Meet IESE Business School’s MBA Class Of 2023

This winter, IESE continued to rank among the 10-best full-time MBA programs. For the third consecutive year, the program retained the top spot for corporate social responsibility, defined by The Financial Times as the “proportion of teaching hours from core courses dedicated to CSR, ethics, social and environmental issues.”  Similarly, IESE finished 2nd in International Course Experience, an FT calculation involving international exchanges and internships. Still, IESE truly excels in The Economist MBA ranking. Last year, IESE reigned as the top full-time MBA program in the world, an honor it had also received in 2009, 2006, and 2005. The honor stemmed from surveyed students and alumni giving IESE the highest scores for culture and classmates and program content (and the 5th-highest score for faculty quality). At the same time, recent IESE grads pulled in the 5th-best post-MBA salaries according to The Economist.  Considering IESE’s fundamentals — personalized attention and student satisfaction — IESE enjoys an advantage at repeating as The Economist’s #1 program when the ranking is unveiled on June 15th. That doesn’t count improved pay and placement this past year too.

“When you talk to professors and upper management, you can feel the genuine will to deliver the best possible experience to students on campus, explains Paula Amorim, IESE’s MBA admissions director, in a 2022 interview with P&Q. “We do this because we bet that if they have this outstanding experience (which, from the survey, we can see that they do), it will be so transformational that they will take the lessons they learn at IESE with them for the rest of their lives. And in doing so, we will have built the leaders that we believe can change the world.”

THE CASE METHOD

That process started in the 1950s, when Harvard Business School partnered with the University of Navarra to form a different type of European MBA program. The result was the
Instituto de Estudios Superiores de La Empresa —popularly known as IESE — which opened in 1964. Unlike continental business schools at the time, IESE offered a two-year experience, with the program now featuring 15- and 19-month options. Like Harvard Business School IESE prides itself of teaching excellence, even placing greater emphasis on greater touch with a 4-to-1 student-to-faculty ratio. Most important, IESE imported Harvard’s vaunted case method.

Think of the case method as bootcamp for decision-makers. Each class, MBAs take a deep dive into a real-life business situation, such as a transformation effort or PR disaster. Playing the role of a decision-maker, MBAs encounter unknowns and weigh uncertainties. In the process, they must pinpoint underlying issues and formulate best possible options — understanding that there are technically no correct answers…just decisions with tradeoffs and risks. For Dian de wet, the case method provides a practical means for exposing MBAs to a wide range of industries and the interplay of various organizational roles and levels.

“It provides you with examples of problems faced by previous managers, which you then analyze and assess based on the same info that the protagonist had. You then have to make your own recommendations and see what the implications of those decisions are. It means you can learn from the mistakes of others as well as giving you the opportunity to fine-tune your decision-making, business problem analysis, and creative problem-solving skills. As Malcom Gladwell said, you need 10,000 hours to become an expert. But the case study method helps you get to those 10,000 hours quicker.”

de Wat goes on to explain that the ambiguity inherent to case learning also taps into a IESE strength: diversity of backgrounds. “Ten people can read the same case and come up with ten different interpretations,” he adds. “When you are in a class that is made up of students from different countries, cultures, professional backgrounds and experiences, you get insights that you would never normally think about. You make recommendations based on your own experiences, so hearing insights from someone that has a completely different background from yourself really broadens your thinking. It forces you to start looking at problems from all angles. The case method really facilitates these types of discussions much more than any way of studying.”

AN INTERVIEW WIT THE MBA ADMISSIONS DIRECTOR

The case method is one of the topics that P&Q broached with Paula Amorim, IESE Business School´s MBA Admissions Director, in an exclusive interview. From the school’s strengths in entrepreneurship and innovation to the strategy behind its academic rigor, here is what MBA applicants need to know about the IESE MBA.

P&Q: What are the two most exciting developments at your program, and how will they enrich the MBA experience for current and future MBAs?

PA: “We are launching a new MBA specialization on sustainability. As IESE’s Marc Badia recently told Poets & Quants, one trend set to accelerate next year is “the focus on adopting a sustainability mindset and related practices at all levels in organizations.” While at IESE we discuss ESG issues throughout all the different courses we offer (not just those focused explicitly on those topics), the specialization helps students deep dive into the subject.

In addition, we are enhancing the Team Building experience with new activities, workshops, and personalized follow-up. Leading and working in high-performing teams is an essential skill for any MBA. In our program, we don’t just place our students in highly diverse teams, but we give them all the necessary tools to make them effective and learn along the process.

And if I can add a quick third one, we’re also revamping our international modules to include a new immersive module in Dubai starting this year, and a new design for the New York module.

P&Q: What are the two biggest differentiating features of your MBA program? How do each of these enrich the learning of your MBA students? 

PA: “IESE has many special features that, as an alumna myself, I feel lucky to have experienced firsthand. If I must mention just two though, I’ll go with the ones that are incomparable to other schools.

First, we use the case methodology to deliver more than 80% of our sessions. This immerses our students in a practical environment, where they learn business from real-life situations and, even more importantly, from their peers. IESE is a highly international school with students coming from different backgrounds. Having them be the protagonists of the class –instead of just the professors – makes the learning experience much more enriching. There are other side effects to this: students get closer to each other because they hear about each other’s past experiences and engage during the class and in team meetings; the student is the owner of their learning process because they need to prepare the case beforehand and the more you prepare, the more you learn; and you practice decision-making and communicating your opinion multiple times a day.

This environment of participation and sharing your own experiences is enhanced by an attitude of high collaboration, what we call the ‘spirit of service.’ This is one of IESE’s biggest differentiators: our culture and the commitment to form leaders that will impact the world. IESE is a mission-driven school, so everything is built around leveraging that mission and inputting the values of ethics, professionalism, and collaboration in our students.”

P&Q: In recent years, there have been several areas that have gained increased prominence in business school programming, including STEM, analytics, artificial intelligence and digital disruption. How does your full-time MBA program integrate these concepts across its curriculum?

PA: “This has been the most extensive growth area at IESE in the past years. I’ve been a graduate for almost six years now, and I can point out at least 20 courses that were not there when I was a student, and 90% of them relate to analytics and digital business. IESE is in a constant process of updating itself to meet the market’s needs. For example, one recent addition to the curriculum is the Barcelona Technology Transfer course, which aims at improving business-building skills across technology-intensive contexts (e.g., MedTech, pharma, etc.) In a nutshell, the students help advance a technology-based idea or nascent venture towards a revenue-generating business. The course is project-based, and the students are matched to a dedicated real-life project with scientists and engineers as their counterparts. The students help them with their investor communication strategy, identifying market fit and segmentation, and assessing appropriate commercialization models and sales channels.

In addition, we have recently added a Python Bootcamp for Data Analysis in partnership with a top coding school. This prepares students for other courses such as Data Science, Machine Learning, Digital Driven Organizations, and Fintech.”

P&Q: IESE boasts five campuses as well as top programs in executive education. How does IESE leverage these resources to bring additional value to full-time MBAs?

PA: “IESE built its campuses in strategic cities to increase our physical presence and strengthen the brand in these important cities: New York, Sao Paulo, Barcelona, Madrid, and Munich. Each campus has a different set of programs offered, depending on local needs and what we are trying to accomplish in each city. IESE has also been ranked #1 for Executive Education in the Financial Times for six years in a row, and this means that senior executives and companies are choosing IESE to support them in their business education. The impact for the full-time MBAs is a more robust and more senior network around the globe that carries the school’s values and would be willing to open doors if needed. On top of that, the professors who teach in our more senior programs are the same as those who teach in the MBA, so there’s an exchange of experiences and perspectives that makes the professors’ contributions even more complete and fresh.”

P&Q: IESE is well-known for entrepreneurship. What types of programming does IESE offer to prepare students to run their own companies? How are these offerings different or more robust than what you might find in other MBA programs?

PA: “The whole IESE entrepreneurship ecosystem is so complete that it becomes hard to mention all the available resources to support our alumni in building their own ventures. Starting with the MBA, we have multiple courses related to entrepreneurship, including a concentration in Entrepreneurship & Innovation that gathers several electives focused on the theme so the students can deep dive into the topic and start getting ready.

During the summer, students also have the option to do the Summer Entrepreneurship Experience. Here, they develop their business idea with the support of faculty from the entrepreneurship department and investors from the network while learning about the lean startup methodology. Many students use their second year and its electives to continue developing the idea over the summer and eventually pitch it to IESE´s business angel network or FINAVES (a venture capital fund that invests in alumni startups).

So many other resources are also available for our alumni, such as mentoring for alumni with early-stage startups (WeStart), the monthly gathering of over 200 angel investors (the Business Angels Investment Forum), or a series of talks to foster the adoption of emerging technologies (Scaling Deep Tech), among others.”

P&Q: IESE has a reputation for being academically rigorous. What exactly does this mean and how do these demands better prepare MBAs for their careers ahead?

PA: “In this case, the reputation is well deserved! Academics are a central point of the IESE experience, and the school is not doing it out of pure sadism. There are reasons behind it, and after you’ve been through the whole process, these reasons become apparent.

First, the case method demands extra preparation and dedication. To get the most out of a class, a student needs to prepare the case well, discuss it with their team and participate in the classroom. Good preparation is estimated to last from one and a half to two hours, and we have three cases per day. That alone already builds a particular need to manage your time well and be smart in allocating your resources.

Second, we follow up closely with attendance and punctuality precisely because the value-added of having a diverse class depends on each individual participating in the discussion. Our students are handpicked because we feel they can add a unique flavor to the cohort. But for that to happen, they need to be in class and on time.

Third, the hardships you go through during the program with all the case preparation, high expectations, and rigor bring the students closer and make them rely on each other to survive. I honestly think this strengthens the bonds between students and makes the network even more powerful because you’ve shared profound moments with your classmates, not only the classroom. I believe much of the shine in our eyes when we speak about IESE comes from remembering everything we lived through with our classmates and all the support we gave and received in challenging situations.”

Next Page: Profiles of 10 IESE MBAs from the Class of 2023