Stuart Ballan found his recent master's program in business administration so stimulating that he decided to share his enthusiasm - by setting up a "handbook" on the Web of course information aimed at Israeli corporate types and alumni alike.

The Manchester-born immigrant graduated two years ago¹ from the Kellogg-Recanati International Executive Master's in Business Administration Program, conducted jointly by Northwestern University's prestigious J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management, based outside of Chicago, Illinois, and the Leon Recanati Graduate School of Business Administration at Tel Aviv University.

The two-year MBA program, which costs $39,600 in tuition fees, is open only to executives whose companies sponsor them; its credentials are impeccable and thus have not been questioned at all as part of recent investigations into the academic rigorousness of some foreign university extension programs in Israel.

"The MBA program is very intensive and is taken by senior people who work very hard. I started to realize a while after I graduated that I was starting to forget some of the main points in the courses. And then I thought that what would help me remember would be a handbook of the courses," explains Ballan, 43.

He decided to set up an Internet site - www.kr04.net - with a summary of course content, called the "Kellogg-Recanati Executive MBA Handbook."

The part-owner of high-tech marketing and financing companies Mobile Software Ltd. and Mobile Capital Ltd., Ballan decided to recruit students to summarize the 27 courses offered by the master's program, which is taught at Tel Aviv University by professors from Kellogg and Recanati.

"Everyone said it would never work. They told me I'd never get 27 Israelis students to volunteer for such a project," recalls Ballan. But he succeeded - and then also asked each professor to correct and approve the summaries.

"As soon as Kellogg at Northwestern understood what was happening and what we had done, they announced it to all Kellogg alumni and to sister extension programs - in Hong Kong, Germany and Canada," Ballan says.

The new Web site, whose content is also available in print form, has attracted the attention of alumni interested in reviewing some of the material they have learned, and also serves as a reference site for prospective students and business people.

"It was exciting to me that we did this in Israel and were able to produce a resource which is useful to others," says Ballan, who moved to Israel with his Israeli wife from London in 1997.

Now that the Internet project is up and running, with links to many MBA-related sites, Ballan is involved in discussions with people from Kellogg's Hong Kong extension program about providing course summaries of its courses - which focus particularly on how to do business in Asia - on his Web site.

"It seems that about 20 percent of the courses in Hong Kong are different from the courses in the Kellogg-Recanati program. It would be interesting for students in Israel or, say, Germany or the U.S. or Canada, to understand the differences in their curriculum. A summary, for example, on a course in Hong Kong on marketing tactics in the Far East, could be very useful for someone who is thinking of doing business in that region of the world," he explains.

Launching the Web site has helped to put Ballan into close touch with all the professors in the program - half of them at Northwestern, and all of them well-connected in the world business community. It has also given him a chance, on-line, to tap into a far-flung network of alumni and colleagues as he regularly goes through his incoming e-mail. This Internet dialogue is beneficial to Ballan's own business interests as his two companies rely on an extensive network of contacts to help provide financial and marketing assistance to start-up companies, mostly Israeli ones, seeking to expand abroad.

"It's extremely satisfying to go to the mailbox [of the Kellogg-Recanati Handbook site] and find, say, an e-mail from someone in Singapore, telling me he really liked the site, looked up the Web site of my companies, and wants to know if we can meet when he comes to Israel in two weeks' time," he says.

Visitors to the site have also suggested that Ballan add a chat room, bulletin board or news pages where people could network.

"I consider this as a project which has finished its first few stages," he says. "There will be later stages. It's a journey to something bigger."

Note 1: Stuart Ballan graduated from the Kellogg-Recanati Executive MBA Program in November 2001, and not 2 years ago, as stated in the above article.