5) Defying Conventional Wisdom: IMD 

Ask the most knowledgeable observers of MBA education in Europe to name the top two business schools and you will inevitably get this answer: INSEAD and London Business School. But Bloomberg Businessweek clearly thinks otherwise in naming the Institute of Management Development the best program in Europe.

This is no anomaly. IMD has topped the Businessweek MBA lists in four of the past five rankings, with only one exception. Last year, SDA Bocconi in Italy nudged out IMD which placed third.

What makes IMD so special? It is among the most diverse and most differentiated MBA experiences in the world. While much of MBA programming is commoditized, IMD is anything but. Originally founded by business executives for business executives, IMD’s 12-month program is heavy on personal coaching and individual development. It boasts significant experiential learning with top companies and an immersive month at the school’s Future Lab in Singapore.

No less critical, IMD has been at the forefront of change. With most professors still debating exactly what to do about the AI revolution, IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland, has devised an innovative answer. In a major redesign of its one-year MBA curriculum, IMD is betting that human skills not easily duplicated by machine intelligence is the best way to prepare students for the AI future.

The school’s reimagined MBA experience, to take effect when it enrolls its new MBA cohort in January, is one of the boldest changes yet in response to how powerful AI will change society and the world of work. For one thing, the new program acknowledges that we are not living with change as usual. The MBA curriculum—informed by corporate executives, faculty, and alumni—accepts that the world is fundamentally changing with the advent of machine intelligence.

A business school must now double down on the humanistic skills not easily duplicated by a machine and must teach a new generation of students how best to collaborate—not only with each other—but with the machines that will sit side by side with them. IMD believes it must place an even greater focus on the human qualities of leadership and enabling change, as these are critical in a world of abundant data and AI.

At IMD, that means a full embrace of AI technologies to do things that graduates had once done on their own. It also means that skill development has become as important if not more so than the knowledge dispensed in traditional coursework.

Among the innovations in IMD’s redesign is an intense focus on ten core skills that range from systems thinking and pattern recognition to storytelling and presentation (see table below). To emphasize the teaching of those skills, IMD students will now receive two grades: a course grade based on the knowledge they are taught and another for the skills they develop and demonstrate.

“We reorganized everything,” says Omar Toulan, MBA dean at IMD. “We needed to take this up to another level. We are focusing on elemental human traits. I have yet to see an AI system that can be an effective leader. You still need someone in the room to use judgment in making the final decision and motivate people to implement it, someone with the intelligence and the courage to make difficult decisions. I would put my bet on leadership.”

“People wanted a greater emphasis on skill-based learning and not just course-based learning,” says Toulan. “We worked down to a list of critical skills we want to track across the entire program (see table below). These are skills that an MBA needs to dominate before they go to the job market. By working with every professor in the program, we can identify how a person is doing on certain skills. When you go into a job interview, you are not there with a team. It’s just you, so you need to have those skills at the individual level.”

IMD’s number-one ranking is no fluke.

IMD Tops The European Business Schools In Bloomberg Businessweek’s MBA Ranking

Rank & School	Y-O-Y Change	Compensation	Learning	Networking	Entrepreneurship
1. IMD	+1	86.6	89.3	83.3	83.7
2. IESE Business School	——–	84.1	89.7	85.3	83.5
3. SDA Bocconi	-2	86.1	88.6	83.8	80.7
4. London Business School	+1	89.4	84.2	84.4	77.2
5. INSEAD	-1	82.2	86.8	84.6	79.5
6. St. Gallen	+2	81.5	86.1	81.0	74.5
7. Oxford (Said)	+3	76.9	86.0	81.2	81.9
8. Cambridge (Judge)	+1	72.7	86.0	81.7	81.8
9. ESADE	+2	67.4	88.7	84.1	86.2
10. Mannheim	-3	75.8	82.8	81.4	67.6
11. IE Business School	-5	72.0	83.1	74.9	83.2
12. Cranfield	——–	56.4	90.1	82.5	85.9
13. Copenhagen Business School	+4	63.9	86.2	80.0	73.7
14. ESMT Berlin	+2	63.8	84.0	78.7	78.5
15. POLMI Graduate School of Management	+4	61.7	84.9	78.7	76.1
16. EADA	+2	61.8	86.3	73.4	78.6
17. ESIC	-2	58.5	86.1	78.6	79.1
18. EDHEC	-5	56.6	81.9	76.5	71.9
19. EAE	+1	48.8	80.3	73.4	75.7

The full-time MBA program at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business raced from 19th to 9th in this year’s Bloomberg Businessweek ranking, besting M7’s MIT Sloan and Columbia Business School in the process

6) Two Big Winners – and A Big Loser

There are no participation trophies in the rankings. You move up or move down. You’re heralded as the next “It” school – or people wonder if you’ve lost a step or need to reset priorities. Either way, you’re bound to find overreactions from applicants, students, alumni, administrators…and media outlets too.

Case in point: Colubmia Business School. Clearly, CBS’ benefits didn’t align with Bloomberg Businessweek’s methodology, as the school dived from 5th to 17th. One issue: Pay – which Businessweek claims is worth a 37.7% share of the ranking. Here, Columbia Business School dropped from 2nd to 13th. And the news gets worse from there. In Learning, which accounts for a 25.5% share, CBS lost 28 spots to end up at 57th. Networking carries an 18.6% weight – and Columbia sank from 12th to 29th. With Entrepreneurship, good for an 11.6% share, the school suffered a freefall, going from 16th to 45th. In a pyrrhic victory, CBS only lost four spots in Diversity – the smallest weight at 6.6%,

What happened? Hard to say as Bloomberg Businessweek doesn’t publish underlying data. The Financial Times showed minor flags, as the school’s satisfaction rate among alumni and students dipped from 9.51 to 9.225 over the past year (even as the same surveys showed improvement in career services and alumni network). MBA pay also slipped from 2nd to 4th according to FT data. Does this mean CBS Is no longer a Top 10 program? More likely, it is a blip considering the school has ranked anywhere from 5th to 9th with Bloomberg Businessweek since 2018 (and even gained three spots in last year’s ranking). Regardless, CBS will be placed under the microscope until the next big ranking (Think FT in February).

That said, two schools can certainly crow about the results. That starts with Northwestern University’s Kellogg School, which climbed from 7th to 3rd. Along the way, Kellogg vaulted over Dartmouth Tuck, Harvard Business School, Columbia Business School, and Virginia Darden for bragging rights. Sure, Kellogg still ranks below cross-town rival Chicago Booth, but it improved in 4 out of 5 measures (while holding its 15th place in Entrepreneurship from the previous year). Notably, the school finished 5th in Compensation (+3) and 4th in Networking (+4) among American schools, while sliding into 10th for Learning as well. That’s three Top 10 finishes in measures worth a collective 81.8% weight. In comparison, only Stanford GSB, Dartmouth Tuck, Carnegie Mellon Tepper, and William & Mary Mason scored that high across that many measures! Even more, with Kellogg also ranking 3rd in both U.S. News and Fortune, it cements an impression that maybe Kellogg belongs in the same conversation as Stanford and Wharton. After all, perception is everything.

Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School should also take a bow, pop a champagne cork, and take a victory lab this week.  They raced from 19th to 9th this year, besting M7’s MIT Sloan and Columbia Business School in the process. Call it the capper to a banner year, where Tepper moved up in the Financial Times, U.S. News, CEOWorld, and Fortune rankings. Notably, Tepper posted the 3rd-highest score in Entrepreneurship, while ranking 5th in both Learning and Networking with Bloomberg Businessweek.

It seems like just yesterday – January 2023 to be exact – when Columbia Business School was toasted as the world’s top MBA program by The Financial Times. Even after slipping to 3rd this year, most believed Columbia had staked their claim as a program on the rise. While opening a $600 million campus in Manhattanville in 2022, the school also invested heavily in becoming leaders in the subjects of the future: digital disruption, machine learning, climate change, and sustainability. And they ranked among the five best business schools for faculty research this year according to The Financial Times.

While rankings may not be the arbiters of reality, they are unquestionably the barometer of perception. CBS’ decline may not be rooted in its programming but in basic branding. In the end, a crack in the latter is easily more lethal and harder to clean up.