Postgraduate News and Views: International Masters in Practising Management

A collaborative Masters programme run by a consortium of business schools around the world has its focus firmly on making things happen, according to its chair, Jonathan Gosling, who has also recently taken up the post of director at Exeter University's Centre for Leadership Studies.

"The course was originally set up to show how we think management training should be done," he says. "The MBA, for instance, tends to focus on generic business topics, but the issue for people running companies or parts of large organisations is more about getting things to actually happen than describing or analysing them."

The International Masters in Practising Management (IMPM) is organised into five chunks, each with a different mindset, he explains. The reflective – thinking about our role in the organisation; the analytic – the various parts of the organisation and their functions; the worldly – the context in which the organisation is operating; the collaborative – the relationships between organisations and the different functions within them; and the action – effecting changes and making things actually happen.

Each module is taught at a different school; the Lancaster University School of Management, the India Institute of Management at Bangalore, Insead in France, the McGill University Faculty of Management in Canada, and in Japan and Korea, a collaboration of faculties from Hitotsubashi and Kobe Universities, the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and the Korean Development Institute.

"Almost all businesses operate in a highly international context these days," says Gosling, "We wanted to develop something to help people deal with this. Each school owns and runs its particular module, and does what it wants to do in its own style. It really is a partnership, and builds in both pluralism and a distinctive way of doing things."

For Kevin Livesey, a senior business manager at BT, the programme has been a unique experience. "While it combines some of the more traditional elements of an MBA, such as finance, marketing, etc, the emphasis on practicing management makes it much more relevant to my job, and the challenges one faces as a manager and leader. It was a revelation to discover that the problems faced by me, or a Japanese manager at Fujitsu, or an Indian manager in Bangalore, or a disaster co-ordinator for the Red Cross, were similar. Whilst the context and culture may be different, they all boil down to how to lead and motivate and organise people."

The programme has run for eight years and attracted 245 top executives from organisations including Lufthansa, Alcan, AstraZeneca, BT, Fujitsu, LG, and Motorola. Each of them had to spend two weeks in each country. "It's a huge commitment," says Gosling. "These are all people in demanding jobs, but they know it's worth it.

emma@haughton.net