Poets&Quants’ MBA Program Of The Year: IMD’s Reimagining Of The MBA

The IMD campus in Lausanne, Switzerland

It’s been less than two years since ChatGPT splashed into the world, making everyone understand that artificial intelligence would have a profound impact on the way people live and work. It hasn’t taken very long for the world’s business schools to respond, adding courses, programs, concentrations and majors into their curriculum. How to use AI effectively and ethically is already an essential and expected element of any business program.

A year after ChatGPT debuted in November of 2022, the Graduate Business Curriculum Roundtable found that 74% of business schools teach AI in some form while 19% report dedicated courses on the subject of generative AI. Those estimates have exploded in the past year with one business school after another launching initiatives and centers to address the issues posed by the technology.

One of the most innovative of these efforts is playing out at IMD in Switzerland which has reimagined what an MBA curriculum should be for this new, modern era. The school is not only immersing students in the use of this technology; it is doubling down on the soft yet critically important soft skills to insure that no algorithm, however sophisticated or smart, can replace the graduates of its small and intimate MBA experience.

AN INTENSE FOCUS ON TEN CORE SKILLS THAT AN ALGORITHM WILL NEVER REPLACE

Instead of asking its professors to add an AI assignment in their courses or design new electives, IMD essentially took out a blank sheet of paper to reinvent what an MBA program should teach. The result: 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. To emphasize the teaching of those skills, IMD students will now receive a course grade based on the knowledge they are taught and an assessment for the skills they develop and demonstrate. The school intends to leverage AI technology to create dashboard tools so students can know where they stand on what IMD is calling “transversal” skills that span all areas of business at any time in the program.

For the sweeping nature of the reinvention and the ambitious innovation needed to bring it forward, Poets&Quants‘ has named the IMD program the MBA Program of the Year for 2024. What IMD’s faculty are attempting is not a tweak nor an incremental change. Nearly every aspect of this MBA experience has been rethought, redesigned, and retooled for the AI revolution. To deliver on its promise to prepare graduates for an AI-informed world, moreover, the school is working to invent new ways of assessing students based on artificial intelligence.

MBA PROGRAM OF THE YEAR

“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.”

Announced in July, the new MBA curriculum will debut in January when the newest cohort of MBAs arrive on the IMD campus in Lausanne. It is already receiving rave reviews from alumni, and applications for the program are up 15% over last year. “There is a lot of excitement, especially in taking AI not from a defensive point of view but from a pro-active one. Our AI policy is how to make the most of the technology.”

IMD WILL BRING THREE OF ITS STAR PROFS IN TO KICK OFF THE PROGRAM

The new program will kick off with a newly designed module on critical thinking and communication. “There were always elements of these skills in the program but we need this intense focus in the beginning to highlight the importance they have but also to reinforce them throughout the program. These skills are fundamental, as to be a good leader one must also possess the critical thinking abilities needed to diagnose, assess, and solve problems,” adds Toulan.

The 10-day module will be co-taught by Toulan, leadership professor Michael Watkins, author of the best-selling book The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter, and strategy professor Arnaud Chevallier. The latter two profs have authored numerous articles for the Harvard Business Review. “That week we will go through each of the individual skills.”

An immersive month in Singapore, entitled the Future Lab, has also been added to the program and will center on digital and AI. Two days per week will largely be devoted to company visits and keynote speakers who will explore the power and impact of technology on business. Among IMD professors who will run the immersion is AI and analytics professor Amit Joshi, recently singled out by the school’s Class of 2024 as one of the favorite professors of the year.