Global Executive MBA

Financial Statement Analysis

The objective of the course is to provide students with hands-on experience in financial statement analysis. Students will be exposed to general tools of financial analysis, theoretical concepts, and practical valuation issues.
By the end of the course, students should be comfortable with using firms' financial statements to develop an understanding of their performance and to establish a basis for making reasonable valuation estimates.

This course is aimed at all students who expect at some point in their careers to use financial statements to evaluate the performance, prospects, and value of a business. The primary emphasis will be on the analysis of public companies, but many tools and techniques utilized are relevant to private enterprise financial analysis as well.

Strategy, KPIs & Firm Valuation

Corporate executives need to understand how their strategic decisions relate to and affect the financials and valuation of the firm. They need to gauge the financial impact of their decisions and they also need to communicate about this impact with the firm’s stakeholders.
The course zooms in on the measurement of corporate performance and the impact of corporate strategic decisions. It identifies the financial consequences of these decisions and maps these consequences into the firm’s KPIs and its valuation.
After concluding the course, participants will have deepened their knowledge of the relevant aspects of the accounting language needed to understand how strategic decisions map into the firm’s financials and its val. Importantly, this enhanced understanding will sharpen their skills to communicate with the firm’s stakeholders on these decisions.

Advanced Negotiations

The purpose of this course is to deepen further your learnings and practice of negotiation dynamics across a set of complex problems that you often face in today's business world. The course is also designed to complement and build on the technical and behavioral skills you covered in the Negotiation Dynamics course in the EMBA at INSEAD.
The course will be heavily experiential, providing you with the opportunity to develop your skills by participating in complex negotiations that require you to integrate your experiences with the principles presented in the Negotiation course. As such, completing a level 1 Negotiation course is a prerequisite for attending this course.

Foundations of AI for Executives

The Foundations of AI for Executives course aims to equip executives with the knowledge needed to effectively identify, evaluate, and lead AI initiatives within their organizations. The course focuses on providing a non-technical, executive-level understanding of AI, including key data science and machine learning concepts. Participants will learn how to identify business opportunities for AI, translate business problems into data problems, and apply AI solutions to drive business value. The course covers various AI techniques, such as supervised and unsupervised learning, generative AI, and responsible AI practices. It also emphasizes organizational issues, such as operationalizing AI and working with data scientists. The course builds on the UDJ core and involves hands-on workshops, group discussions, and practical no-code software implementations. 

Management Decision Making

Leaders continuously need to

• Make and supervise decisions under resource constraints
• Acknowledge risks, uncertainties, and complexities in various decision situations
• Evaluate other decision makers and provide actionable advice
• Prioritize decisions based on short- and long-term objectives

In all these tasks, they rely on fundamental factors that are assumed to improve performance: intuition, experience, data, creativity, technology, and cooperation. But research suggests that all these factors are unexpectedly prone to systematic mistakes, narrow perspectives, and manipulations, which can lead to preventable losses and shortfalls. Only by identifying and acknowledging these issues can decision makers effectively reduce biases, increase insights, and balance speed with quality. 

This course focuses on improving critical thinking and strategic decision making skills of executives. The experiential sessions involve exercises, real-life scenarios, simulations, puzzles, and science-based discussions that are designed to be thought-provoking, solution-oriented, and applicable to a variety of decision situations.

Storytelling & Decision-Making

This is a workshop where you can explore, practice and refine your storytelling. You will learn by crafting and telling personal stories and watching others do it. By developing your own style of storytelling, you will better understand your intentions and this will contribute to inform your decision-making. Authentic stories lead you to discover new aspects of who you are, what you care about, what you aspire to, what you decide upon in your life. Stories also create bonds with their audience, be it colleagues, partners, friends, family or everyone in between. They have an impact on others and are essential to leadership.

Private Equity, Venture Capital & Minority Investments

The private equity model has in the past decades created considerable wealth and employment in the most advanced economies. However, future growth will hinge on bringing the benefits of professionally managed active investing to regions with different institutions, talent pools, and types of opportunities. Traditional private equity categories may need to be re-thought in fast-growth markets; all Private Capital investors will need to show that they bring more than funding to the table to stay relevant. For Private Equity, this has meant a push towards Sustainability in their investment mandate and a focus on Social Justice (some call it DEI). For Venture Capital one area of focus has been questions around Responsible AI (artificial intelligence).

A solid understanding of this industry is without doubt critical to future entrepreneurs, business owners, board members and investment professionals alike. While the private capital industry itself has grown significantly in recent decades (from $5 billion in 1980 to over $9 trillion today), the ongoing discussions on the purpose of businesses beyond profit has provided an even greater reason for those investing in private businesses of any stage to understand the dynamics in this industry and push for answers.

This course offers a balanced overview of the private equity landscape, covering both early-stage (venture capital) and late-stage (growth equity, minority and buyout financing) investments. The course focuses on the perspective of the private equity partnership, while also highlighting the important roles of the entrepreneur and limited partners. The course is premised on the idea that private equity is a negotiated process between the relevant parties, and that private equity partnerships are in the business of building sustainable businesses rather than structuring purely financial transactions.

Realising Entrepreneurial Potential / Entrepreneurship through Acquistion

During the span of their careers, many managers toy with the idea of buying (part of) the company they work for (Management Buy-out) or buying some other company (Management Buy-in). In addition to the obvious financial motives, more and more people are taking this path for the challenge, to fully exploit their skills and abilities and to exercise more control over their lives in a uniquely entrepreneurial way.

This course focuses on how to realize entrepreneurial potential without having an idea for launching a company from scratch, but through acquiring a business as a direct route to entrepreneurship. If you have strong managerial skills and entrepreneurial affinities, you can acquire an existing business, grow it, cut costs, and increase profitability, maybe make a couple of add-on acquisitions, and build it into a larger successful company. This form of entrepreneurship is called Entrepreneurship through Acquisition (ETA).

Strategic Thinking with Game Theory

Firms and individuals rarely make decisions in a vacuum. Instead, we inhabit a world where our actions, payoffs, and opportunities for value creation and value capture depend on the actions of others – be they consumers, competitors, regulators or complementors. Examples include contemplating what price to charge, how much capacity to build, how much advertising or R&D expenditure to incur; how to bid for contracts, whether to enter a new market, how to design contracts, how to deter entry into lucrative markets, how to build dominant platforms, etc. In situations like these, determining the best course of action, requires you to think through your opponents’ options, their objectives and the way they will act or react … all the while knowing that they will be doing the same in order to outdo you! 

Game Theory offers a systematic approach to strategic decision making that helps in identifying the right alternatives and choosing among them. The biggest win comes from understanding the game you are playing, choosing the right strategies, but most importantly, changing the rules of the game to your advantage. Given the uncertain, complex and interconnected worlds that we all inhabit, game theory is a tool that provides support for informed decisions. Game theory is also a language that facilitates deeper dialogue about strategy, your view of the world and your rivals’ view of the world. In this course, we will use game theory as a framework for understanding business strategy.

Advanced Corporate Finance

This module focuses on value creation and how it can be achieved. We will follow companies through the process of growth and will we see how value is created and how growth and financing strategically interact to select the major choices. We will consider the process of growth (organic growth, M&A, strategic alliances) for a successful firm and we will show how proper financial insight is required for the success of the growth process.

The goal is to provide the participants with the major insights that modern finance provides to create value. At the same time, we will show how a lack of proper financial strategic insight made lead to value destructing growth. We will define value creation and distinguish it from just profitability, sustainability and growth or mere profit distribution.

Energy Transition Finance

The course focuses on renewable energy required to reach carbon neutrality. The emphasis is on i. the financing, ii. the valuation and iii. investments in renewable projects (and disinvestments in high emitting generation technologies).

The course starts with a general discussion about project finance as a financing technique and the differences between project finance (PF) and corporate finance (CF) regarding the issues of financing, risk mitigation and valuation. It then focuses on the financing and valuation of VRE projects (solar, onshore, offshore wind, BESS, green H2, DAC, ….) and emphasizes the difference between costs (LCOE) and value of VRE projects (capture price), i.e., it focuses on the competitiveness of VRE relative to older technologies (coal, gas….). The last part of the course deals with the important issue of storage (short-term and long-term) and direct air capture (DAC).

Brand Management

In today’s hyperconnected and competitive world, brands are not logos, products or slogans—they often are the lifeblood of businesses. For many successful companies, branding has evolved from being just advertising addendum to a boardroom discipline. A strong brand isn’t just an asset; it’s often the most powerful driver of growth, loyalty, and competitive advantage. In an increasingly commoditized digital-first economy, a brand may be the only meaningful differentiator. In some industries, brand perception and brand equity already drive up to 90% of purchasing decisions.

The digital revolution has transformed how consumers interact with brands, shifting power firmly into their hands. Today, a brand’s success depends on its ability to forge meaningful connections across a fragmented and fast-evolving landscape. Yet many organizations fail to integrate branding into strategic decision-making, making decisions about products, pricing, and advertising in isolation—unaware of the damage this can do to long-term brand equity.

This course is designed to equip you with the tools, strategies, and frameworks to thrive in this new reality. We will examine strategy through a branding lens, addressing the most pressing issues involved in building strong brands and maximizing the value of existing ones.

Customer Insight: Understanding & Influence People with Behavioral Economics

We explore simple yet powerful principles that will help you more deeply understand & effectively influence customers (defined broadly to include “traditional” customers, and more generally, people you may wish to understand or influence—co-workers, friends, as well as yourself). In other words, while this is a marketing course, a considerable portion of it will also help you develop your ‘soft skills’, discussing implications to management, leadership & life.

The course draws on the powerful lens of Behavioral Economics—a very popular scientific discipline that combines psychology & economics to explain how and why people think and decide the way they do. The course will thus help you be more savvy about people (clients, colleagues, friends, yourself, etc), & effective at responding to commercial & personal opportunities & challenges.

Digital and AI-Driven Customer-Centric Strategy & Transformation

Adapting to the ongoing digitization of the economy, and of society in general, is arguably the most challenging transformation businesses face today. Digital technologies, especially AI, have become the backbone of almost every industry, reshaping customer expectations, competitive dynamics, and value creation models. However, rapidly advancing technologies, changing customer behaviours, and disruptive competitors make it increasingly difficult for organisations to drive sustainable and profitable growth. Despite significant investments, up to 70% of organizations fail to meet their return on digital investment goals.

This course empowers executives to navigate these challenges and lead successful digital transformations. Long-term value can only be created when companies prioritize customer-centricity, using technology and AI as an enabler to deliver meaningful customer outcomes. Based on research of the last 5 years of over 30 transformation cases and interviews with more than 2,500 executives, we have identified three strategic shifts essential for leveraging digital technologies to build competitive advantage and future-proof strategies.

Learning from Luxury & Fashion

This course unpacks how successful luxury and fashion houses create competitive advantages by acting as cultural producers – that is, businesses that think of their products and services as delivering value to clients primarily in the form of new meaningful narratives, semantics, beliefs and practices that embody a desired identity. When “going premium,” brands focus on tangible benefits, compete on quality and become feature-driven. Often, this is a great value creation strategy. But businesses going “beyond premium” do something more: they focus on intangible benefits, compete on cultural value, and are story driven.

For business leaders, this means developing news skills to combine style and status dynamics and learning how to craft and leverage cultural storytelling. Internally, this means developing and coordinating among three main luxury leadership types – Visionaries, Dreamers, and Talentists - and organising a business to compete on style and status.

To help participants achieve these objectives, this unique multidisciplinary course offers an immersive experience in the fascinating luxury and fashion industry that unpacks the role of status and style in creativity, leadership, and consumption.

Negotiation

Negotiation is the art and science of securing agreements between two or more interdependent parties with different preferences and motives. The purpose of this course is to understand the theory and processes of negotiation as they are practiced in a variety of settings. The course is designed to be relevant to a broad spectrum of negotiation problems that are faced in the business world. It is also designed to complement the technical and behavioral skills in other courses in the EMBA at INSEAD.

Psychological Issues in Leadership

This course is about the psychological forces that influence the exercise of leadership. Its purpose is to enhance participants’ personal and professional ability to lead and live mindfully, effectively, and responsibly in a range of contemporary workplaces. P.I.L. incorporates a significant reflective component, both individually and with others. It is best suited for those who view professional and personal lives as deeply intertwined, who view work as a potential source of personal meaning and fulfilment, and who aspire to do work that clarifies and reflects who they are. We will be addressing topics and dilemmas that have both professional and personal facets, and focusing on how we can understand and navigate them.

Advanced Competitive Strategy

The course will go beyond the basic concepts learned in the core strategy course (five forces analysis, value chain, competitive advantage framework, etc.) and provide a set of analytical tools and frameworks that will help you assess strategic opportunities for your company and generate and evaluate strategic options.

Unprecedented levels of uncertainty and dynamism characterize today's competitive environment – the cycle time of opportunity creation and erosion is faster than ever. Competitive dynamics are also more complex – firms now face competitive challenges from competitors with very different capabilities and business models. At the same time, as firms have become more specialized, successful strategy involves the creation of business models that effectively manage the interdependence (and perhaps integration) with other stakeholders in their value chains or business ecosystems.

The course will focus on the analysis of businesses facing strategic challenges that require reassessment of strategic direction and business model, such as those facing new competition, technological disruption, or industry restructuring. In addition to analysis, the course will provide a context for exercising the generation of strategic options and strategic choice. Therefore, all cases involve some sort of strategic decision that has to be made, and we will use the frameworks and tools for assessing those options.

The Art of Communication

This course is a non-smoke and mirrors approach to the core essence of being an impactful speaker and communicator in all scenarios. It is for you if your goal is to be a really confident speaker, to enhance your executive presence and your communication & presentation skills.

Whether you are speaking at a conference or live event, presenting a key message to a team, to the board, to stakeholders, pitching to potential clients for that crucial contract, launching a new product or service, or being interviewed for your dream job, people need to be convinced by what you are saying. There is no such thing as information only; you need to persuade your audience that your information is accurate and relevant to them. It’s about striking the right chord with maximum impact.

Blue Ocean Strategy

Companies have long engaged in head-to-head competition in search of sustained, profitable growth. They have fought for competitive advantage, battled over market share, and struggled for differentiation. Yet in today’s overcrowded industries, competing head-on results in nothing but a bloody ‘red ocean’ of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool characterised by increasing levels of commoditisation. INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy offers a new perspective on strategy formulation and execution. This programme takes the theory, created by INSEAD professors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, and develops it into concepts, tools and frameworks. You will learn to create ‘blue oceans’ of uncontested market space to help you make the competition irrelevant. You will gain key insights on how these concepts complement and go beyond traditional approaches to strategy. There is also a strong emphasis on learning how to apply Blue Ocean Strategy to real business situations in order to help your business break away from the competition and achieve strong profitable growth.

This elective is designed to run in ‘Bootcamp’ style to enable participants to practice applying Blue Ocean Strategy (BOS) to their specific contexts. Each participant will get a chance to develop a BOS idea, to discuss it with classmate(s) in small groups to give/receive peer feedback, and to submit it for entry in the BOS Hackathon. Six finalists emerging from the Hackathon will then work in Groups to develop and present a complete BOS initiative in the subsequent Blue Ocean Fair that will conclude the course.

M&As, Alliances and Corporate Strategy

Most companies today aspire to grow. A firm’s definition of its corporate growth strategy and the choice of its corporate scope are therefore of great importance. Mergers and acquisitions (M&A), alliances and joint ventures are external critical means to achieve the desired growth and create new value. At the same time M&A, alliances and joint ventures have become a major area for advisory services. Hence, executives and managers as well as advisors/consultants require a thorough understanding of corporate strategy, mergers & acquisitions, and alliances.

This course explores the challenges that firms face when choosing their corporate strategy and achieving growth through external means. It explores the various modes available to the firm in detail, such as M&A, alliances, and joint ventures. The objective of the course is to give you a thorough understanding of corporate strategy, M&As, and alliances, and to give you a set of tools for making good corporate strategic decisions, and for using M&A and alliances.

Strategy, Structure and Incentives

How do you make sure that the strategy you have designed will be internalized and smoothly implemented by your employees? You can have the best strategy in the world, if your firm is unable to bring it to action, it is of little use. Bringing it to action requires not only that the employee’s interests are aligned with the overall goal, but that the structure of the firm allows for smooth implementation. It requires thinking about the Organizational Architecture. Just like a skilled architect can look at a building’s blueprint and know instantly whether the building will stand or collapse and how it will perform as the needs of the users change, a skilled manager must be able to look at a company’s “blueprint”—its organizational structure and incentive systems—and know instantly whether the company will succeed or struggle in executing its strategy.

Understanding the forces behind organizational design is particularly important in a world of rapid change, where technology and digitalization are changing the way we interact, and do business, which is giving rise to new forms of organizing. In this course, we will develop an analytical framework and tools for rapidly diagnosing an organization’s key strengths and vulnerabilities in organizational design.

Technology and Innovation Strategy

How can you lead innovation in your company? Technology and innovation affect every domain of business, changing the face of industries at an accelerating pace. Yet few leaders accurately understand these patterns, leading to failures that undermine companies, projects, and careers. In this course we will explore the fundamental questions of technology and innovation in order to provide you with the foundations to create and capture value in the changing technology environment.

Exploring these topics will allow us to address the many puzzles of technology innovation, such as, why does listening to customers sometimes lead to failure, why do inventors fail to capture the value of their innovations, and why does great execution sometimes lead to failure?

ART of WHY: Data Analytics for Real Business Impact

In a world overflowing with data, businesses still struggle to turn it into real value. Why? Too much focus on methods and AI techniques, without truly understanding their impact. This course won’t make you a data scientist—it will make you a sharper, more strategic decision-maker. You’ll learn to blend data with instinct, use causal analytics to uncover why strategies succeed or fail, and lead with confidence. Ask the right questions, challenge assumptions, and drive real impact. The future belongs to those who master the ART of WHY.

Delivering Outstanding Service Experiences

To escape commoditization, many B2C services (e.g., Starbucks, Disney, Apple stores, Cirque du Soleil) compete on delivering outstanding service experiences. Service experiences boost customer satisfaction, build customer loyalty, and may in fact transform a company’s customers into its most dedicated promoters. Operational excellence lies at the heart of service experience delivery. In this course, we will discuss how to resolve the classical trade-off in customer experiences between variability and productivity, either through uncompromised variability reduction or through low-cost variability accommodation. We will discuss the efficacy of not only classical operational strategies (e.g., buffering, batching, and focus)—this time with a novel perspective on experience management—  but also various service management innovations (theatricalization, operational transparency, automation, and self-service), and how they relate to the management fundamentals.