IMD business school for management and leadership courses
The President’s Year in Review
Leaders, organizations, and many societies today are navigating a world in flux. The global order is being reconfigured before our eyes, with many long-standing economic principles shifting. Rapid technological advancements are reshaping the future of work and business and raising fundamental questions about the social contract between governments and citizens. And all this is unfolding on a warming planet with rapidly declining biodiversity, and where too many people still lack meaningful opportunities.
Against the backdrop of these transformative changes, IMD stands as a place of consequence. We have always been and are determined to remain the place where leaders and organizations from all over the globe come for cutting-edge management practice, and applied thought leadership. In a world turning inwards, we pride ourselves on fostering global connections. As misinformation distorts public debate, we are committed to academic rigor and practical insights. And when genuine exchange is in decline, IMD remains rooted in dialogue, fostering mutual learning and collective growth.
My goal as President is to build on IMD’s legacy and that of our parent institutions, IMEDE and IMI, to broaden and deepen our impact. Our vision is to be recognized as the most impactful business school – not just in reputation but in real-world influence. While this might seem like a lofty ambition, IMD has a powerful multiplier effect: most of our program participants are senior executives; our MBA and EMBA students have more experience than their peers elsewhere.
When they return to their organizations, their decisions shape thousands of employees’ futures, affect millions of customers, and influence communities worldwide. As the business school most recognized for its proximity to practice, we produce research and thought leadership that not only generates new knowledge but also drives meaningful action.
This commitment is reflected in our refined purpose statement: Challenging what is and inspiring what could be, we develop leaders who transform organizations for a more prosperous, sustainable, and inclusive world.
In practice, this means IMD is the place where we challenge the status quo. We bring together leaders from diverse backgrounds – across industries, cultures, and economic realities – to share knowledge, spark innovation, and build a better future. This same principle guided my approach to assembling IMD’s new leadership team. One of my first tasks as president was to create a smaller, more integrated leadership team that blends experience with fresh perspectives.
Our collective strength lies in our diversity and shared commitment to shaping IMD’s future. You can watch the full discussion on my first 90 days with Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change Michael Watkins here.
Over the past few months, we have demonstrated how IMD delivers impact. In these uncertain times, we’ve developed new frameworks that help leaders cut through the fog and anticipate global shifts. We have supported organizations in deploying AI for transformational change. We have worked closely with companies to accelerate the energy transition while fostering broad-based prosperity.
This impact is made possible by the immense support and goodwill of our stakeholders – our alumni, clients, and partners who recognize IMD’s unique position among top business schools. It is driven by our faculty and staff, who are motivated by excellence and a shared mission to create tangible outcomes for leaders, organizations, and communities.
Looking ahead, our activities in 2025 will further our purpose of contributing to a more prosperous, sustainable, and inclusive world. We will intensify our efforts by generating new knowledge, working closely with leaders and organizations worldwide, leveraging technology to enhance connectivity, and advancing learning innovation to reach more people in more places.
I am deeply optimistic about the years ahead. IMD will continue to be a pivotal place where leaders come together, ask tough questions, challenge assumptions, and leave with renewed purpose, determination, and the motivation to create lasting value.
Our strength lies in the organizations we collaborate with and the communities we engage. As we look toward 2025, we are committed to forging deeper, more meaningful connections with leaders around the world – working together to navigate change and shape a better future.
David Bach
Jean-François Manzoni reflects on the ‘honor and privilege’ of his presidency
As you know, my eight-year presidency ended on 1 September 2024 when David Bach stepped up to the role.
I was delighted that David was selected to succeed me. As a member of the Executive Committee in charge of Programs and Innovation over the previous four years, David was actively involved in the school’s management and is hence highly knowledgeable about the school, its challenges, and its opportunities. It has been a pleasure for me to work with him over the last four years, and I now look forward to being a faculty member again and to supporting him and his leadership team in their efforts.
Leaders never know for sure how they will be remembered. In my case, however, I suspect I will be remembered by many as the COVID President.
Indeed, it is true that 2020 and 2021 were probably somewhat pivotal in the history of the school. Given IMD’s dependency on executive education and on people traveling to work together face-to-face, when the pandemic put a stop to travel this triggered a crisis with the potential to threaten our very existence. And yet, we not only survived this crisis, we came out of it a stronger organization and we have been thriving ever since.
Along the way, we used the crisis to back up our claim that degree programs were a major priority for us. While students at other schools complained about their school’s lack of investment in their experience during COVID and asked for refunds, we at IMD significantly increased support to our MBA and EMBA candidates.
While we could not offer them the same experience as before COVID, we committed to giving them the best possible experience under the circumstances, and we did. These students noticed, and so did our Alumni.
Beyond degree programs, we seized the opportunity to dramatically accelerate our understanding and mastery of technology-mediated interactions, to innovate faster and better than everyone else, and to convince executives and organizations that we had effective, efficient alternatives to face-to-face programs.
It was true back then and it is still true four years later: there is no other top business school in the world that showed more willingness to innovate, more solidarity, more collegiality, and more drive to excel than IMD did through the COVID crisis.
The IMD faculty and staff were simply amazing!
Looking back on my eight years as President, I regret to say that I have a pretty long list of things that I did not manage to achieve. CEOs with whom I have discussed this feeling say that they all felt this way upon stepping down. It seems that nobody steps down feeling they did everything they were hoping to do.
On the positive side, I am proud of the many things that we did achieve together. One of these achievements is the return to growth after years of revenue stagnation.
Over the last eight years (and of course except for the COVID period), all of our activities and programs grew again, enabling us to have more impact and to increase our investments in innovation and thought leadership.
And among many other developments:
- We formalized a new tag line highlighting our pursuit of Real Learning, Real Impact, and significantly increased our focus on measuring the impact of our programs.
- We innovated relentlessly in terms of program design, content, and delivery, which has resulted in IMD winning a considerable number of innovation- and program-related awards over the last few years.
- Building on several workshops conducted with IMD staff, we formalized a new version of our purpose statement.
- We significantly increased our investment in alumni Relations and our communication with alumni.
- We recommitted to our academic heritage and re-affirmed our identity as an independent academic institution with a strong connection to practice.
- This academic re-positioning led to us being accredited as a Swiss University Institute, which means that our degrees are now internationally recognized, we can launch new ones, and we can receive financial support from public research funding organizations.
- We continued to invest in the hiring of more faculty and staff colleagues, each of whom has brought new capabilities and experience, as well as significant diversity in all its forms. We have around 60 faculty members today, 50% of whom were hired over the last eight years.
- We considerably enhanced our thought leadership production in all of its forms and facets, including books, cases, and articles in academic journals such as Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Journal, and many more.
- We launched our own I by IMD magazine, which is fast becoming a respected and trusted source of ideas, and a welcome non-US-centric voice.
- We launched several partnerships, including the Enterprise for Society Center(E4S), Business Schools for Climate Leadership (BS4CL), the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and many more.
- Speaking of E4S and our UNIL and EPFL partners, together we launched a new, pre-experience Master of Science in Sustainable Management and Technology that has now very successfully graduated its first two cohorts.
- We created a Business and Innovation Hub in Cape Town, thus enabling us to tap into a new source of excellent talent that is also offering a significant cost advantage.
Along the way, we also worked hard at developing a caring and inclusive high-performance organizational culture, where our faculty and staff “play to win”, dare to innovate, and strive for excellence but also support one another. Of course, this journey is a race without a finish line, which David and his team will now be picking up.
None of this could have been achieved without the support of IMD’s Alumni, Supervisory Board, faculty and staff. I want to take this last opportunity to thank all of them for their commitment to IMD and what it stands for, and for their unwavering support of IMD’s leadership team – and its President – over the last eight years.
Leading IMD has been an honor and a privilege. I have tried to be a good steward and hopefully leave IMD a little bit stronger than when I began. I now look forward to again having more time to work directly with leaders and organizations, and to doing my best to support IMD’s new leadership in their efforts.
Jean-François Manzoni