Too often when people see the "E" in EMBA they think it stands for easy, and associate it with weekend courses, or worse, e-mail-based programs. Sign up, maybe attend a few classes, participate in some online discussions, pay your money, and, voila, you get an MBA. There may be a place in the world for those "programs", but at IMD the MBA degree stands for an achievement and the acquisition of a large body of knowledge. This is learning that much takes time and effort, and also means taking risks.

"The Executive MBA program at IMD was an outstanding experience,” said Claus Hemmingsen, CEO of Maersk Contractors, who graduated at the top of his EMBA class last year. “The Faculty promised from the outset that it would be tough to go through, a lot of hard work and a sacrifice on participants’ both private and - as relevant - working lives. I can testify that it was all of that: challenging assignments, hours of studying and preparing assignments and quite extensive field and campus weeks. What they didn’t promise (they probably didn’t have to) was that it would be invigorating, motivating, self-satisfying and above all extremely relevant for participants' full-time working life. Indeed it was all of that. The program builds on your experience, no matter how extensive, and it builds on real cases from your own day-to-day working environment. Before the program was over, several learnings had been put to good use in my home company. It was an excellent program – worth all the long evenings and demanding travels. ”

IMD believes that achievement doesn't just mean showing up for class. It means that a graduate has done the work that was asked of him or her, and more importantly, reached our standard. Every assignment that one does during the EMBA is evaluated: Outstanding, Pass or Fail. A Fail, the so-called “re-do”, means repeating the assignment and responding to the weaknesses identified in detail by the Faculty. This is a rigorous process and one that Alumni describe as being very tough. However, many say that it should be tough as it means all graduates reach the same high standard of performance.

Learning also entails risk. In the IMD EMBA program, learning means the willingness to try things that one hasn’t yet mastered and working in areas never experienced, while collaborating with other high-performing individuals and being evaluated by the Faculty.

It's not worth putting in all that effort and taking the risks unless the learning is relevant. Relevance has always been one of the hallmarks of IMD, and the Executive MBA Program is no exception. Participants take their learning straight into their own companies through a series of assignments that identify opportunities and improvements for their organizations based on ideas and frameworks developed in class.

Doug Lowther, Vice President of Irdeto Access, graduated as valedictorian five years ago. He finds that the program still has relevance for him today. "The EMBA is ideally designed to be relevant to practicing executives, whether in large or small enterprises. Real-life examples are used in most of the coursework and your peers in the classroom often have great ideas that you can immediately apply to your own situation. A mix of team and individual assignments ensure that learning is applied immediately, and these assignments can be based on your own company so that even during the program the results are immediately useful. Five years later, I still regularly refer to material from the EMBA, and can often find a way of solving an unfamiliar problem much more quickly than before."

Danny Touw, who is Philip Morris’ General Manager for Singapore & Brunei and graduated at the top of IMD's first Executive MBA Class in 1999, offers these thoughts: “It's amazing that it's already 10 years ago I did this. It was hard work, but I only realized after the program, when I finished and suddenly I had free weekends, that during the EMBA I used to at least be working on the program one full day/evening during the weekend, and many evenings during the week. Over these 10 years I must have quoted the program at least once a month, every month, every year. There's always a topic, an event, something that makes me go back into my memory to the EMBA program. I relate to it, think about it, talk about it, share it with people in the room, learn again, update knowledge and get 'return on my investment'. I'm not joking - at least once a month during all these years. Everything taught, studied, learned and debated, has been relevant.”

Perhaps the Executive MBA is best summed up by Rae Yuan, a 2005 IMD EMBA graduate and currently the head of Roche Pharma’s Development Center in Shanghai. "Some schools give you five books to read on Monday; IMD gives you five ideas to use on Monday,” she said.