Together with senior leaders from Rockwool's Growth and
Emerging Markets Division, I had the opportunity to spend a week at the world's #1
business school according to Financial Times' annual rating. Obviously,
expectations were very high of attending the IMD, but was it that good and what
is the secret behind IMD's top rating?
IMD provides excellent facilities for management development
and learning. Facilities are state of the art with huge auditoriums, rooms for
break-out sessions and located in the heart of Lausanne, Switzerland, overlooking
beautiful Lake Geneva and the French Alps.
Many Danish multi-national companies such as Carlsberg, Lego
and A.P. Møller Mærsk is showing a strong commitment and support to IMD. For
instance, Maersk McKinney Møller donated in
2009 more than EUR 12 million to a state of the art learning facility auditorium,
which now bears the Maersk name.
Upon arrival all participants are equipped with iPads where presentations are uploaded.
This allows the professors to do online
surveys using iPad voting bottoms for different subjects. The faculty of
professors is obviously excellent; very inspiring and capable of drawing the
audience's attention for several hours in a row. The faculty is obviously
highly trained in communicating their knowledge to the audience and give
excellent presentations.
Is it better than what I have experienced at e.g. Berkeley, Stanford or Cranfield? Probably not, but for sure better than what I
have experienced at during my studies at Copenhagen University or CBS, not to offend any academics.
Our training programme concentrates on three important issues for our company being more customers centric, more innovative and capable of
coping with the multicultural leadership dimension our company faces in our globalisation
strategy. My key take-away’s are:
- On Customer intimacy, a key learning is that you cannot help
your customers unless you understand their business, their value chain and
their customers. Moreover, customer service surveys that does not
lead to corrective actions is best not undertaken at all.
- Innovation comes in all shapes - finance, process, offering
and delivery - and is more than just product or service innovation. It is
everyone's job to innovate the company as innovation occurs in multiple
points in the organisation and to create a strong innovation culture in
your company you need autonomy, rewards and psychological safety from experimenting.
- On Leadership, we learnt by training that to build a strong
leadership team you need to listen more and ask more questions to ensure
that everyone is on board.
