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Global Executive MBA

Designed for experienced professionals who wish to develop their leadership skills while they continue to advance their current careers.

At a Glance
Modular
14 to 17 Months
Three Intakes
Across 3 Campus
Home Campus
France
Singapore
Abu Dhabi

Key Management Challenges

In the real world, management decisions don’t fall into neat boxes of business-school disciplines. Nor do they necessarily fit within the departmental silos of your own organisation. This is why INSEAD has developed Key Management Challenges (KMCs) – broad, cross-disciplinary, cross-departmental courses that genuinely reflect the realities of doing business.

The KMCs are offered on all three campuses and you can choose three topics to suit your needs and interests.

Download Key Management Challenges Overview

Course Topics (Sample)

Corporate Governance & Leadership

Corporate governance has been in the limelight over the last years, amplifying a trend that started a decade ago with major corporate scandals (Enron, Parmalat, Tyco …). The financial crisis can be viewed as the result of governance failures of both financial companies, public markets, and regulatory agencies. The Euro crisis is largely a governance crisis. As a result, the subject of governance has received a lot of attention from business leaders, managers, government officials, academics as well as the general public.

This KMC takes a broad organisational view of governance, examining start-up as well not-for-profit organisations (where proper governance is on average more difficult), and of course dealing with governance inside the corporation. It also takes a perhaps unusually personal view: are you being governed and governing yourself effectively? There has been plenty of academic and professional attention and discussion on the corporate governance front, as a result of the financial crisis. So we will be selective in the topics we chose to cover. Our main focus in the subject will be on governance as exercised by the board. We will discuss the board’s impact on the organisation, the conditions for mutually satisfactory relations between board members, executive, shareholders and other stakeholders, and more generally for board effectiveness.

Conducting Business Across Cultures

Whether from Düsseldorf or Dubai, Brasilia or Beijing, New York or New Delhi, we are all part of a global network – not just in the office or meetings – but virtually, through e-mail, video conferences, Skype and phone. Today, success depends on the ability to navigate through the complexities of how people from different cultures think and get things done. Unless we know how to decode other cultures, to avoid easy-to-fall-into cultural traps, and to communicate our message effectively to those located in another part of the world, we are vulnerable to embarrassment, dysfunctional teams and deals that fall apart.

This course is designed to teach participants to understand cultural differences that may impact their international work, and develop strategies to manage these differences effectively. In addition, this course will teach techniques for managing geographically-dispersed teams, and for improving communication with others at a distance.

Entrepreneurial Leadership: Leading Your Life, Family and Firm

This course posits that entrepreneurship and leadership are interrelated phenomena. They share the goal of creating value; entrepreneurship through new opportunities and innovation and leadership through intentionally influencing others to improve their effectiveness. The course is designed for EMBAs interested in “thinking outside the box” and considering entrepreneurial activities as a part of their leadership repertoire. It is not about management as usual (so some EMBAs may not find it useful).

This KMC is about you - and how you can develop your leadership talents to support a more rewarding and satisfying personal and work life. The course is taught in an executive education format and focuses on exploring issues facing leaders in the real world. The classroom and learning activities are experiential using exercises and assessments as well as case discussion, meditation, lectures, group work, videos, readings and short papers.

New Business Ventures

This course is aimed at EMBA's interested in building a new business or understanding entrepreneurial behaviours and processes. In three days we will develop insights and frameworks that can help participants progress from an entrepreneurial idea to a business design, launch and growth. The focus is the creation of independent ventures, although the learning may also be useful for developing new business initiatives inside companies.

The KMC will be taught via a combination of lectures, cases, team work and exercises. The first day focuses on the conceptualisation of opportunities and understanding the essence of entrepreneurial behavior. The second day explores issues that are relevant to the design and launch of a new business, including an encompassing case series covering all stages of development of a new venture, from financing to business model development, organisational building, and exit. The third day is dedicated to the integration of learning, through a venture development workshop and pitching trial, to improve how you communicate your business ideas.

Strategy and Impact

This course will examine how to best employ business and management tools as a force for good. We will adopt a critical lens on what “impact” (whether social or environmental) really means, and examine why just having good intentions is often not enough for the desired impact to be realised. Next, we will study how to integrate a broader social and/or environmental agenda into an organisation’s strategy, and analyse practical approaches for building financially viable, effective and scalable market-based solutions to meet critical societal needs. Lastly, we will study a range of impactful business models that can help address various societal problems and needs, while acknowledging the necessity of complementing market-based approaches with other interventions in many contexts. Irrespective of whether you work within a traditional business setting or in an impact-driven organisation, the course will show how being creative yet rigorous can help you maximise your contribution to society within your unique context and career path.

AI Strategy for Startups and C-Suites

This course is designed to introduce, demystify and investigate value creation strategies in eco-systems relating to AI, machine learning, robotics, and advanced analytics. The course covers four key layers in AI systems: (1) the data layer - all things "big and small data", (2) the deep learning layer - all things machine learning, advanced multivariate statistics, graph theory, and algorithms, (3) the authoring layer - decision support, automated news, and writing, and (4) the distribution layer - meta data, formats, and uses. The course will emphasise value creation opportunities along the way, and, from time to time, focus on arcane things like 3D game rendering engines, trade-offs between PCI/SSD/MDD/RAM, programming languages, database formats, IT pipelines, and how to avoid spending too much money.

Managing Corporate Turnaround

This course introduces students to the challenges of managing critical turnaround situations in corporations globally. To consistently preserve shareholder value throughout the ups and downs of the business cycle, it is vital to first understand the reasons why companies slide into decline and the mechanics of executing a successful turnaround. The course then discusses turnaround management by both introducing the relevant theories and strategies with a close eye on best practices in the industry and also by allowing students to experience the various processes and pressures of turnaround management firsthand.