IMD hosts “Reinventing Luxury” event

47 senior executives from 42 companies across luxury sectors participated in the first IMD Discovery Event dedicated to luxury industries: “Reinventing Luxury: Strategic Conversations.” IMD professor...

A mobile market

By Ralf W. Seifert

The Chinese market accounted for a third of worldwide smartphone sales in 2016, with about half a billion units sold. However, the size of this market didn't offer much protection to market leaders. A...

The IMD World Digital Competitiveness Ranking

By Arturo Bris with Christos Cabolis, José Caballero.

The nature of competitiveness constantly evolves, affecting not only how businesses function but how countries perform today and will perform in the future. Economies are experiencing more rapid...

IMD continues to support winning startups in Switzerland

Each year the top 100 startups in Switzerland are named and celebrated in Zurich at the “ Top 100 Swiss Startups” event. This year, as has been the case every year, IMD has strong ties to a high...

IMD and the Agricultural Bank of China hold event to celebrate ground-breaking IMD case study of ABC’s business model

IMD recently held an event with executives from the Agricultural Bank of China (ABC), following close collaboration which resulted in a case study about the bank’s activities to finance farming in...

Why Facebook’s artificial intelligence break is scary for companies

By Amit Joshi

The recent news that Facebook temporarily suspended its Artificial Intelligence (AI) program when the bots within this program started chatting to each other in a strange language only they understood...

Power (not Gender) Driving Sexual Harassment in the Tech Industry

By Jennifer Jordan

The depressing news about harassment, sexism and a generally toxic work environment for women in the tech industry just keeps coming. Uber, venture capitalists, and now Google’s diversity manager, wit...

IMD MBAs go on impactful Discovery Expedition to the UAE

IMD’s current class of MBAs just returned from a series of trips to discover the business contexts and specialized industries in a number of regions around the world. One of these trips was to Dubai a...

South African entrepreneur increases societal impact after IMD program

Sibongile Manganyi-Rath is an award-winning entrepreneur from South Africa who was recently named Africa’s most influential woman in business by CEO magazine. Sibongile’s life story is inspiring; She...

Transition expert Michael D. Watkins on CEO shifts at Uber and Expedia

By Michael D. Watkins

It's not easy to be a successor CEO. Surprisingly, this is especially true when everything is going great, and a well-regarded CEO like Dara Khosrowshahi leaves to join a high-profile company like Ube...

Professor Peter Vogel chosen as holder of the new Debiopharm Chair for Family Philanthropy at IMD

IMD is pleased to announce the nomination of Professor Peter Vogel from the 1st of September 2017 as the holder of the new Debiopharm Chair for Family Philanthropy.

Gaining the skills and confidence to take that next step

It’s time to take that next step and move closer to your dream. It’s time to become the professional you have always wanted to be, the leader, the manager or the next Executive MBA candidate. It’s tim...

Digital health ecosystem workshop at IMD

The IMD Global Centre, Value Chain 4.0, recently hosted its first workshop on the digital health ecosystem in Switzerland. The aim of this workshop was to identify barriers and facilitators towards th...

Getting back on the horse: striving for gold at the Paralympics

In 2008 Celine van Till had an accident that changed her life forever. While training for a dressage competition in Germany, the horse she was riding reared up and fell back onto the 17-year-old,...

IMD’s Entrepreneurship Community continues to gain momentum

Since last year a new initiative, the Alumni Community for Entrepreneurship (ACE), has been making waves at IMD and in the wider Lausanne area. Other regions in Switzerland and beyond will also soon s...

Blockchain

By Arturo Bris

Artificial intelligence, big data analytics, and the internet of things are some of the most ground-breaking applications of the digital revolution we are living in the last decade. We are all aware o...

Facebook’s new video service can’t compete with YouTube

By Michael R. Wade

Google (goog) started out as a search company, Facebook (fb) a social media company, Amazon (amzn) an e-commerce company, and Tencent a messaging company. But these distinctions are becoming less...

MBA candidates share learning in Asia’s Lion City

IMD Asia’s campus in Singapore, also known as the Lion City, played host to 30 MBA candidates from the class of 2017 this week, as part of their MBA Discovery Expeditions program across the globe.

If you want to lead people, you have to enter their world

By Stéphane Garelli

This was the favorite piece of advice of Professor Warren Bennis, the world’s foremost expert on leadership, who encouraged leaders to create followers by entering their world. To lead a nation or a...

Talent acceleration with IMD

“TBL came to me at an extra good time, just as I was getting ready to take on a new and broader leadership role. It helped familiarize me with core leadership values and plan the transition.”

Supply chain digitalization

By Ralf W. Seifert with Richard Markoff.

The digitalization of supply chains is happening quickly. Much of the attention is being rightly paid to how innovations like the Cloud, software as a service or SaaS, advanced analytics and the...

Why corporate earnings matter so little to Amazon

By Howard H. Yu

No industry captain has garnered as much attention as Amazon’s chief executive Jeff Bezos. When the e-commerce giant announced the acquisition of Whole Foods, its share price shot up to a record high ...

The rise of Runtastic

By Benoit F. Leleux

In 2006, three young Austrian had a brilliant idea: a tracking system for amateur runners to record runs and improve their times. They knew that more people were taking up running. They had the...

IMD business school and PwC Consulting to jointly host a leadership development program in Japan to nurture the next generation of business leaders

By Naoshi Takatsu

IMD business school and PwC Consulting will jointly host a leadership development program in Japan to nurture the next generation of business leaders. The inaugural session is planned for October of...

Project supply chains – a different world

By Ralf W. Seifert with Richard Markoff.

Companies are increasingly investing in their sales and operation planning (S&OP) process and tools. Gartner, an American technology research and advisory firm, considers demand planning accuracy at t...

So you think your company is customer-led?

By Seán Meehan with Karine Avagyan, Charlie Dawson.

Customers matter. No one would argue with that. But so do finance, people, operations, innovation and lots more. What impact do all these competing priorities have on a company’s ability to remain tru...

New book by IMD MBA Alumna

IMD alumnae Alicia Micklethwait has co-authored a new book on the importance of corporate governance, board leadership and culture.

IOC Executive Board concludes meetings with governance report from IMD business school

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) Executive Board wrapped up two days of meetings, ahead of the 2024 Candidate City Briefing and 130th Session, with a review of the IOC’s governance structures...

IMD brings Silicon Valley to Switzerland

IMD’s Alumni Community for Entrepreneurship held its first Venture Capital Deal Camp. The daylong program was organized to bring entrepreneurs and investors together as well as to give an overview of...

“The pedagogy all but guarantees success”

In 2014, MTN began working with IMD by signing up 10 high-potential executives to participate in IMD’s online-based Global Leadership in the Cloud learning programs. According to Birgitte Davy, Learni...

Fear is galvanizing

Celebrated for her bullseye wit, Lucy Kellaway gives her last talk at IMD before leaving the Financial Times after 32 years to become a teacher. The final keynote speaker of IMD’s 2017 Orchestrating...

The World Economy in 2017: What to Expect (and not to expect)

Home to the World Competitiveness Center, IMD shares its findings every year with Orchestrating Winning Performance, its signature program attended by executives from around the world. The yearly...

Performing Under Pressure - Learning from F1

A wide variety of keynote speakers contributes to the excellence of IMD’s Orchestrating Winning Performance program and this year’s edition is no exception. Following an evening dedicated to industry...

IMD recognizes its Lifelong Learners

At a ceremony held during Orchestrating Winning Performance, (OWP), President Jean-François Manzoni and OWP Program co-Director Tawfik Jelassi recognized outstanding IMD alumni with Lifelong Learning...

Making globalization work for everyone

Lise Kingo, the CEO & Executive Director of the United Nations Global Compact, a United Nations initiative dedicated to encouraging businesses worldwide to adopt sustainable and socially responsible...

All MBA event brings Alumni across generations back to school

Over the weekend, IMD held its annual All MBA Alumni event which brought together more than 200 holders of IMD’s MBA from classes starting from 1976 all the way up to the present.

Transition traps

By Michael D. Watkins

Every year, thousands of managers enter new leadership positions. Their actions during the first few months on the job can determine their success or failure, yet little first-rate advice is available...

Two IMD MBA teams rewarded for innovation in the Debiopharm Inartis Challenge

Two IMD teams of IMD MBAs have been named among the winners of the Debiopharm Inartis Challenge, a competition organized to harness innovation to improve the lives of healthcare patients. One team’s...

Beware of success

The double billing of Bracken P. Darrell, CEO of Logitech and Gilbert Achermann, former CEO and current Chairman of Straumann, was the unlikely combination of a leader in computer peripherals and a...

Orchestrating Winning Performance 2017 kicks off

IMD's largest open enrolment program, Orchestrating Winning Performance, kicked off for the 21st consecutive year on Sunday, drawing over 350 participants from around the globe to the IMD campus in...

IMD Launches The First 90 Days, a new program to help leaders in career transition

IMD has recently launched The First 90 Days, a new program designed to help leaders in career transition get up to speed quickly and find ways to create positive momentum in their new role.

Abeer Hazboun-Sader: from technology and Ted Talks to impact investment

Positive action characterizes Abeer Hazboun-Sader’s every move. She has co-founded an intercultural leadership program, turned a company around, while co-organising a three stages Ted Talk – connectin...

Jana Valkovicova aims to lead change and transformation in consumer-focused innovation solutions

Jana obtained a BSc & MSc in Management and Marketing from RWTH Aachen University and the University of Economics Bratislava in Slovakia, her home country. After graduation, she joined Puma Group as a...

Ashish Singh hones his skills for future leadership roles

Ashish Singh comes to IMD from a highly technical background and intends to leverage his expertise within the oil and gas sector to pursue a role in corporate business strategy.

Strategy 2020: IMD and the Hempel Custom Strategy Program

IMD and Hempel developed a custom strategy program for its top teams in order to optimize their strategy and make key decisions to optimize its global business. Learn how this custom strategy program...

Abhijat Chahal believes in the power of education and politics to transform societies and countries

When Abhijat Chahal graduated from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science in Pilani, India with a BS in Marine Engineering, he was immediately employed by Maersk Group, the integrated transport...

Does the quest for high status encourage misconduct?

By Jennifer Jordan with Tim Vriend, Onne Janssen.

Rankings, that is, positions by which persons or groups are ordered according to their performance, are pervasive throughout society, including both business and sports. On many levels, rankings are...

Patricia Nyberg relishes the learning experience after some years of working

Patricia first completed her MSc and BSc in Economics and Business Administration, at the Hanken School of Economics in her home city of Helsinki, Finland before working as Senior Origination Manager,...

Why less bad doesn’t equal good

By Francisco Szekely

Why does a company exist? If you’d asked executives this in the 1970s, the most common answer would have been ‘to make money’. Consumers, employees and the natural environment didn’t really figure in...

Amazon buys Whole Foods – a grocery revolution?

By Ralf W. Seifert with Richard Markoff.

Right after we published an article on Amazon and its grocery business, Amazon announced the acquisition of the American grocery chain Whole Foods for nearly 14 billion USD. The impact of this move on...

Priya Mehra: developing business solutions for human created challenges

Priya Mehra radiates hope. She is confident that sustainable business practices can help power the under-served and address human-created challenges, including climate change. Her dedication to social...

Thibault Acolas: remodelling the value chain of defence spending

Corporate experience is not a requirement to get into the IMD MBA program, as Thibault Acolas discovered. A graduate of the French Naval Academy, he has been a naval officer for 10 years, and worked o...

Kuniyuki Furuta dives into the business world from the public sector

Born in Denver, Colorado, raised in Japan, Kuniyuki Furuta comes to IMD by way of Africa where he worked as an aid worker for the Japanese government. He aims to boost entrepreneurship by promoting an...

Tim Nai: leveraging technology and corporate strategy

Following a MSc & BSc in Mechanical Engineering, Cum Laude from Delft University of Technology, Tim joined Accenture in 2011, where he has been a Management Consulting Manager since 2015. He now aims...

IMD and Cisco unveil telepresence technology to connect campuses in Lausanne and Singapore

IMD Business School and Cisco have announced the completion of the Connected Classroom — a two-year-long initiative to virtually connect classrooms and boardrooms thousands of kilometres apart with...

Amazon fresh and the disruption of the supply chain

By Ralf W. Seifert with Richard Markoff.

The omni-channel supply chain is in our headlines and on our lips. Retailers are experimenting with different ways to meet growing consumer expectation to interact with products in different ways. The...

Sea change: how to make a sustainable global culture shift

By Carlos Cordon with Michael Leck.

In September 2013, shipping giant Maersk Line was facing an unprecedented organizational challenge. The company was about to enter into an alliance, dubbed the P3 network, with two other container...

MP and HPL “The perfect combination”

Guy Chatillon, a key figure in the luxury industry, attended IMD two years running and now explains why he will soon return. President Europe, CIS & ME of the exclusive high jewellery and watch maker...

New book on sustainability

Many recent books make the case for businesses to become more sustainable, but few explain the specifics. In a new book titled “Beyond the Triple Bottom Line Eight Steps Toward a Sustainable Business...

2017 Best EMBAs: Andreu Torregrosa Martinez, IMD

“An enthusiastic and energetic visionary that loves the journey, especially when surrounded by amazing people.”

Déjà vu: Is the film industry’s sequel and remake addiction a sign of the end?

By Knut Haanaes, Michael Sorell

The US film industry has been immensely successful and has overshadowed its rivals around the word, but are we starting to see signs of its decline? Is it a victim of the success trap?

New Study Finds Executives See Digital Disruption as Opportunity to Transform Their Companies

A major study by the Global Center for Digital Business Transformation, an IMD and Cisco initiative, today revealed that executives are increasingly recognizing the positive aspects of digital...

Lessons from the front

It’s been a tumultuous time in the agribusiness and a busy time for Liana Logiurato, Global Head of M&A at Syngenta International AG, who has just seen through the Syngenta / ChemChina deal. Working a...

How transition coaches accelerate executive onboarding

By Michael D. Watkins

Our research provided rich insight into the limitations of many companies’ existing executive onboarding systems. If your company has a weak system for onboarding and integration, evaluate potential...

Does your company really do a good job of onboarding new hires?

By Michael D. Watkins

The research provided rich insight into the limitations of many companies’ existing executive onboarding systems. If your company has a weak system for onboarding and integration, evaluate potential...

IMD and EPFL announce TransformTECH, a new joint program for creating business value through artificial intelligence, robotics and IoT

IMD business school and EPFL announced today a collaboration to establish TransformTECH. The new program, which is scheduled to begin in January 2018, will focus on how business leaders can use...

Remembering the first IMD MBA class

Finnish entrepreneur, Jan M Koivurinta and Australian Private Equity guru, Greg Minton, took a trip down memory lane together, visiting friends around the world and catching up with IMD where the...

What Mr. Trump didn’t say about leaving the Paris Agreement

By Francisco Szekely

The US President announced on June 1st that his country will leave the Paris Accord and leave behnind an international effort of diplomacy that took 20 years to develop, and which 195 countries have...

IMD President Jean-François Manzoni at the St. Petersburg International Forum 2017

This month IMD president Jean-François Manzoni joins CEOs, global business leaders and decision and policy makers at the St. Petersburg International Forum 2017 organized under the auspices of the...

An inside look at the 2017 World Competitiveness Rankings

The world’s most competitive countries continue to jostle for the top positions in the 2017 IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook, as the USA is pushed out of the top three.

An impactful EMBA journey celebrated

On Friday, June 2 an amazing group of global leaders graduate the IMD Executive MBA program. The group of 51 participants represent 24 industries and 24 different nationalities including Canada, Brazi...

IMD team wins in EFMD Case Writing Competition

EFMD, a not for profit association of business schools known for publishing and awarding cases used all over the world by the most prestigious business schools, has just announced the winners of its...

New competitive global elite emerges in IMD business school’s latest world competitiveness ranking

Lausanne, Switzerland – May 31, 2017 - The world’s most competitive countries continue to jostle for the top positions in the 2017 IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook, as the USA is pushed out of the t...

Why VUCA business leaders end up paralyzed, blind and deaf

By Marco Mancesti

Leaders cannot orchestrate in a vacuum. In fact, they depend on others in at least three important ways: 1] Leaders guide, they do not execute. Therefore, they rely on others to take care of...

2017 Best MBAs: Andrea Michahelles Barreno, IMD

“Energetic and analytical engineer. Volunteer by heart, true friend and action driven. Loves to smile and ask questions.”

IMD Alumnus publishes new book analysing decline of UK engineering industry

Tom Brown, an IMD MBA alumnus and engineering expert who has chaired 15 companies, has authored and successfully published a new book which explores the decline of the UK engineering industry.

Is Switzerland headed for a crisis?

By Arturo Bris

Switzerland is heavily integrated into international markets and therefore some of the biggest risks looming on the financial horizon have potential to affect the country. IMD Professor Arturo Bris...

What is the future of the European Union?

By Arturo Bris

After Brexit and other recent anti-Europe sentiment rearing its head in national elections around Europe, is there reason to be optimistic about the Union? IMD Professor Arturo Bris answers looks at t...

Keeping the momentum of High Performance Leadership

Adrian Zwingli is a self-professed entrepreneur and as well as founder and chairman of SwissQ, a Zurich-based tech company. Adrian has done a number of programs at IMD including High Performance...

EMBA graduate says IMD helped build his career and seal a record deal

Paul Krell just experienced the most bitter-sweet success of his career. He was involved in selling a company, Sequent Medical, which he helped grow from scratch and that he considered his “baby”, for...

Building on unfamiliar turf

By Goutam Challagalla

The liberalization of the Indian economy in the 1990s led to a chaotic housing boom in Mumbai. Thousands of real estate developers jostled for space in a sellers’ market, throwing up apartment blocks...

IMD ranked #1 in open programs by the Financial Times for sixth straight year

15 May 2017 – IMD has been recognized once again among the world’s best business schools by the Financial Times in its 2017 Executive Education Rankings. IMD came in at #1 in open programs for the six...

Corporate governance experts at IMD For annual conference

Fifty international academics and leading corporate governance practitioners have come together for an annual lecture at IMD with the IMD Global Board Center.

New IMD digital series: bootcamp, strategy, leadership, execution and more

The pace of digital transformation continues to speed up dramatically. No industries have been left untouched any many business risk being left behind. That’s why IMD business school is launching a ne...

Can we calculate the future?

By Stéphane Garelli

Modern economics is increasingly focusing on identifying possible choices rather than on calculating outcomes... So why are we so obsessed with mathematics...? The tragedy is that our approach...

IMD’s MBAs wrap up innovation week with exciting new projects

                                                                                                                                         IMD’s MBAs have just completed their whirlwind week of being...

The power and pitfalls of default settings

By Jayanth Narayanan

Organ donation rates in some countries are much higher than in others. Neighboring countries with similar cultures can have dramatically different levels of organ donation. For example, organ donation...

Why consumers should plan on paying more for medicine

By Ralf Boscheck

The problem with protective legislation is that it destroys the whole PBM model. It eliminates efficiency incentives, limits competition among pharmacies and drug suppliers and lessens rivalry among...

Seven lessons from the digital media revolution

By Stéphane Garelli

Business is about change — but no CEO would like to face disruption on the scale seen in the newspaper business over the past 15 years.  I am chairman of the Swiss top tier newspaper, Le Temps . It wa...

Why powerful people should apologize more often and better

By Jayanth Narayanan

The recent scandal involving Ravindra Gaikwad, the Indian Member of Parliament who made headlines after an alleged assault on an Air India Employee for being asked to take an economy instead of a...

“As soon as I returned to my company, I started to apply what I learned”

Claudio D'Ettole is the School of Management and Learning Systems Manager at Pirelli. He recently participated in IMD’s Organizational Learning in Action program, which helps senior learning leaders...

IMD MBAs immersed in innovation

Can innovation be taught in a classroom? According to Cyril Bouquet, who’s currently leading the innovation module for IMD’s 2017 MBA class, the answer is probably not. That’s why he’s given the class...

What tech’s survivalist billionaires should be doing instead

By Howard H. Yu

If Wall Street could pour hundreds of billions of dollars into subprime mortgages that ultimately came to naught, why are we struggling to fund some of our basic research in climatology, marine scienc...

Smart Cities: Swisscom and IMD partner again to help cities digitize

Smart City initiatives generally lack an operational framework that would guide the process undertaken by the heads of public entities. It was on this basis that IMD and Swisscom joined forces two yea...

How to build an agile beast

By Bettina Büchel

The €10 billion food packaging business Tetra Pak once faced a dilemma familiar to most multinational corporations. The company was mired in a classic “strategic-agility conundrum” — it lacked the...

MBA alumnus authors new book on entrepreneurial management

A graduate of the MBA Class of 1989 at IMD, Anwar Jumabhoy, has successfully co-authored and published a new book exploring the concept of entrepreneurial management.  The book, 9 ENTREPRENEURisms:...

Agile vs. death-by-committee

By Carlos Cordon with Isaak Tsalicoglou.

Companies need to create a feedback loop between market and technology, and drive it much faster. Agile techniques enable teams to frequently and reliably feed customer insights back into their...

TESLA becomes a model for sustainable leadership: David and Goliath revisited

By Francisco Szekely

Far from focusing on short-term goals and immediate growth – as many traditional car makers do – Tesla decided from the beginning to adopt a big picture approach by focusing on addressing two importan...

What leaders can learn from hostage negotiation

When Professor George Kohlrieser encountered his first hostage situation, he knew he had to act fast; a perpetrator had a knife held to a nurse’s throat. Fortunately, by speaking to the knifeman and...

Welcome to Brazil

IMD’s EMBA participants recently headed to Brazil to meet with both domestic and multinational companies, academics and government officials to learn about the internationalization strategies of...