Global Board Center
Since 2010, the IMD Global Board Center has supported boards and senior leaders by providing unique resources and world-class research on current governance issues and the latest governance trends. Building on more than 45 years of experience, we help some of the most respected organizations in the world transform their governance practices for the better through board education.
High demand for programs
This year saw a record number of participants join us on campus for board programs, with the Center’s online program offering continuing to flourish simultaneously.
We constantly re-engineered our approach to program design, ensuring an impactful and transformative experience by leveraging our network of experienced board members and advisors around the world.
We delivered 10 custom board programs to a number of influential organizations across different sectors, ranging from SOEs and public corporations to international organizations and renowned global banks.
Our 19 Open Programs were attended by 357 participants and demand for the Board Director Diploma continued to be high as we recorded our strongest year at 71% growth over 2021 with 58 diploma candidates in 2022.
As part of the IMD Directors’ Diploma, we held the Grand Oral exam, to which we invited five candidates, as well as four prominent board members to serve on our evaluation panel together with Didier Cossin, Founder and Director of the Center.
“Mastering Board Governance is a fantastic collaborative experience that I recommend to all professionals interested in governance best practices, whether they are new to the subject or looking for continuous improvement. The program helped to improve my skills and was a source of inspiration.”
Konstantin Yershov, early-stage investor and board member, Switzerland
Our key research approach
The Global Board Center has developed technical know-how on Natural Language Processing (NLP) content analysis to study governance issues.
Content analysis is a research technique used to make replicable and valid inferences by interpreting and coding textual materials. By systematically evaluating texts such as letters to shareholders, annual reports, or call transcripts, qualitative data can be converted into quantitative data. Content analysis is promising for the rigorous exploration of many important but difficult-to-study issues in the governance area.
With this methodology, we conduct research on values-based governance. We have developed several academic papers to study unobserved, yet hard-to-measure concepts such as stewardship, short-termism, long-termism, cheap talk, real talk, and social-emotional wealth .
In 2022, we continued to produce a variety of materials for publication based on our research into the diverse dimensions of governance challenges.
2
FT 50 articles
4
I by IMD articles
7
Conference proceedings
6
Case studies
The IMD Board Community is formed
In December 2022, the IMD Board Community was launched with an event at IMD, featuring Jouko Karvinen (Chair of Finnair) as our keynote speaker and a panel of board members to discuss board education and its contribution to practice. The launch event was well-attended and the community now includes nearly 200 members. The goals of the community are as follows:
Community Goals