- IMD Business School
News Stories · Leadership

Celebrating the end of a rewarding journey of a lifetime

IMD graduates class of outstanding EMBAs in November 2017
November 2017

This fall, a cohort of 58 Executive MBAs from 37 industries and 35 different nationalities ends their intense 15+ month transformational experience.

The distinguished graduation ceremony takes place at the Royal Savoy Hotel in IMD’s home–Lausanne, Switzerland.

The participants from Europe, Asia, the Americas and the Middle East, and from industries as diverse as banking, trading, shipping, the humanitarian and automotive sectors, technology, agriculture, entertainment and others, lived an intense experience incorporating in-person and online learning, creating lifelong ties with peers, and examining their own roles in their current companies and their future career paths.

Part of their program involved analyzing and writing practical case studies–21 in total with participants working in groups–on global companies’ business challenges in order to reveal lessons for themselves and other practitioners. Supervised by IMD faculty, previous cases have gone on to win awards. This year topics such as artificial intelligence, big data, fintech, the coffee and whiskey industries, banking, digitization, and more, reflected the disruptive nature of today’s business landscape.

In addition to in-class and out-of-class experiential learning, including a two-day intense real world crisis management simulation run in cooperation with the Swiss Armed Forces, the EMBAs travelled around the world to learn about global business contexts, companies and industries. The class experienced discovery expeditions to China, India, Silicon Valley, Vietnam and Brazil.

The graduating cohort benefited from having a new online-based learning interface –Canvas–to manage their course materials, discovery expeditions, evaluations and more.

Overall for the IMD participants it was a demanding but rewarding experience of a lifetime. During the program they dived deep into learning more about themselves, developing their leadership, internalizing an entrepreneurial mind-set, and building a new roadmap for their lives as well as their careers and organizations.

IMD warmly congratulates and wishes the best to all of the graduates.

Find out more about IMD’s EMBA.

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