More than 100 participants from 27 countries gathered in Tirana to discuss what kind of management education is needed to support the emerging markets in their efforts to achieve and sustain competitive advantage in the globalizing world economy. In other words, to what extent management education is and could be universal, and to what extent, and in which way, it could and should be adapted to the specific features of emerging markets.
In order to better understand these realities, conference participants were in position to learn about the past and present of Albania and its future challenges and opportunities from Jozefina Topalli, speaker of the Parliament of Albania, and Edi Rama, Tirana's mayor. The broader political and economic context in south-east Europe was presented by Erhard Busek, coordinator of Southeast European Cooperative Initiative (SECI) and former Vice-Chancellor of Austria, whose message contained recognition of the achieved economic restructuring and social transformation of the region, but also encouragement for further steps to be done on the road to a complete integration into a broader European context.
The CEO Panel led by Andrej Vizjak, Managing Director, A.T. Kearney Eastern Europe, provided a deeper insight into business realities in Southeast Europe. Svetozar Janevski, Chairman of the Board, Tikveš Winery, Macedonia, Iztok Seljak, President of Management Board, Hidria, Slovenia, and Pandeli Garo, entrepreneur and Managing Partner, DDB Worldwide Communication Group, Albania presented the main business issues and managerial challenges, including those related to the specific cultural context faced by their respective organizations, indicating also interesting management development practices taking place to successfully deal with those issues and challenges.
Derek Abell, Professor Emeritus, ESMT - European School of Management and Technology, Germany, introduced the central question of the conference by sketching the specific contours of the complicated landscape of emerging markets, which themselves differ from each other on several dimensions. He strongly advocated a more balanced content of management education in which the universal and generic issues coupled with focus on the global best practices and latest management thinking should provide much more room for the realities of emerging markets, their context and dynamics.
The conference keynote speaker Charles Handy, one of the world's leading management thinkers and social philosophers, provided a highly inspirational personal response to the issues that were at the heart of the conference topic. While indicating business schools' responsibility for developing leadership for a better world, he also talked about the respective challenges and opportunities. His plea for creativity, innovation, and out-of-box thinking was also an encouragement for the business schools from emerging economies to assume an important role.
The conference parallel workshops explored in more detail how business schools should deal with the realities of emerging markets in the areas such as: competitiveness and innovation, entrepreneurship development, corporate social responsibility, and strategic partnerships and alliances that business schools and other management development institutions can establish locally, regionally, and internationally among themselves, as well as with the corporate world functioning in the specific context of emerging economies.
Along the lines of the keynote speeches and workshops' findings and recommendations, Jonathan Gosling, Director, Centre for Leadership Studies at the University of Exeter, UK, summarized lessons for business schools, including ones related to research. He strongly advocated more research efforts, including joint research projects, focused on the specific context and environment in emerging economies.
The 16th CEEMAN Annual Conference was chaired by Chin Tiong Tan, Deputy President, Singapore Management University. His concluding remarks provided a strong encouragement for business schools from emerging markets to take a more active role in the global search for business education and leadership development which would correspond to the emerging global challenges but also specific needs and context of the dynamically changing environments.
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