In his contribution on 11 October, Kai Peters rightly states that schools that concentrate on the segments they can be successful in will surely do better than those who want to do everything.
I could not agree more. Strategy means choice. Not only in business but also in educational institutes. In the short term, choices that break with tradition may be painful but I firmly believe that in the long term they pay off. Of course, choices must be made consistently and must be based on a clear strategy, shared and supported by the whole institute.
IMD, our Lausanne-based International Institute for Management Development, focuses on learning for executives in international businesses and we continuously remind ourselves that that’s the business we are in. If we don’t, our clients will, as we have seen in the past!
Since 1993, IMD has tripled its income, has erased all its debt, continues to be self-funding, spends 25% of its cost base on research and development and attracts some of the world’s best faculty. Why? The only answer is: relevance for and focus on developing international businesses leaders, or in our own words, "real world real learning."
To stay relevant, we continuously check the value of our research, development and programs with our core customers--the 175 companies that make up our Learning Network. We meet these clients on an individual basis but also, twice a year, we invite them to our Business Advisory Council, a forum in which they give us input on their current business dilemmas and feedback on our activities. They help us revamp existing programs, test ideas for new programs and add to our research agenda. This means that our professors are challenged to continuously provide good research and development output and to speedily integrate fresh insights into programs. Their work must be relevant, first and foremost for our customers and second for their academic peers.
IMD has ruled out academic departments, tenure and title hierarchy and offers performance-based bonuses, all of this to be sure to create cross-disciplinary academic value that our clients can understand and appreciate. Our members of faculty value our flat organization and the freedom to work across disciplines.
Sometimes strategy means "No"
People have asked me why we do not have a PhD program. A PhD program calls for enormous amounts of resources, which we simply do not have. Above all we are not prepared to offer the many specialized courses needed for such a program. Nor are we prepared to supervise PhD students who ultimately turn out to be unable to meet IMD’s high standards. There are many places that are much better suited for a PhD program than IMD. However, we are systematically hiring Post-Doctorates, young academics who already have their PhDs and who have proven to be good. They work with our faculty on their research and the good news is that they deliver!
I have also been asked why we do not open a campus in Asia, like many of my colleagues have. We do have a research center in Shanghai, China, and we will soon open a second center in India, but we will not have an IMD campus in Asia. We believe that both Asian executives and executives from other places around the world are best served by one meeting place with maximum diversity. A place where they can meet professors and peers, exchange successes and failures and learn from a wealth of global, rather than regional, experience.
With its own approach to learning, IMD is perhaps unlike other business schools. While we are fully aware that our nonconformist model will not necessarily work for all executives or all companies, all the time, I do think it illustrates the need for all business schools--including IMD--to continuously pose this general question: "Who are our customers and how can we serve them best?" Even if the answer means saying no sometimes or making tough choices that break with traditions. Strategy means choice indeed and this may be more true today than ever!"
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