IE Business School

14. IE Business School

María de Molina, 11

28006 Madrid, Spain

Admissions Telephone: +34 91 568 96 00

Website: http://gxmba.ie.edu/

IE Business School is one of the most innovative in the world and currently boasts three different Executive MBA programs in English as well as two taught in Spanish.

First, there’s the International Executive MBA, an intensive 13-month program that begins in November of every year. The bi-weekly format of the program is designed to allow the combination of full-time work and travel with the rigors of the MBA program. Classes are held every second weekend in Madrid on Fridays (9:00 to 20:00 h) and Saturdays (9:00 to 15:00 h), including approximately six day-long Thursday sessions throughout the year and a week long program called “learning through context”, where students travel to another continent to gain a better understanding of business in an international and globalized context, through contact with companies from another country. The average age of a student in this program is 34 and 68% of the class comes from outside Spain.

Another choice is the 13-month Global Executive MBA which is a combined in-person and online program which starts off in both June and November. It includes face-to-face periods in Spain, China, USA and Brazil, adding coursework on Asian markets, sustainable development and the liberal arts, to the traditional MBA. Topics are analyzed through participant’s discussion of real cases and business simulations, combined with expert facilitation, designed to release the experience of classmates. The average age of a participant is 36, with nearly a third of the students female.

Finallly, there’s IE’s new partnership program with Brown University. The IE Brown Executive MBA is one of the more innovative offerings on the market. The program is delivered over 15 months via a blended methodology of face-to-face and online modules. In this relationship, Brown is a poet, with faculty slated to deliver liberal arts topics ranging from medical anthropology and neuroscience to international politics. IE is the quant, carrying the bread-and-butter MBA classes. “Many of the leadership challenges confronting global executives arise in the social, political, cultural, and philosophical context that we all know matters, but that usually gets sidestepped in conventional MBA programs,” explains  David Bach, dean of programs at IE Business School, and academic director of the IE Brown Executive MBA. If their website is anything to go by, expect more Einstein and Tolstoy than Welch and Gates.

Latest Up-to-Date Executive MBA Rankings:

2012 Poets&Quants: 14

2011 BusinessWeek: 9

2011 U.S. News & World Report: NR

2010 The Wall Street Journal: 24

2011 Financial Times: 8

Rankings Analysis: When we last ranked Executive MBA programs in 2011, we put together two separate lists–a ranking of North American programs and a ranking of programs outside North America. In that latter ranking, IE emerged as the number one player in executive MBAs. For our new 2012 list, however, we went completely global. As a result, IE is ranked 14th on this combined international list, though it is still number one in EMBA programs outside the U.S.