This is written from a 747 somewhere over the Rocky Mountains. I am on my way to the AACSB Annual conference in Honolulu, Hawaii. It is a conference on business school management, which is interesting in itself, and Hawaii, of course, is a new destination for me.

But the real reason I am on my way is because I am on the board of Masterstudies.com, and startup company offering a Web-based search-and-match service for business schools and prospective business school students. (Check our the website – and for all my colleagues out there – we are getting good reviews, send me an email if you think this might be a good way to generate leads for your school.)

Anyway, the VP of Business Development is going over to sell our services, and I am tagging along to translate between academese and marketing and (I suspect) as a guarantee that this is a serious business. I am quite looking forward to it – it will be interesting to see how other business school are competing for students in an increasingly global market. It will also be interesting to see which way the market moves – I suspect a movement towards more and more franchising of well-known schools, more tailored education (tied to knowledge profiles and career tracks in large corporations) and, of course, more use of technology both in marketing and execution.