As the global financial maelstrom spins on, Harvard Business School has dropped anchor in the relative shelter of Shanghai.

In the throes of the recent global economic downturn, The Financial Times ran an article about the Harvard Business School headlined “HBS: Masters of the Apocalypse”. Brian Kenny, the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer of Harvard Business School, says “we were getting calls from journalists multiple times a week for about six or eight months wanting to talk to us about curricula change: Had business schools done a good enough job educating executives? Why are we in this mess?”

“Our perspective on this, probably not surprisingly, is that we’ve never needed people who understand business more than we do now,” Kenny says. They’re also spending more time teaching risk management.

Harvard recently opened a Shanghai office in Pudong, near the Shangri-La, to bring some of its business smarts to China. “Executive education is a big part of what we do,” Kenny says. “[In Shanghai] we have what we call focused programs. They could be anywhere from finance related courses to strategy to marketing, they could even be more specific than that. We may do a program on digital marketing for instance. I think what we’ll have to do over time is find out what Chinese business executives are interested in learning about and that will help us to figure out the right kind of courses to offer.”

Typically, courses will run for between four and seven days, often from 8am until 9pm. The school will use the “case study” method of teaching, where students discuss the stories of real businesses. The programs are aimed at mid-level to senior executives, and applications usually require an executive sponsor.

Notably, Harvard will not be offering an MBA program in Shanghai. “The only place we do the MBA courses is back in Boston,” Kerry says. “It’s the nature of the program. It’s a two year, full time, residential program and a big part of the experience is being on campus, developing relationships with your classmates there and we couldn’t replicate that someplace else.”

The Harvard Center Shanghai officially opened on 18 March, and it brings together the Harvard Business School and the Harvard China Fund, which aims to build education partnerships here for teaching a wide range of subjects including law, health, the humanities and social sciences.

The Center includes one large, narrow hall that looks out on the Oriental Pearl Tower, plus meeting spaces for break out groups and a single, main “presentation space”.

“If you were standing in that classroom you wouldn’t know that you weren’t standing in Boston, Massachusetts,” Kenny says. “We built it to the same specifications, we imported all the materials, and we had our people, our engineers, onsite working with the Chinese architects and the Chinese builders to make sure everything was built as close as possible to what we do in Boston.”

“The only thing that’s different than the classrooms in Boston is that there’s a glass-enclosed booth at the back of this room and that’s where we have two translators at all times. So when the teacher’s up at the front of the room writing in English on the board there’s a person standing next to him writing in Chinese.”

In addition to catering to Chinese speakers, Harvard has already devoted plenty of energy to investigating the particularities of business in China. “We’ve been working in China and conducting research in China for a decade now, so we have a lot of cases that take place all around China,” Kenny says. “They’re in Shanghai, they’re in Beijing, but they’re also in very rural areas where we do research.”

Shanghai was chosen as the location for a major Harvard base because it’s a centre of commerce. But is the Harvard Business School confident in its own business model here?

“Oh yeah, I think we did our homework on that front,” Kenny says.

Just checking.