Esade Business School

The Esade MBA: What You Need To Know

If practice makes perfect, then Barcelona’s Esade MBA program should be pretty good at teaching MBAs, because they have been doing it since 1964. The school prides itself on being at the forefront of modern MBAs because their aim is to prepare creative leaders who can flourish in a disruptive environment. The Esade MBA is based on Four C’s – Collaborative leadership, Critical thinking, Creativity, and Communication skills.

“I love everything about Barcelona, I feel a part of me now will always be from Barcelona. The culture, art, architecture, music, football, beach, mountains, and life in this city is just contagious, I feel I’m the main character everywhere in this city. I could not have chosen a better city with joy and perfect harmony for this experience. Even after 1.5 years here, I still feel I’m not done with this city and can’t wait to come back and re-experience this city at another point in my life,” says MBA Kimia Koushesh.

The program has a total of 183 students from about 50 countries – 96% of them come from outside Spain, so it’s not surprising that this is an eye-opening and diverse program. The program is flexible for most student’s schedules, offering 12-, 15-, and 18-month options, with the longer options involving exchanges and internships. The first term is about transformation, building awareness, promoting introspection and self-knowledge and students do so fully engaged. Most put their careers on pause while attending the program. The second term is about learning to create and innovate, and the third is about transformation, putting into practice what you have learned.

The MBA has core courses and around 40 electives ranging from the predictable courses, like Hedge Funds to the unusual, such as their “In Search of Principles for a Life Philosophy” course. The B-School offers the usual study tours, treks, and exchanges — and with 13 partner schools in Asia and 11 in the United States, the range is impressive. Esade also offers Business Labs for family businesses, innovation, entrepreneurship, and marketing, and boasts a Career Acceleration Program in investment and private banking, consulting, and technological disruption.

Aside from required courses, Esade also offers both business and social clubs, conferences, and case competitions. Post-grad, MBAs have gone on to work for nearby companies like Banco Sabadell, CaixaBank, Telefónica, Mango, and Accenture, and the B-School reported that 95% of their graduates changed sector, function, or location.

“We pride ourselves on having a diverse cohort on the MBA because we believe the leader of the future must be able to work with others, to foster collaboration and the creation of ecosystems. Collaborative leadership is at the core of what we do. We have a very diverse cohort and we want to build on that diversity. We do not want to homogenize the class, we want them to embrace their differences, backgrounds, and origins by recombining them and creating something new. Our students have interesting stories, and we want them to go on creating even more interesting stories,” says Associate Dean Luis Vives.

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