Archive for August/2011

The IE International Executive MBA includes two new academic partners and offers now 3 1-week residential periods in the US (Brown University), Brazil (Insper)  and China (Fudan University).

In keeping with IE Business School’s commitment to educating globally-oriented, entrepreneurial leaders, we have forged ties with leading academic institutions in the United States and Brazil. Our US partner is Brown University, a leading research university based in Providence, Rhode Island that forms part of the prestigious Ivy League and that is known around the world for its leadership in the liberal arts. Our Brazilian partner is Insper, an innovative, market-oriented management school in Sao Paulo that is led, just like IE, by a group of entrepreneurs.

New face-to-face periods at Brown and Insper will enrich our students’ educational experience and, in combination with our continuing partnership with Fudan University in Shanghai, provide students with a truly global vision of business. To reflect this important change, the program will from now on be known as the Global Executive MBA.

 The innovative program structure allows to get views from 3 different angels:

• At Brown University students are looking Beyond Business considering aspects like Psychology, Political Economy, Art, Humanities with the aim to more effective global leaders through a greater awareness of the world around them.
• At Fudan University the Asian perspective of global business will be considered understanding how business is evolving in Asia and how to be a part of it.
• At Insper the perspective is on emerging markets with the emphasis on the twin challenges of sustainable development and overcoming social inequality.

We would like to take this opportunity to invite you to a Master Class titled “Creating Competitive Advantage Beyond the Market”, taking place in Manila:

Date: Saturday, August 27, 2011
Time: 11:30 – 13:30
Venue: Makati Shangri-La, Ayala Avenue cnr.  Makati Avenue, Makati City 1200
Registration: IE Event Page

In a more complicated and increasingly globalized world, mastering markets is no longer enough. This session will show how companies and their bottom lines are increasingly affected by government policy, changing regulations, activist pressure, and media scrutiny – anywhere in the world and often instantaneously. How can and should companies respond to these growing “nonmarket” pressures? The session will highlight both challenges and opportunities of strategic nonmarket management and leave participants with a fuller picture of the realities of global management in the 21st century.

This Master Class will be lead by Prof. Dr. David Bach, Professor of Strategy and Economic Environment and Dean of Programs at IE Business School. The main focus of David Bach’s teaching and research activities is about the point where business and politics meet. “Politics has always been important for business,” he says, “but owing to globalisation and new demands on companies, executives must more than ever engage in skilful political management.” Professor Bach is an expert in political economy, business-government relations, and nonmarket strategy and has published widely in leading academic journals and with practitioner publications including the Sloan Management Review, Financial Times. His work on the nexus of business and politics has twice earned him a spot as ‘one to watch’ for the Thinkers 50 ranking of leading global business thinkers. In 2011, he was named one of the top 40 business school professors under 40.

We would like to take this opportunity to invite you to a Master Class titled “Achieving Success through Networking and Social Capital”, taking place in Singapore:

Date: Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Time: 19:30 – 21:00

Venue: Gallery Hotel, 1 Nanson Road, Singapore 238  909 (near Robertson Quay)

Registration: IE Event Page

The session will be a good opportunity not only to learn how to uncap our potential through networking, but will be also a chance to put the recently acquired knowledge into practice with incoming and current IE students as well as IE graduates.

This Master Class will be lead by Steven D’Souza, an Executive Fellow and member of the Corporate Learning Group, IE Business School, Madrid. He was formerly Vice President in Global Wealth Management (Private Banking) of Merrill Lynch responsible for managing Diversity and Inclusion across the EMEA region.

In 2008 Steven published his second book ‘Brilliant Networking’, Pearson (Prentice Hall), which reached the no 1 business book on Amazon and was featured nationally in the Independent newspaper’s ‘Success at Work’ series and recommended by the Telegraph and the Times.

The current crisis has once again shown how wrong economic forecasts often are. So why is it such a deeply flawed profession? John Galbraith once said that “The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.” Although many of us are avid readers of economic forecasts issued by the OECD, the IMF, and the EU (the government’s forecasts tend to suffer from a general lack of creditability), it is questionable if our confidence in them is well founded. In my opinion, which is based on my experience, it is not.

Firstly, a large number of economic models try to predict the future by extrapolating the past. The current crisis, like so many others, has highlighted the folly of this method. Such models also predicted in the 1950s that the USSR would become the world’s most powerful economy (its economic growth rate was three times that of the west at the time), and the same was said about Japan (remember the best seller Japan as Number 1, by Harvard Professor Ezra Vogel?), the Asian dragons in the 90s, and now it’s China’s turn. The logic of projecting past growth rates onto the future is an intellectual and economic fallacy, as stated by Paul Krugman in his excellent paper “The Myths of Asia’s Miracle”.  Read more…