The Kellogg-Miami Executive MBA Program is the latest in a series of strategic moves to advance the Kellogg School's mission of delivering a truly global management education to our executive market segment. 

Launched in January, the inaugural class consists of 42 executives from across Latin America, South Florida and beyond.  Students commute from nearby Miami to as far away as Chile and Peru. The second class, which begins its studies this January, looks as robust as the first thanks to the tireless recruiting efforts of our admissions team, alumni volunteers and the Miami-area business community.

The idea to bring the Kellogg School's executive MBA experience to the Latin American market actually began a decade ago. We had considered the objective since 1996 when we launched our first joint executive MBA program abroad. At that point, then-Dean Donald P. Jacobs envisioned a true global community of students — a "classroom without borders" — and with careful expansion to positions in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and North America we edged closer to the goal. By 2001, students from each of these EMBA programs began to take classes both at their home campus and in Evanston, but even with that level of success, we knew we were not done. We wanted to create a rigorous academic experience to serve the needs of Latin American professionals, and then we wanted to integrate all our global offerings to ensure a high-quality "Kellogg" education for all participants.

Clearly, our first challenge was to find a way to serve the Latin American region and not one particular country. After exhaustive meetings with alumni, corporate partners and friends of the school, it became apparent that the initial consideration involved selecting the optimal location. We wanted a way to create value for these professionals that crossed borders. Doing so entailed finding "neutral" ground. The feedback we received from all constituencies told us that to serve the region we needed to locate in Miami. Happily, that advice has proven spot-on. 

Our initial plan was to partner with a Miami-based hotel and simulate, as closely as possible, the James L. Allen Center experience on our Evanston campus. Our two-year goal was to identify and secure a facility that we could then customize. We're delighted to say that we beat our goal by nearly two years by opening our facility in Coral Gables just four weeks after the program's launch. What's more, these facilities give us the opportunity to scale up operations as our program grows.

The inaugural class has exceeded our expectations on all accounts. They demonstrate that elusive combination of academic excellence and exuberance for the school and the program that helped make expanding our executive portfolio surprisingly easy. We were amazed when during the first Live-In Week students already were interested in knowing how we were going to help them leverage the many global opportunities that are part of the Kellogg Executive MBA Program experience. They wanted to know when the class would travel to Asia for part of their program experience, and they were curious to learn when students from our joint ventures in Germany, Israel, Hong Kong and Toronto were coming to Miami to study.  (The answer to both questions is "spring 2007.")

In fact, all students in the Kellogg EMBA program will have the opportunity to experience a self-directed exchange program at any Kellogg School location around the globe. In doing so, they continue to build their global mindset and leverage the powerful international network created by this remarkable Kellogg portfolio — a portfolio that, with Miami, just continues getting better.