Burkhard Schrage

Having worked and studied in different countries around the world informs some of my research. So we take best practices and insights from other countries and try to apply that to, for example, Vietnam. Hi. I'm Burkhard Schrage. I'm the Senior Program Manager of the Management program and also the Program Manager of the MBA program here at RMIT Vietnam. I research in strategic management, in corporate governance and also in the political economy. Much of my research is actually grounded in my personal history, if you want. So I have been working as an investment banker. And I'm currently also involved in an investment fund. And as such, I'm on the board of several companies. So many of the questions that I try to answer with my research are questions that we have that I have as a board member or as someone who was an investment banker before. And as a board member I'm basically thinking very hard about strategy and how we can compete in the marketplace. And we have a lot of discussions because there are so many options you can do, like for any business, say how should you grow faster or should you go slower? What's the regional footprint you want to have? Do you invest more in technology or do you invest more in marketing or in PR? So oftentimes I take questions from the boardroom into the classroom, but sometimes I take the answers from the classroom back into the boardroom. So there is actually a mutually benefitting sort of symbiosis between being a board member and actually also helping students to think about the questions they may think when they are running a business. Before Vietnam…You know, as a German, I studied, of course, in Germany [for] my undergraduate degree. Then I went to Paris, worked, continued to work in Paris in a bank. And after that, I went to Brazil  to work in an investment bank. And then I went to Boston, did my doctoral degree. From Boston, I went to Singapore where I became a professor of strategy. And then finally from Singapore, I came to Vietnam. What drew me to Vietnam is the ability to live in a country that is growing very fast. It's essentially transitioning from two different market systems. And essentially “getting my hands dirty” because my research is concerned with emerging market strategy and so forth. So there will be some sort of transition here towards a more service-oriented economy that is being pushed by the availability of new technologies. And the interesting part is that actually much of what people think about [as] the digital era of management or digital era of running a business, the fundamental ideas are still true. Competition works the same whether you are producing furniture or whether you're doing an e-wallet. The future of management involves thinking hard about new technologies and how we build them into our current operations. And we as academics, we have to understand so what are the best practices to embed those new technologies, to increase our profitability, to perhaps serve our stakeholders better? Because the old questions they still remain in the new era.