiple courses in the liberal
arts, including literature,
philosophy, and history. The
university also boasts an elite
liberal arts curriculum in the
Yuanpei Program, named for
Peking University’s famous
German-educated chancellor of the early 20th century,
the philosopher Cai Yuanpei.
Across the street, Tsinghua’s
encouragement, sought to buy, rather than
rent (or steal), breakthrough innovation
capabilities through acquisitions of both
technology and talent.
Take the case of Huawei. William Plummer, the company’s Washington, DC–based
vice president for external affairs and a former U.S. diplomat, once portrayed the telecom powerhouse as “the biggest company
you’ve never heard of,” a claim few would
make today, especially given its 16 R&D
centers around the world and the controversies regarding its acquisition attempts
in the United States.
Haier, a leading Chinese appliance and
consumer electronics manufacturer, has
a similarly wide network of global design
and R&D centers in the United States, Japan,
Korea, Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany.
For Chinese auto manufacturers, Turin,
Italy, is the place to be, with JAC, FAW, and
Chang’an operating R&D centers there.
Anti-Western cultural currents may be
strong at home, but private Chinese firms
operating overseas have embraced local senior talent. Plummer, for example, is hardly
the only high-ranking Westerner who has
worked at Huawei. In 2010 the company recruited John Roese, the former chief technology officer of Nortel, to lead the company’s North American R&D efforts, and
a year earlier former British Telecom CTO
Matt Bross was brought in to oversee Huawei’s entire $2.5 billion R&D budget and operations. Both had reported directly to Huawei’s founder and chairman, Ren Zhengfei,
a former Chinese military officer. Similarly,
turbine manufacturer Goldwind recruited
American Tim Rosenzweig, an established
5 Harvard Business Review March 2014
School of Economics and
Management has implemented
what is perhaps the most
imaginative program in liberal
arts and general education in
any Chinese university.
The most important revolution in Chinese higher education today may not be its size
and scope but the fact that
even under the leadership of
engineers, top institutions
figure in the clean-energy field, to serve as
the first CEO of its U.S. operations. He in
turn brought in executives with records
distinguished by cross-cultural experience
and industrial expertise.
Machinery manufacturer Sany, whose
main international competitors include
Caterpillar and Komatsu, initially attempted to succeed in the European and
U.S. markets by relying on homegrown
talent and technology. But a few missteps
encouraged the firm to establish R&D centers closely tied to its European and U.S.
regional headquarters and to staff them
with professionals from those countries.
And Sany’s 2012 acquisition of Putzmeister,
Germany’s leading cement pump maker,
gave the company access to a onetime competitor’s technology.
In short, we see Chinese firms making
a concerted—and effective—effort to fill
major gaps in their innovation capacity
through increasingly widespread foreign
acquisitions and partnerships.
Still, to become a leading force for innovation in the 21st century, the Chinese need
to be nurturing the innovators of the future.
That is the job of Chinese universities.
Innovation Through the
Next Generation
In the first half of the 20th century, China
developed strong state-run institutions
(Peking University, Jiao Tong University,
National Central University, and, at the
apogee of research, the Academia Sinica).
These were accompanied by a creative
set of private colleges and universities
(Yenching University, St. John’s University,
have come to understand that
an education in the absence of
the humanities is incomplete.
Perhaps this is because education leaders in China know
better than anyone what can
happen when a society loses
its cultural foundations. This is
an education revolution within
a revolution, the outcome of
which is not yet clear.
and Peking Union Medical College, to name