Jack Welch Launches Online MBA

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"In every course there will be pieces of what I taught at Crotonville," he says. "In the budgeting part there will be a view of conventional budgeting and a view of budgeting my way, and students can debate the two. Same thing in strategy. I have a method of strategy, Michael Porter has a method. We'll use Porter's book and then I'll throw my stuff in."

Lots of Competition

Welch isn't a stranger to the MBA world. For the past three years, Welch has taught an extremely popular leadership course at MIT's Sloan School of Management, based on the leadership principles covered in his best-selling book Winning. Welch also lent his name to the business school at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn.

The Management Institute marks a more active leap into the MBA landscape, but Welch is far from alone in offering an inexpensive online MBA. Many business schools known for their full-time graduate programs offer online components to their MBAs, including Massachusetts, and Carnegie Mellon (Carnegie Mellon Full-Time MBA Profile). Also, for-profit institutions like the University of Phoenix (APOL) and Cappella University (CPLA)have made names for themselves offering graduate business degrees primarily online at bargain prices.

In the short term, Gary Bisbee, director at Barclay's Capital, doesn't see the Jack Welch Management Institute as much of a threat to the more recognized online education brands. But with the right mix of marketing money and curriculum innovation, it's feasible that in the longer term the Welch Institute could become a serious competitor. "It would make sense that the school could become one of the successful players in the industry, given his reputation for management skill and maybe even more so developing leaders," Bisbee says. "I would clearly think they could become a player over time."

Upside in Online Education

To help him get there, Welch has chosen a dean and is working closely with a select group of prospective faculty members whom he hopes will soon be in place to turn the lights on in September. Ideally, he would have a few hundred students enrolled at that time, gradually increasing the number over time. "We intend to start slow," he says. "Our interest is in developing a quality program and we're not interested in a big ramp-up."

While launching a new MBA program might seem risky, especially with so many seasoned players in the market, Welch isn't concerned. "There's no risk," he says. "So people lose a little money. The reward is that a winning management formula spreads further than it already has. It's already spread widely. Now, we want to add more people to it. Online education is going nowhere but up. It's for real. It took me a long time to get there, being a bit of a traditionalist, but you see the way that kids learn, the way that they are more attentive. I think it had opportunities to be more rigorous. I'm very excited about where we're going."

Gloeckler is a staff editor for BusinessWeek in New York.

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