This confirms for the fourth year in succession, IMI’s place among the top global providers of uniquely tailored, company specific executive education.

“The maintenance of IMI’s position in this ranking is extremely important to IMI and Ireland. It is vital for the country’s economic renewal that companies have access to global best practice management and competitive world class executive development training here at home. It shows that IMI has the knowledge and experience to help companies grow at home and expand internationally,” Dr Phil Nolan, Executive Chairman of IMI said.

IMI’s collaboration with partner schools in providing leading edge management learning was highlighted in this year’s ranking. These collaborations have been enhanced over the past 12 months by IMI’s developing alliance with University College Cork (UCC).

Improvements in the provision of overseas programmes, the breadth of experience among IMI’s teaching faculty and the facilities provided at the IMI’s National Management Campus in Sandyford were also highlighted in this year’s ranking.

“IMI has maintained its ranking for Customised Executive Education for the fourth year in a row and remains the only business school in Ireland to be included. This shows that IMI is among the best international business schools and that our customers recognise the continued value that we bring to their organisations having endorsed that through the feedback they gave during the ranking process,” commented Dr Nolan.

IMI is ranked just three places behind MIT Sloan.

IMI Customised Executive Education involves a close collaboration with clients to design pragmatic solutions to their specific business issues. IMI works to fully understand the challenges clients are facing and programmes are then designed to align with the client’s business strategy in order to drive optimal business results.

These rankings are produced after a lengthy and rigorous process of evaluation among the companies involved and benchmarking against those other business schools assessed.

For more information on our programmes for organisations please click here.

The Irish Management Institute today announced a partnership with the de Bono Foundation which will see IMI offer courses and training based on the thinking techniques pioneered by Dr Edward de Bono.

“Edward de Bono is a pioneer, a unique figure who has had a major impact on innovation and creativity – two commodities that will play a key role in helping Ireland get out of our difficulties. One of his crucial insights was in realising that these qualities can be taught, trained and developed. I am delighted to welcome the establishment of training courses in Ireland based on his ground-breaking conclusions, I congratulate the IMI and all involved in bringing this about, and I wish it every success”, Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Richard Bruton TD said welcomed the new partnership.

De Bono, the father of lateral thinking has developed a number of ground-breaking thinking methods including the ‘Six Thinking Hats’, delivered a Master-class for managers and business people at the IMI Conference Centre in Sandyford to mark the launch of the new partnership.

These thinking techniques have great application to the world of business and “disrupt dominant thinking patterns, allowing managers and teams to overcome the limitations of their previous ways of thinking,” Dr de Bono commented.

These lateral thinking skills can be learnt and this initiative by the IMI represents a “unique intersection of creative and business thinking,” putting those who study these courses at the IMI at the leading edge of business innovation.

Details of the de Bono courses will be announced as part of the IMI autumn schedule of programmes.

Dr Phil Nolan, IMI’s Executive Chairman said de Bono’s methods are of great use to organisations. “Developing Edward de Bono’s principles of co-operative and collaborative thinking in teams will improve problem solving and decision-making in companies and organisations, ultimately delivering better outcomes and higher productivity.”

The de Bono courses will include topics such as:

‘Six Thinking Hats – Parallel Thinking for World Class Teamwork’ which drives effectiveness within teams through focused thinking, as well as moving teams away from traditional adversarial to co-operative thinking.

‘Lateral Thinking’ will help develop systems that generate alternatives that go far beyond the more immediate, obvious solutions.

‘The Power of Perception,’ will detail ten strategies for sharpening perception and focusing thinking in a more comprehensive, effective and efficient way.

Simplicity will teach people to end habits that are no longer necessary, stop duplication of tasks and challenge every aspect of business to enable higher performance.

There will also be a course for facilitators which combines the three core de Bono ‘Thinking Systems’ to enable the facilitator achieve their aims more effectively and efficiently.

This initiative with the de Bono Foundation enhances the IMI offering which it has been developing in alliance with University College Cork (UCC) since June last year.

Date: Wednesday, 2nd May

Time: 8:30am – Registration

Venue: IMI Conference Centre, Sandyford

Fee: IMI Members / Alumni – Complimentary but registration in advance is required

Non-members – €195

This event is now oversubscribed.

Lateral Thinking

Edward de Bono coined the term ‘lateral thinking’ and has developed a number of thinking methods, including the Six Thinking Hats. His work has been influential the world over in a range of different contexts from corporate organisations to government agencies through to sports teams and education.

De Bono’s thinking techniques are designed to enable individuals and groups to overcome the limitations of purely linear thinking processes. He stresses the importance of disrupting this dominant thinking pattern to enable more creative and effective problem solving. He sees lateral thinking as a learnable skill and is a proponent of teaching thinking as a distinct subject in schools.

In organisations, de Bono’s methods are used to great effect to develop co-operative and collaborative thinking in teams to improve problem solving and decision-making and ultimately deliver better outcomes and higher productivity.

This Masterclass, which will be led by Edward de Bono and facilitated by IMI Faculty, will be highly interactive and designed to enable participants maximise the power and capability of their own thinking and that of their teams.

Brant Cooper, author of ‘The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development’, will lead a half day workshop on Customer Development on May 1st, at the IMI.

Customer Development is a four step framework for discovering and validating the right market for your ideas, building the right product features that solve customers’ needs, testing the tactics for acquiring and converting customers, and deploying the right organsiation and resources to scale the product / business. It is a systematic approach to developing the right products to meet market demand.

This workshop will also look at how Lean principles can inform the change and (disruptive) innovation process where uncertainty is a key component.

Date: Tuesday, 1st May

Time: 2 – 5:30pm

Venue: IMI Conference Centre, Sandyford

Fees & Booking IMI Members / Alumni – €125 or  Non-members – €195

(Includes an electronic copy of Brant’s book, The Entrepreneurs’ Guide To Customer Development in PDF Format)

To Book: Phone: Conor Nolan on (01) 207 8428 or Email: conor.nolan@imi.ie

Places are limited and prior booking is essential.

Who is this workshop for:

Designed as an interactive workshop this will appeal to marketers, product developers, product managers, those involved in R&D, in sales and getting products to market, intraprenuers and owner-managers. Suitable for anyone in your organisation who interacts with customers or who wants to improve the way ideas gain traction through their organisations.

Workshop Content:

After reviewing Customer Development and Lean principles, participants will apply them to their own business models, documenting underlying assumptions, identifying and prioritising risks, and finally learning how they might go about testing.
The workshop will also cover:
• The difference between listening to customers and doing what they say
• How Customer Development fits into the Build -> Measure -> Learn framework
• The Stages of Customer Development
• When NOT to do Customer Development

About Brant Cooper:

Brant Cooper has over 20 years’ experience in IT and a long track record of bringing innovative products to market. As a leader in Professional Services, Product Management and Marketing, he has directed strategy, design, marketing and implementation of numerous products for a variety of start-ups including Tumbleweed, Timestamp, WildPackets, Incode and InfoBright.

Brant’s book ‘The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development,’ published in 2010 has become required reading on the University of Chicago’s MBA program as well as at Stanford University, De Paul, Boston University, UC Santa Barbara and University of Oslo. Brant has also published articles in Venture Beat and Business Insider .

He has spoken at many conferences around the world including at Qualcomm, the Kuala Lumpur Venture Capital Symposium, and Lean Startup conferences in Vancouver and Michigan. Other speaking events include the Forward Technology Conference in Wisconsin, the Lean Startup Challenge in Boston, and Lean Startup Machines in London, New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco.

Brant consults for and advises on Lean and Customer Development, serving clients in Silicon Valley, New York, San Diego, France, Australia and Singapore. Clients include Qualcomm, MOGL, HubKick, MotherKnows, i.TV.

But how do emotional competencies affect workplace productivity?

To answer this question I investigated it among Irish middle managers working across a large variety of Irish organisations who undertook the IMI Core Skills of Management / Advanced Skills of Management.

Correlating Bar-On EQi responses with management practice adoption, I found that:

1. Managers who can tune into the reality of the immediate situation are more likely to define clear performance metrics, review performance against such metrics and address poor performance

2. Managers who care about what happens to other people are more likely to address poor performance by taking action and implement re-training in areas of weakness or realigning talents to where they can deliver better performance

3. Managers who have difficulty in controlling strong impulses are less likely to define the right balance between financial and non-financial metrics. They are also less likely to continuously track the right metrics

The McKinsey / LSE work mentioned earlier identified three key areas of poor adoption in Ireland, these are:

1. Defining the right metrics

2. Reviewing Performance against these metrics

3. Addressing poor performance

So, developing the emotional competencies of Irish managers, especially in the areas of adaptability, empathy and impulse control are essential in order to improve how Irish managers adopt  management best practice and in turn increase productivity.

In practical terms, models like the ‘6 Seconds’ approach, can help develop emotional competence through quick and easy to use strategies such at the six-second challenge.

Joshua Freedman and Max Ghini of the Six Seconds Emotional Intelligence network will be in Ireland in May to help managers learn how to use such critical strategies.

For more information please click here.

The company received a place on the IMI’s Senior Executive Programme which will equip one of its senior team with the strategic skills and leadership understanding to position both themselves and their organisation for continued success.

This award reflects the fact that, this year, the judges placed a particular emphasis on the innovative strategies the companies are adopting to ensure their continued success.

IMI has been involved as academic sponsor of the Best Managed Companies Awards since the programme began four years ago and Dr Phil Nolan, Executive Chair, IMI presented the Gold Standard Awards to those 16 companies who have requalified each year since 2008.

IMI also organised the annual symposium which took place on Friday, 2nd March in the Burlington Hotel. Keynote speakers included leading authority on innovation Charles Leadbeater and Julian Birkinshaw, Professor of Strategy & Entrepreneurship at LBS. The afternoon’s programme also included a very engaging interview with John Teeling the founder and Chairman of Cooley Distillery.

Some of the presentations from the symposium are available below:

Best Managed Symposium 2012 – Julian Birkinshaw Presentation

Best Managed Symposium 2012 – Tom McCarthy Presentation

For more information on the 2012 Winners, requalifying companies and Gold Standard recipients as well as the Deloitte Best Managed Companies Awards click here.

I have been participating on the Diploma in Strategic Marketing and Strategic Online Marketing at the IMI since November 2011, on behalf of my organisation, a charity working in the voluntary and community sector. We recognised a number of knowledge gaps within our organisation which included marketing strategy. To continue to provide relevant services to those that needed them, and to allow us move confidently towards the future we needed to address these gaps.

I can say hand on heart that my strategic marketing ‘knowhow’ was nil prior to this adventure. I am a psychologist not a marketer and these past 4 months have meant a steep learning curve for me, though marketing and psychology are second cousins in many respects.

The IMI are providing me with a great resource. The practical nature of the course and the thorough strategic thinking leadership and guidance, have been excellent. The programme has helped me focus on strategic organisational marketing concerns. I believe that this opportunity will help my organisation avoid costly marketing mistakes as I have access to practitioners and academics who are top of their game and give freely of marketing insights and knowledge. I am a great believer in learning from others’ successes and failures and this programme will save me from many of the pitfalls I would have encountered had I not availed of it, I have no doubt!

60% of our marks go towards developing a marketing plan. While this has been an agony in the garden for me, the effort I have put in to gathering data is paying dividends not only for the programme, but for other initiatives the Hanly Centre is undertaking.  I know without the structure of this programme this research work, which is crucial across many facets of the organisation, would have been put on the longest finger. Now it’s almost done!

I have studied in and with a variety of 3rd level institutions both here in Ireland, the UK and Sweden at both undergrad and post grad levels and, in my experience, I can say without reservation that IMI have provided me with a learning environment of excellent standard which recognises the value of the practitioner and more that adequately bridges the academic/practitioner divide (something that can be the Achilles heel for many tertiary institutions) within a supportive environment. I am delighted to have had the opportunity to study here.

Check back often as we’ll be featuring posts from our Scholarship Winners regularly.

Paul is Director of the Centre for Performance-Led HR and Professor of Human Resource Management at the Lancaster University Management School and an Associate Faculty at IMI teaching on our Diploma in Strategic HRM.

In 2010 he was voted amongst the Top 15 Most Influential HR Thinkers by Human Resources Magazine. He has published over 100 journal articles and chapters and several books. He is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development

The New HR Agenda

The first phase of research at the Centre for Performance-Led HR, focused on ways to enhance the experience of the work force and the productivity and performance of both employees and HR functions. As a central issue for innovation and growth in businesses, this raises questions about business model change, organizational design, employee engagement and talent management. The latest phase of research has looked at the underlying drivers that will shape performance – innovation, customer centricity and lean management – and identified another raft of challenges to be faced.

Considering the future of work, questions of fairness are becoming more complex. Many issues, from pension provision to the question of reward through to global sourcing of work to name but a few, are impacting across generational groups and across different internal employee segments. Many organizations now face the challenge of providing seamless HR support to business arrangements that might be based on partnering (in its many guises), and this raises questions about how best to ensure governance, risk management and capability development across partnered business arrangements, or in business models that involve several agencies.

The session will take us through this journey towards the New HR Agenda.

Breakfast Briefing – The New HR Agenda

Date March 9th
Time 8.00 Registration & Breakfast
8.30 – 9.30 Briefing – The New HR Agenda
Venue IMI Conference Centre

To register:
Please send the following information by email to Sharon.Byrne@imi.ie by 5pm Wednesday February 29th:

Participant’s Name
Job Title
Email Address
Contact Telephone Number

Flourishing: The Art & Science of Being at Your Best

Date: 1st March 2012
Venue: IMI Conference Centre, Sandyford
Time: 6:00pm to 8:00pm

Guest Speaker: Dr Maureen Gaffney,
Psychologist, Author of Flourishing,
Adjunct Professor of Psychology & Society UCD

Register: email – alumni@imi.ie by Friday, 24th February

Dr Maureen Gaffney is an expert on change management, emotional intelligence, ‘gender at work’ and on work/life balance. A clinical psychologist she has worked with companies in Ireland, UK, Israel, and the US in the areas of leadership, change and transition, emotional intelligence and managing diversity.

In her recent book ‘Flourishing’ she explains that adversity can be a positive turning point and looks at the factors which enable individuals overcome adversity, maximise their potential and enjoy life and this is what she will speak about on March 1st. Maureen is a well-known broadcaster, writer and columnist and has served as Chair of the NESF, Chair of the Council of the Insurance Ombudsman of Ireland; as a board member of the HSE; Council member of the ESRI; and as a Law reform Commissioner.

This event is open to all IMI Alumni Network members, there is no charge but registration in advance is neccessary.

To register: email – alumi@imi.ie before Friday, 24th February.

Cloud-based innovation has the potential to deliver €9.4 billion in sales annually and create up to 8,600 new jobs in Ireland according to research carried out last year.

“Cloud computing has the potential to create new business models, reduce costs and transform how work is carried out within any organisation. The Diploma in Cloud Strategy will equip managers with the expertise to develop cloud strategies that deliver bottom line value”, UCC President Dr Michael Murphy.

This new Diploma represents a significant innovation for UCC/IMI’s Master of Business programme as it is the first of these Diplomas to incorporate an industry partnership – in this case with Microsoft Ireland.

Alongside classroom discussion with UCC and IMI experts, participants will learn firsthand from Microsoft’s practical experience of implementing cloud-based solutions through workshops with senior Microsoft specialists and a visit to Microsoft’s cloud data centre in Grange Castle.

“Leveraging cloud-based opportunities requires a new way of thinking about information and its value to any organisation. This programme will enable the formulation of new business strategies and business models, and a fresh approach to the skills required to take advantage of what the Cloud can offer.” Paul Rellis Managing Director of Microsoft Ireland commented.

Aimed at technical and non-technical managers, entrepreneurs and graduates with industry experience, the UCC/IMI Diploma in Cloud Strategy will enable participants to identify and evaluate cloud-related strategies for their organisations, and develop a sound business case for moving to the cloud. As part of the programme, every participant will develop a comprehensive “cloud strategy blueprint” for their organisation.

“This Diploma will be characterised by a unique classroom dynamic that will bring together both technical and non-technical managers to jointly analyse cloud strategies and map out new ways of doing business,” commented IMI Executive Chairman Dr Phil Nolan.

The Diploma in Cloud Strategy is based on three themes; strategy processes and frameworks, innovation management and cloud based business models and has an emphasis on intensely interactive and focused action-learning which will draw upon the professional experiences of participants.

Find out more here.