The FINANCIAL — Being a manager at a company doesn’t necessarily lessen your ability to gain modern management skills with the most flexible time schedule. This is how 43 outstanding Georgian managers/executives have gone through different MBA programmes at IEDC-Bled School of Management (iedc.si), back in 1986, when it was established, the first management school in Central and Eastern Europe, while today the IEDC is one of the most innovative business educators in Europe and beyond.
Under Prof. Danica Purg, President of the School, IEDC has extended its influence far beyond Slovenia, now attracting 3,500 managers from around the world to different programmes each year. She is also the President of CEEMAN, international management association, connecting 185 universities from 43 countries worldwide, including the leading Georgian business schools like Caucasus University, ESM and International Black Sea University. Last week Prof. Danica Purg talked with The FINANCIAL about IEDC connections with Georgia.
From Georgia we had 43 managers overall at the IEDC, 22 of them attended the five-week General Management Program, 15 of them Executive MBA and one took the Presidents’ MBA, which is quite a lot for such a small country. The Georgian participants we’ve had at IEDC have all been brilliant – they knew English well and once getting back most of them got promoted, others established their own companies etc.
“Taking into account the relatively low income level in the country, we provide certain support to Georgians, so we usually offer half price – that’s if a one year MBA costs 23,000 EUR then we offer it to Georgians for 11,500 EUR. The cost of studying is relatively high, but if you want to go to such a high-class faculty with such outstanding lecturers then it’s not expensive at all, in fact 3-4 times cheaper than similar profile universities and their lecturers in the West.
Corporate clients from Georgia include large banks as well as companies specializing in telecommunications and other various management practices. TBC Bank alone sent 4 of its different department heads to improve their qualifications to IEDC-Bled School of Management during the last 4-5 years. “One half of our revenue comes from in-company programmes and we are very well-known for such innovative programmes all over the world. So if a company has challenges which are proving to be a stumbling block for their development, then we take their managers for a week or two to teach them how to overcome those challenges in innovative ways.”
Q. What is the difference between the style of education you provide for managers to other business schools in Europe or in some other parts of the world?
A. We’re always looking for new forms of education, that’s why we use art elements during leadership lectures. Art and science are increasingly inspiring us to develop future managers and leaders; this is why people are coming to IEDC to learn and which gives our school additional international visibility.
Art helps people to see more, hear more and feel more. It also provokes, shocks and inspires them to learn. Finance, accounting marketing is of course necessary but not sufficient any more. Hence what we do is draw parallels between the arts and the things that they’re studying and let people reflect and inspire.
Professors who teach at the IEDC come from the best business schools from all over the world, like IMD Lausanne, Switzerland, Darden School of Business from USA, Richard Ivey School of Business and Queen’s University from Canada, and other well-known business schools. So there are 70-80 invited professors from such universities whilst only 7 people, including myself, are permanent faculty members employed at the School; also permanent faculty is international.
In today’s world managers are occupied with traveling to business meetings and busy with mounting job practices, hereby during all that time they lose their creativity and are not reflective anymore. So we teach them how to be timely managed in addition to maintaining creativity and stay reflective.
Art helps us to trace the symptoms of change in business as well as in science. We teach our participants how to perform well in business while drawing parallels with the art, for instance, we let them paint their strategies, they listen to patterns in the performance of the orchestra and compare it to the patterns their organizational change, etc.
All IEDC MBA programs are organized on a modular basis (participants come to Bled for some weeks, then they return to their jobs, then they come again for a few weeks etc.). Executive MBA programs last 17 weeks spread over one year (one-year EMBA) or two years (two-year EMBA), while Presidents’ MBA – IEDC’s world-wide innovation – designed for senior and top managers can be completed in up to three years, whereas the schedule is flexible and adjusted to their time constraints.
In addition we also provide international summer schools for young people, called Young Managers’ Program (for young managers) and Discover Management Program (for those students who recently graduated and need an introduction to business world before taking on their first job); so far we had 5 participants from Georgia in these programs.
At the IEDC in Bled we have a campus comprised of three buildings; Bled itself is located near Austria, in the Alpine part of Slovenia, with the lake in the vicinity of IEDC; it is a beautiful place for reflection. There are about 12 hotels with quality accommodation possibilities and another 300 private rooms, so IEDC participants can choose from variety of options for a reasonable price.
Our school has its own time schedule as students study from 8:30 in the morning till 5 PM, then they get, for example, 60 pages to read overnight in order to discuss cases for the following day. Students are required to speak English fluently, as the learning environment is entirely in English. The lectures are highly interactive, for example, the lecturer speaks for only 20 minutes then she/he gives the participants a task, and they discuss and present what solutions they have made.
“In Bled, we not only teach managers/participants, but – through CEEMAN – also professors who come to learn and then go back to their individual countries to teach. There were several lecturers from Georgia who came to study in our CEEMAN courses.
The purpose of my visit to Georgia was to visit the CEEMAN member universities from Georgia, such as Caucasus School of Business, International Black Sea University, ESM, and Euro Asia Institute.
I established CEEMAN together with my colleagues in Eastern Europe in order to connect to more universities in the West and this association is becoming global as 185 universities with 43 countries are involved already and the number of universities is increasing as well as the number of countries.
On 21-25 September we’ll have a big conference in Tbilisi called Management Education in Changing World which will be held at the Radisson BLU Iveria hotel with over 150 outstanding lecturers/deans from all over the world. We organize it together with Caucasus School of Business as a host. The event will be very important for the country at large too, as people will get to know the challenges that the country faces and show it to the world’s outstanding audience. We organize such conferences every year; last year for instance we held one in Italy, a year ago in Latvia.
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