An Interview With IESE Dean Jordi Canals

How good do you think your school is on the world stage? If you had to compare IESE to one in the U.S. which schools would you compare it to?

This is very difficult because you see great things at different schools all over the world. If you ask me how do we compare with Harvard, Stanford or Wharton, I think we are different. We are a smaller school with a global scope and a personal approach. The school is getting lots of pressure from recruiters to keep growing the MBA.

But the question I’m often asked is this: if an applicant is interested in a global education should they go to a U.S. school? And is the brand value of some of the best European schools, including IESE, equivalent to the best schools in the U.S.?

My first reaction is that there are many good business schools around the world. You may find that some of them fit better with your aspirations and with the type of knowledge and expertise you want to develop. You need to do your own research.

How many really good business schools do you think there are in the world?

I think 30 to 35. You have many hidden jewels. But many of the schools teach in a local language and only have domestic students. If you go to Keio Business School in Japan, for example, the program is taught in Japanese. Keio is a very good school with very good scholars. In India, you have six or seven very good business schools with very good one-year master’s programs.

We emphasize our global scope. Every single day, students from all over the world are working together in small and larger groups at IESE. They spend a lot of time together. If you do it at the right scale, it’s a unique advantage for our students. There are a few other schools that do this, including INSEAD. But my question for INSEAD is can you really do it in ten months?

The second thing we have an interest in is leadership. Leadership isn’t just soft skills. It’s about how you implement change. You need both an analytical education and you need to know how to work with people to make change possible.

Everything you do in management you do with people. At some point in our life, we as human beings are going to be treated the way we treat others. People have families that are as good as your family. So we need to treat people with dignity and act always with integrity. If these things are important to you, then IESE is one of your choices.

When students are dissatisfied at IESE what do they tend to be dissatisfied with?

In the first year, some wonder if it would be more effective if we didn’t teach by case study. And they would like to have more of a digital experience with the MBA in just the same way they have with music and books. In the second year, they would like to have more project-based courses. We have a few of them but they would like to have more.

In ten or 15 years down the road, it may make sense to have the first year in Barcelona and the second year with one term in New York and one term in Sao Paulo or Shanghai. We already have second-year elective modules in New York, Sao Paulo and Shanghai for our MBA students and many of them also went on exchange programs at other leading business schools, including MIT, Columbia, Chicago, Kellogg, Wharton, London Business School and CEIBS (China Europe International Business School). Last year, 83 of our students took advantage of these exchanges and we welcomed 74 students from other schools.

We are also actually trying to link up our executive education capability with the full-time MBA program. This is something we are thinking about and are building the flexibility to scale up.

In 1988, when I created the business school ranking for BusinessWeek, the best schools in Europe were without question INSEAD, IMD and London Business School. How did it come to be that Spain now has three schools that are among the best European options?

It has to do with the fact that higher education is highly correlated with the social and economic development of a country. Some of our industries and companies are global leaders and they saw the world going the same way. We realized that we had to help them with the globalization process. It’s not only that we had a great vision. We were in a context that pushed us toward a more global view of the world. It was the same thing with IE and ESADE. They learned from their Spanish clients.

Each of the Spanish schools offer different things for different people. Our success also has to do with the fact that there has been intense competition which is healthy. The competition has made everybody better. ESADE is very strong in undergraduate business education and they are growing the MBA. It’s not very large, but they do it very well. It’s a very good school and they are learning and improving.

How do the three schools differ?

You would have to ask them. I think that IE is very good at innovating and doing new things and they are strong in entrepreneurship. In the case of ESADE, it’s probably how they develop soft skills and leadership skills and emotional intelligence. Companies like what they do in this area.