Design thinking – for MBA only!

IE News

The IE International MBA starts with an innovative, constantly changing module called LAUNCH. In past edition, students had to play basketball, talk like actors and develop their creative side guided by the Architecture Association of London.

In this year edition, the IE School of Architecture created a workshop related to Design Thinking. Enjoy the video!

IE University || All about “international”

IE News

IE University is an international university in two complementary meanings of the word: 1 It is a university which has an international faculty and staff, with students coming from almost 60 different countries. 2 Students are prepared for international careers and draw on IE University’s international experience.  Both the contents of its academic programs, and the academic…

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Out of sync at 40

Academics

IE Focus | By Celia de Anca, Director Centre of Global Diversity Management at IE

The midlife crisis affects both men and women, but while men tend to seek an emotional answer, women often need a more rational approach. It would be to business corporations’ advantage to provide women with just that.According to Jewish mysticism, a man can only start his learning of the cabbala after his 40th birthday, when life starts to fall apart and needs to be rebuilt, not so much from the outside, but rather from within, from a connection with his true nature. In our more prosaic civilisation, we speak of the midlife crisis, which, as Tony Judt pointed out not long ago, is that crucial moment when many men either get a new wife or buy a motorbike. 

A woman could not study the cabbala so there was apparently no reason for speaking about when her life starts to fall apart in mystic terms, and women have not traditionally changed their husband for one who was 20 years younger when reaching the age of 40. Her crisis, at least in our society, used to be the empty nest syndrome, which left a woman waiting to refill it with grandchildren.
Our society has changed, even if the midlife crisis is still with us. A woman no longer cries when her chicks fly the nest. Indeed, many of them are happy to see them go and become hungry for a professional career with some kind of meaning. A male friend once told me that after 20 years in the same profession, the time had come to change his life. At the same time, his wife, after 5 years at home looking after the children, had reached a point where she really needed to go back to work. Hence pure logic led them to change their roles, whereby he stayed at home for a few years enjoying his time with his children, who were still small, while she went back to work to enjoy the pleasures (yes, there are some) of a full professional life.

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Beyond stereotypes

Academics
1728IE Focus | By Celica de Anca, Director Centre for Diversity, IE Business School
The women’s leadership debate and the reasons that there are still so few women on boards of directors will come to nothing if we keep referring to the same old male and female stereotypes.
McKinsey recently published its Women Matter 2 study, in which it drew the conclusion that the women leaders analysed used certain styles of leadership that had a direct effect on the company’s performance more often than men’s styles. Women’s leadership styles involved people development, intuition and participatory decision-taking.Other studies along the same lines have insisted on the need for including more women in corporate bodies of management owing to their different leadership styles. However, despite the scientific rigour of the analyses, the same number of scientific studies can also be found to demonstrate that the presence of more women in senior management does not necessarily improve a company’s performance.

Accepting these studies as valid, I believe that in order to move forward in the issue of women in business leadership, certain untruths that add confusion to the debate must first of all be clarified.

The first is the search for reasons that justify something which, in my opinion, does not need justifying. Women represent half of the world population and 46% of its workforce. Some of them are competent and others less so, some are more qualified and some less so. Indeed, some of them are not qualified for senior management posts, most probably in the same percentage as men who are not qualified for positions of responsibility. In the globalised and competitive society of the 21st century and in the interests of corporate effectiveness there is no room for maintaining barriers that prevent talented or valuable women from taking up posts in senior management. The barriers we imagine exist, albeit indirectly and subtly, limit, for example, the number of women who sit on boards of directors to only 6% of the top 800 European businesses. Scandinavian countries have the greatest number of women on their boards of directors and the countries in the South of Europe have the lowest number. I hope there are other factors that explain what could otherwise be put down to Swedish women being more talented than their Spanish counterparts.

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