Wonderful. Lovely. So this is what all that fuss over the "Skolkovo School of Management" was for. So this is what it was worth effectively funding it from the state budget under the cover story of a Sberbank loan. So this is what it was worth for President Medvedev to chair the board of trustees of this school. So this is why they lied to the whole world, claiming there were students paying €90,000 in tuition at this school. Only for dialogues like this to take place later, in faraway California, before the eyes of the whole world: D. MEDVEDEV: Do we have time? Then let's talk some more. REMARK (Ilya Strebulaev): For Skolkovo to succeed and for Russia's economy to change, we need management talent, a critical mass of management talent, because we need people who can take an idea and bring it to commercial success. These are people who will make the right decisions and know how to assess risk. We need economists, financiers, and so on. That requires high-quality business education. And as a professor at Stanford Business School, everything I know so far about business education in Russia suggests that all attempts have gone down a rather idiosyncratic path. But you don't have to look far for successful examples. The New Economic School (a well-known Russian economics graduate school), of which I am a proud graduate, was created some 15 or 18 years ago, and it was built entirely on a Western model: the best Western economists came and trained young specialists. Today, as we know, NES graduates are snapped up both in the West and in Russia, for obvious reasons. Russia still does not have anything comparable in business education. There is now a critical mass of professors from Russia working at business schools, at elite business schools in America. Misha Ostrovsky is a business school professor, I am a business school professor at Stanford, and there are others at other schools. We would gladly be interested in cooperating and helping establish real education, real business education, in Russia. D. MEDVEDEV: That's not really even a question, it's more like a toast. I can say that I would be very glad if you came. As for business education, you are right: it followed a completely idiosyncratic path until Russian business finally realized that once again we were going our own way, as a certain famous classic instructed, whereas it would be better to follow the global path. But some things have now been done. We are trying to create these business schools. I also hope there will be some success; in any case, as for the business school in Skolkovo, I do hope something comes of it. I don't know, perhaps that hope is excessive, but in any case they did at least try to do everything there according to modern standards. REMARK (Mikhail Ostrovsky): Yesterday I went to your website devoted to Skolkovo. D. MEDVEDEV: What do you think? REMARK: In principle, everything they want to do is correct. But I looked at the list of people... the faculty, and there isn't a single finance specialist there, not a single expert in... D. MEDVEDEV: So who did they hire? REMARK: And there isn't a single person we know. D. MEDVEDEV: Maybe they just couldn't find people like that? So who did they hire? REMARK: They hired... an etiquette specialist... D. MEDVEDEV: That's actually sad. If they didn't hire the core specialists, then it's unclear who they did hire... //////// (via ksonin) The President of the Russian Federation and chairman of Skolkovo's board of trustees is baffled: So who did they hire? and indignant: That's actually sad. Hello!!! President Medvedev!!! Then what the hell was the point of financing all this garbage at the expense of Sberbank shareholders and Russian taxpayers? For the sake of this photo?
They could just as well have put scarves on members of the "Nashi" movement (a pro-Kremlin youth group) and staged a photo op. Same effect, less money wasted. In three years, it'll be the same story with the "Skolkovo innovation city." - So who did they hire? - That's very sad. They'll be a little sad for a moment and then write off another few tens of billions of rubles. The country is big and rich, after all. Time to move on to new horizons. Russia will become a leader in extrasensory perception (they say that's the future) or build the world's largest accordion factory. So far, the "Skolkovo School of Management" has become a leader in only one field. Talk to any specialist in "blog promotion." Skolkovo has the biggest budget for that. Quite a peculiar management style for a "school of management," isn't it?