The compelling attractiveness of fewer ideas

By William A. Fischer

How many ideas did Jack Welch need to unleash to reinvent General Electric in the 1980s, as the Cold War wound down and the world economy approached major technological and geo-political inflection...

Venezuela: A Default in the Making

By Arturo Bris with José Caballero.

Venezuela is close to a sovereign default. The country's reserves are being depleted and its debt obligations will make it technically insolvent before the end of the year—it must repay almost...

MBA Alumnus and Club President in Brazil, Diego Baretto tells how IMD shaped his career

In 2014, Diego Barreto studied at IMD and, until that moment, thought of himself as a traditional businessman. However, after completing the institution’s MBA program, he embarked on adopting a new...

IMD Professors in the Case Centre’s bestselling authors

The Case Centre has once again compiled a list of its bestselling authors. The figures for the 2016-2017 academic year place 3 IMD faculty members among the list of influential business thinkers.

Moving from technology to business driven value generation

By Bettina Büchel, Cyril Bouquet with Jim Pulcrano.

Many executives we meet at IMD ask the following question: How can we use the latest technologies – be it the Internet of Things, robotics, artificial intelligence and others – to transform our business?

Rural mission

By Arturo Bris

The Agricultural Bank of China (ABC) has arguably the world’s largest and most disparate customer base. It aims to serve a widely dispersed rural population of nearly 600 million people, often in...

Digital transformation in healthcare

IMD recently organized a discovery event which brought together a number of executives from the health sector to focus on digital transformation in healthcare. The healthcare sector is experiencing a...

IMD launches new 3-week Advanced Management Program

IMD Business School has announced the launch of its new Advanced Management Program (AMP).

Turning loss into inspiration with Richard Moore at IMD

Richard Moore, Founder and CEO of Children in Crossfire, who became blind at the age of 10 and overcame what happened to him, spoke at IMD.

An interview with IMD’s incoming MBA Dean

Seán Meehan was recently named Dean of IMD’s MBA program and will take up the role on January 1st, 2018. Seán recently spoke to the MBA-focused publication Poets & Quants about what sets IMD and its M...

The India supply chain revolution

By Ralf W. Seifert with Richard Markoff.

India is on the cusp of a supply chain transformation that may end up being nothing short of a major game changer. At IMD, we often discuss the distribution footprint of L’Oréal which had an outsized...

Is fulfilment still a FMCG core competency?

By Ralf W. Seifert with Richard Markoff.

Over the past several years, Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies have looked more and more to third party logistics providers (3PLs) to manage their order fulfillment processes. The reasons and...

IMD annual alumni event channels innovation and entrepreneurship

Over the weekend IMD hosted its Annual International Alumni Event, which focused on Disruptive Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The two day event drew an energetic crowd of over 300 executives who hav...

IMD hosts top digital executives from companies and organizations

IMD recently hosted the Chief Digital Officers roundtable, gathering leading digital minds from companies such as Hilti, Cisco, Hitachi, KPN, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC),...

Has Apple changed the online advertising game?

Apple recently quietly updated its operating system during the release of its new IPhones. What went unnoticed is that its cookie policy also changed. What effect does that have on the company’s abili...

The final frontier of disruptive innovation

By William A. Fischer

It was the great American author F. Scott Fitzgerald who ventured the opinion that “there are no second acts in American lives”, at a time, ironically, “when he himself was only a couple of years away...

A board is first and foremost a team

For Maria Castuera Hidalgo, attending IMD’s HPB program cemented her realization that a board is first and foremost a team. “This simple but very revealing concept, opened up a whole new perspective f...

Learning before doing: how HPB helped prepare for a family business legacy

Grupo Vilaseca is a family business and this is perhaps why, when Juan Vilaseca De Prati decided to attend the HPB program in Lausanne, he came with his two nephews.

Singapore’s HR community draws new roadmaps with IMD President

A group of Singapore’s Human Resources and Leadership development industry leaders gathered this month at the IMD Southeast Asia Executive Learning Center with President Jean-Francois Manzoni to...

IMD’s MBA ranks first in Forbes 2017

Forbes has again ranked IMD's MBA the #1 one-year program outside of the United States. This ranking measures return on investment based on "5-year MBA gain" and is testament to IMD’s strength and...

IMD and Huawei join forces to deliver program for top telecom companies

IMD and Huawei, a leading telecom provider based in China, recently delivered an open enrolment executive education program to help telecommunications executives from around the world lead their...

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 M. 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: Former Naval officer says IMD MBA forges leadership and business impact

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 1^st that his country will leave the Paris Accord and leave behnind an international effort of diplomacy that took 20 years to develop, and...

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...