Hitotsubashi University was founded in 1875 to educate “captains of industry” to combine the best of Japanese and Western philosophy and practices and lead Japan’s entry into the industrialized world. For 135 years, Hitotsubashi graduates have been at the forefront of Japanese business, government, academics, and media, and have built Japan into the global economic power it is today. In 2000, Hitotsubashi University founded the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy (Hitotsubashi ICS) to continue its tradition of developing global leaders. Hitotsubashi ICS offers a world-class MBA curriculum, taught entirely in English by a distinguished faculty of leading researchers and business practitioners.
At Hitotsubashi ICS, you will join a small, select, and extremely international group of students and encounter a challenging MBA curriculum that reflects our value of combining the “Best of Two Worlds.” You will, of course, study Finance, Strategy, Operations, Marketing, Organizational Behavior, and the other essential courses of an MBA program. But, through further coursework, meetings with top executives, internships, and field studies, you will also learn how Japanese companies create knowledge, innovate, and manage quality, and how the goals and social purpose of the corporation differs around the world. In the course on Global Citizenship, you will learn about meeting the needs of others — from villagers in Nepal to homeless people in Tokyo. During Knowledge Week, you will look inside yourself to better understand your own values, and relate your career to your life’s purpose. In your teamwork with classmates, you will learn first-hand how values, work practices, expectations, and incentives vary across cultures, and how you can manage these differences to create greater synergies. Our student to faculty ratio, of about 3 to 1, means that you will have many opportunities to interact directly with faculty, through our seminar system, independent studies, and a wide range of social and academic activities.
Hitotsubashi ICS is entering its second decade of providing a global standard MBA in Japan. We are embarking on a number of new initiatives to further enhance your education at Hitotsubashi ICS. We recently signed the BEST Alliance, a path-breaking alliance between Hitotsubashi ICS, Guanghua School of Management at Peking University, and the Seoul National University Graduate School of Business. BEST refers to the initials of our cities: BEijing, Seoul, and Tokyo. This alliance links Hitotsubashi ICS to two of the best business schools in Asia, so that through exchange of students and faculty we can help our students to better understand the institutional and cultural diversity of this region, and prepare them to lead in a global economy that will increasingly be dominated by Asia. At the same time, we are developing our position as global thought leaders through faculty research on Japanese companies. Although the Japanese economy as a whole has faced many problems over the last two decades, Japanese companies still remain an inspiration to companies around the world in quality, technology, and service. And Japanese companies today are on the forefront of solving problems that affect the entire world: including the environment, limited natural resources, and an aging population.
In the aftermath of the global financial crisis and with the rise of Asian economies, there is an increasing realization that there is no longer one best model — no longer a single path and a right way to manage a business or an economy. Global leaders must learn to combine different approaches, different philosophies, and different values, and this is what we do every day at Hitotsubashi ICS. You will receive an education that equips you to lead in this new world, and you will build lifelong networks with members of an extraordinarily diverse and committed community of students and faculty. Hitotsubashi ICS will change your life and open up new opportunities — perhaps opportunities that you have never even imagined.
I invite you to learn more about our program, and to see how an MBA from the Hitotsubashi University Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy (Hitotsubashi ICS) can meet your personal career goals.
Christina Ahmadjian
Dean
