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INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR MANAGEMENT DEVELOPMENT
Here, I would like to shed light on the education scenario at the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) business school. Unusually, IMD’s origins lie in two corporate business schools, the International Management Institute (Geneva) established by Alcan, and Nestlé’s Institut pour l’Etude des Methodes de Direction de l’Entreprise (Lausanne), which merged in 1990. This background ensures that the priority is to deal with real world issues and challenges and conducting research in close collaboration with industry. It solely provides executive education, it is determinedly not part of a university, and there are no academic departments, except for one integrated multidisciplinary faculty. The system followed for the faculty is that professors do not have a permanent academic tenure and instead work under a one-year contract and a performance-based pay package. Interestingly, the faculty consists of 60 full-time members with 23 different nationalities.
According to the Economist, the 11-month program hopes to cover as much ground as other two-year courses. An emphasis on personal development, leadership, and general management means that graduates tend to work more in the industrial than the financial sector. The school lists its main strengths as general management, leadership, and entrepreneurship.
IMD has a strong focus on training and developing general management and leadership skills. It selects experienced candidates for both the Master of Business Administration (MBA) (average age 31) and the Executive MBA (average age 41). Its other focus is to have a broad international group of participants attending open programs to ensure that no nationality dominates, and every year, some 8,000 executives representing over 98 nationalities attend one of the programs.