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Success Stories from Dubai

Three Business Mastery Projects (BMP) from the Executive MBA in Dubai Cohort 2008 were of such a high quality (and incidentally, achieved the highest marks awarded on the Dubai EMBA) that Prof. Rob Melville, Professor of Internal Auditing, recommended to the authors that they develop them as academic papers to be presented at appropriate conferences and for publication.

• Kishore Jaichandani and Neeraj Teckchandani produced a BMP about potential links between governance and performance in the GCC. From this, an abstract was produced for a paper ‘Where Corporate Governance And Better Firm Performance Meet: Empirical Evidence of Public Listed Companies in the GCC Region’. This was submitted to the 9^th Internal Auditing and Corporate Governance conference in London, April 2011 a peer reviewed event with an acceptance rate of only one in three. It was received very positively, and was awarded the conference prize of £500 for best paper. Competition included many experienced academics from internationally recognised universities.
• Tim Travers produced a BMP about Shar’ia law in Islamic financial insitutions. This was developed into a paper that was put forward for the 1st International Conference on Organisational Governance, organised by the Centre for Research into Organisational Governance (CROG) at Leicester Business School, De Montfort University, Leicester, September 2011. This is a peer reviewed conference, and the organisers are very well known in the CSR and governance reseacrh community.
• Thomas Hodgson and Damien Kriteman developed their BMP on corporate governance in sovereign wealth funds. Their paper based on the BMP ‘The Importance of Good Governance and Corporate Governance to the Government Investment Vehicles of the United Arab Emirates’ has also been accepted for the CROG event. Both theirs and Tim’s will have the opportunity to be published in specialist CSR journals as a result. 

Corporate governance and CSR are two of the key strategic issues for many very well known companies, and Islamic finance and governance is among the major areas for research, especially how it is developing in MENA, London and SE Asian locations. These three projects have made a vital contribution to the understanding of governance and show clearly that Cass' MBA students can compete as both extremely effective practitioners and as researchers of the highest quality.