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Every year, thousands of business leaders from around the world come to IMD's global meeting place in Lausanne, Switzerland. Ninety of
those learn and network in the school's small but highly-ranked MBA program. IMD's unique
"Real World. Real Learning" approach allows participants to immediately apply new insights to their business
challenges.
Here is a summer 2008 interview with Dr. Janet Shaner, Director of MBA Marketing & IMD Alumni Network and Nathalie Britten, MBA Program advisor.
IMD has one of the smallest intakes at around 90 students. What do you think are the advantages of the smaller class size and do you think IMD might have any plans to grow the full-time
MBA program in the future?
We discuss growth from time to time, but actually for us there are a number of advantages with 90 people and that's often why people choose IMD. So it makes sense for us to stay small and
leverage those advantages.
First of all, one of the reasons people like IMD is because we are small. It means we can be personal in our help, we all know the students, the faculty know the students, et cetera. It also
means that we can do a number of real-world projects that everybody participates in. We do projects in consulting, we do projects in entrepreneurship, we take the whole class on a Discovery Expedition.
For example, right now, they're in Kenya and it's all 90 students who are there. We really feel like that this is a very special program that we can do very effectively and very high quality
with 90. We wouldn't be able to do that if the class size were larger. So for us, every time we debate it we say,
"This is important to us. It makes us different. We'd
like to stay there."
In addition to that characteristic, what would you say are IMD's most distinguishing characteristics when compared to other MBA programs, especially those in Europe that are about the same
length—about one year?
Every year we ask our students, "Why do you choose IMD?" So for me, those are also the most distinguishing characteristics. And that is we're small, so we can be very personal. We have a
slightly older age profile, so our average age is 31. Typically people are somewhere between 27 and 35.
We're also more industry focused as compared to consulting and investment banking, both in terms of where people come from, but also where they go to in their careers afterwards. We have these
real-world projects, and everybody in the class goes through these projects so they can apply what they've learned in real situations.
The last thing is we have a focus on leadership. Clearly people get a general management education, but there's a leadership stream on top where they can learn more about themselves through
what we call a "personal development elective," which is 20 sessions with a trained psychologist; through lots of group work and things like the discovery expedition where they can take a broader leadership
view of a different country and what's happening in society.
So coming back to what makes us different: it's the small size, the older age profile, the real-world projects, and the focus on leadership.
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