Harvard's executive-ed push: China booms, India bargains

Harvard Business School's global ambitions ran into a pricing lesson in 2011. The school had spent four years expanding its executive education programs overseas — focused on China, India, and Europe, teaching everything from venture capital to strategy execution — and the two Asian markets could not have behaved more differently.

China was the boom. Demand for management instruction grew the fastest there, with companies eager to pay for the Harvard brand. India was the puzzle: demand was strong, but at price levels well below what Harvard charged in the United States, and Indian companies resisted paying American prices.

Back home, a Tata-sized bet

While the school figured out Asia, its biggest expansion was happening in Boston. In October 2010, the Tata Group — India's largest conglomerate — announced a $50 million gift to Harvard Business School, the largest from an international donor in the school's history. The money funded a new academic and residential building for executive education students, later named Tata Hall.

The symmetry was hard to miss. An Indian conglomerate was bankrolling the expansion of executive education at Harvard even as Harvard struggled to sell executive education in India at Harvard prices. Ratan Tata, the group's chairman, had attended the school's Advanced Management Program in 1975 — and called the gift a way to give back "a little bit of what it gave to me."

The lesson for business schools going global: the brand travels; the price list doesn't always.