While teaching at the Sloan School of Management, I had the opportunity on two or three occasions to teach executive education courses to a group of managers from Shanghai, the commerical capitol of China. If memory serves me correctly, the group was organized and brought to the US by the Shanghai University of Science and Technology, one of the many schools in China with which Sloan has a partnership.

When teaching these executives, I always had to rely on the services of a translator, even though many of the Chinese execs had better than passable English. During the between-session breaks of the first class I taught to them, I asked a simple question by way of the translator: How many people here know what my name, Starling, means?

There was a pause and then students began talking amongst themselves. After a few seconds a hand went up. An executive answered my question, in English. He said, "You are named after the former leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin." I was stunned. I don't know if my reaction to his answer was visible on my face, but at the very moment I said, "No, that is incorrect", there was laughter in the room- not hilarious or derisive laughter, just the ordinary good-natured kind. Then, smalls groups of executives began to speak to each other and to the one who had answered my question. I asked the translator two related questions: first, "What's so funny?" and then, "Was it my answer?" He replied to my second question first, by saying that he didn't know (if they had heard my reply).

His reply to my first question was something that I found as humorous as the rest of the class clearly did. He told me that the execs were making jokes about my name, as they understood it, i.e. Stalin, and my job as a b-school professor. He suggested, in so many words, that they found the incongruity and irony of the situation quite amusing and were making little jokes like "Stalin, the business school professor" and "Stalin, the teacher of capitalism" and "Stalin, the business strategist" and - the one that became my favorite- "Do you think the second half of this class will be about five-year plans?"

For brief a moment, the translator then turned his back to me to listen once more to what the execs were saying to each other. After doing so he started to apologize in case I had felt offended. But when he saw that I, too, was chuckling, he stopped in mid-sentence and a slight smile broke out over his face. Later I told him that the way I saw it, there was no reason for me to feel offended- the joke was on Uncle Joe, not me. I just provided the occasion.

Forward to November 2005. It was the fond memory of this humorous lesson in political economy that came rushing back to mind last week when I read a Reuters report about the shortage of business schools in Russia, its impact on the Russian economy, and efforts by both the government and private enterprises to remedy it.

As Russia's economy powers ahead driven by high oil prices, business education is failing to keep pace and employers complain of a chronic shortage of managers trained to international standards. More than 100 business schools have been established since the collapse of the Soviet Union but many have failed to gain credibility among Russian and international employers, who still prefer foreign-trained managers for top jobs.

According to the article, the reasons for the dismal performance of Russian business schools include the unwillingness of the most promising candidates to attend, as well as the poor quality of education offered to those who do.

Business education has also been held back because budding entrepreneurs in the 1990s were often fearful that they would miss out on too many opportunities if they took a year or two off to hone their management skills at a school. What business education is on offer in Russia is often very theoretical with little opportunity for students to acquire any sound practical experience.

According to one observer, the quality of and the disinterest in Russian b-schools are two sides of the same ruble:

"In the 1960s just 10 percent of U.S. executives had an MBA but now 60 percent do. It's considered almost a must for a successful career," Vitaly Klintsov, a partner at McKinsey, told a recent conference in Moscow organized by the World Economic Forum. Klintsov believes Russian business schools are in a bind. "It is very difficult to get top students because they go to the West (to study) and if you do not get top students you do not get the best teachers," he said.

The situation is not all gloom and doom, however. According to the article, steps are being taken to remedy the situation:

To tackle the problem, Russia's government is keen to promote flagship schools in the country. "We recognize that a lack of management talent is one of the big challenges for the country," said Aigool Khalikova, an adviser to Russia's liberal-minded Economy Minister German Gref. "We have decided to allocate tens of millions of dollars to develop national champions in business education. Without the support of business, there is no way this can succeed," she said. The lack of a recognized elite business school to rival INSEAD in France, the London Business School or Harvard is prompting local businessmen to act. Ruben Vardanian, founder of Russian investment bank Troika Dialog, is drawing up plans with the backing of a group of local and international companies to set up a school in Moscow which he hopes could compete with the best worldwide. "We are trying to establish something that will be a benchmark. Now is the right time and this will be a big challenge," said Vardanian, who said he wants $200 million to launch the school.

I, for one, think that the establishment of a world class business school in Moscow is a truly wonderful idea and way past due. Moreover, should the opportunity arise, I would consider it a privilege to join the faculty of said school and to extol therein the virtues of free market capitalism in what was once the epicenter of its antithesis. My conditions are but two: that my name is pronounced correctly and that I am allowed to tell students that my name's meaning, a little star, is not a reference to the little star with which they are most familiar: