INSEAD Lead the Future

Content Overview

INSEAD Lead the Future is a 12-month, online learning journey expertly designed to maximise depth of understanding, actionable learning, flexibility and impact.

The programme is built on three core pillars with core and elective programmes carefully selected to provide you with a rounded and integrative perspective on effective leadership today.

Sensing Value: Scan the environment, identify the real trends and shifts affecting business and assess what really matters strategically to you
Delivering Value: Reconnect structures and systems within the organisation, to be able to adapt quickly to changes in the environment
Sustaining Value: Evaluate and identify what brings real long-term value and meaningful impact to your stakeholders

Lead the Future integrates four obligatory core topics and three elective tracks so you can customise your learning to your needs and objectives. Core modules are enriched by an Action Learning Practice (ALP) that challenges you to apply new ideas to an existing, real-life business problem.

You will work on a core project of your choosing that you will present at the end of the core phase, to share insights and learning with fellow Lead the Future participants and faculty.

After finishing core and before starting elective modules, the learning journey is further enhanced by a mandatory live virtual (synchronous) delivery of Effective Decision Making for Leaders.

The programme concludes with a Capstone project: three days of face-to-face workshops and classes.

Learning Journey

** Upon completion of the programme graduates will gain alumni status for a period of 3 years. Following which a minimum annual membership fee will be required to maintain the status thereafter.

Core Modules: Overview

Core Module 1

Fostering Innovation in an Age of Disruption

How to leverage innovation to respond to change, especially when driven by digital disruption?

Understand the meaning of innovation and disruption, and learn about what kind of people lead innovation
Acquire the tools and frameworks to develop a process for innovation and successfully translate your ideas into action
Help your organisation foster innovation to forge ahead of competitors.

Core Module 2

Strategy in Turbulent Times

Explore the latest tools, concepts and frameworks to turn digital threats into opportunities.

Leverage digital to develop compelling value propositions and turn threats into an opportunity
Execute on digital strategies by aligning key activities across your organisation with new value propositions and by balancing strategic agility with longer-term sustainability
Gain a clear understanding of AI and its value creation power and explore key challenges in executing AI strategies.

Core Module 3

Leadership in Disruptive Times

Understand the challenges facing senior leaders– from conducting fair decision-making to enabling organisations to navigate change.

Learn practical tools to help teams make critical decisions
Acquire skills to discern the organisational culture you really have – not just the one you wish for – and how to shape that culture
Manage through contradictory forces that firms inevitably face in fast-paced environments.

Core Module 4

Mastering Financial Analysis

Accelerate your understanding of the core financial dimensions of business.

Elevate your understanding of the tie between financial reporting & sustainable value creation
Access the tools, techniques & frameworks to assess the financial health of your organisation
Accelerate your strategic decision making & empower yourself to make courageous decisions
Build authority & fluency in the language of finance for enhanced communication & a more holistic leadership approach

Electives: Customise Your Journey

Customise your knowledge and skills by choosing 3 elective courses, delivered online and on-demand, to fit your most pressing business issues.

You select the courses that best map to your objectives and needs. Elective courses will feature projects and reflections.

Simply choose any three modules from the below elective streams - within or across streams.

Designing and Building Digital Partnerships and Ecosystems

Learn how to navigate the shifting landscape of digital technologies
Understand which partnerships your business needs to win in the era of the 4th Industrial Revolution
Understand how to become a better partner.

Marketing Strategies in a Digital World

Explore the challenges and opportunities of digital disruptions around your customers
Learn new strategic data-driven skills to empower you to make better business decisions for future growth
Design and deploy bold and competitive marketing strategies around the customer in the digital age.

Mastering AI for your Organisation

Understand how AI is deployed in business, so that you can see what it can (and cannot) do for you and your organisation
Gain practical frameworks and templates to work with data scientists and programmers, so you can commission analysis and analyse the results you receive.

Mastering Creativity and Design Thinking

Develop the creative-thinking skills needed to innovate in any organisational context
Elevate your creative skills so you can develop and support a creative culture within your organisation
Develop a culture that is capable of confidently pushing and sustaining innovative efforts.

Communicating with Impact

Develop your own leadership communication style – to maximise your potential strengths – and close the gaps
Establish a link between leadership, different communication styles and performance results – in the process discovering more about yourself and how your behaviour affects others
Learn how to use emotional intelligence through interpersonal communication and how to encourage strategic thinking

Leadership Presence and Influence

Learn how to employ soft-power strategies to draw people in and empower them
Look at how body language ties to presence
Understand the relative importance versus what we say across different settings, cultural contexts and groups
Explore the critical communication tools that you need to develop, to enact both presence and influence.

Leading Diversity and Inclusion

Diagnose and address the key blockers that impede diverse and inclusive culture
Develop a strategic and practical plan to accelerate progress
Based on cutting-edge research, learn how to lead tangible and quantifiable change across your organisation.

Negotiation Excellence

Explore how to choose between win-lose or win-win, and when each strategy is most likely to be effective
Understand how strategic negotiations can drive effective, long-term outcomes
Accelerate your efficiency, build better relationships with fewer conflicts, drive more engagement and gain more confidence to deliver superior outcomes

Mastering Fintech

Understand the 4 main areas of FinTech: payment systems; lending and fund-raising; cryptocurrencies and blockchains; and technology-driven trading and investing
Explore technologies from a business point of view, and discover not only the potential transformative power of some technologies, but also their limitations
Evaluate either the opportunity or threat that your organisation may face due to FinTech.

Management Accounting

Explore the use of accounting information for internal planning, decision-making, and performance evaluation
Understand, evaluate, and act upon the many financial and nonfinancial reports used in managing organisations.

Sustainable Business

Discover how to align strategy and sustainability
Explore frameworks to operationalise sustainability, and how to drive sustainable economic performance
Drive value innovation through sustainable supply chains
Develop your knowledge of business and climate change

Sustainable Finance

How can sustainability be integrated into the financial product?
What is the impact on financial performance?
What is the real-world impact?

Live Virtual Programme:
Effective Decision Making for Leaders

After participants finish core modules and before starting electives, participants will attend a virtual and synchronous delivery on judgement and decision-making.

Effective Decision Making for Leaders delivers practical frameworks drawn from management science and psychology to help you improve your decision-making. Over three half days you will learn to apply simple data science techniques and experiments to improve individual and team choices.

Capstone and Graduation

The INSEAD Lead the Future journey culminates in a capstone graduation on our Fontainbleau campus. Over 3 days participants will come together face-to-face as a community of leaders and will further solidify their learning through:

A 2-day Workshop and Graduation with live cases
Half day sector workshops
Half day graduation

Action Learning Practice (ALP)

To stay ahead of the curve, to remain competitive and relevant in a disrupted and ever-changing environment means finding new solutions to new problems – and putting those solutions into action. INSEAD Lead the Future challenges you to continuously practice applying your learning to your own role and real-life business problems as you advance through the programme.

Working with a learning coach, you will complete Action Learning Practice (ALP) for each of your four core topics, leveraging the tools and frameworks you master to prepare an action plan that fulfils your objectives and to develop your core INSEAD Lead the Future project.

Throughout the programme, you will work on your own core project building on your learning, on new ideas and frameworks and on your expanding skillset as you advance. You will share your project for faculty and peer review at the end of the programme and prepare to take your ideas forward within your organisation for longer-term impact and value creation.