Cornell-Queen’s is one of a growing number of parterships for providing an Executive MBA, earned from two top universities in different countries. Cornell may have the higher international recognition, but that is more than balanced by the innovative technology that Queen’s brings to the partnership and makes it unique, its multipoint videoconferencing that links Boardroom Learning Centers in major cities across the US and Canada.
Of course, Cornell is no slouch in innovation either: here’s the $60 million Gates Hall under construction, to be the new home of Computing and Information Science:
CQ came across us at an Executive MBA conference.Paul Roman, an Associate Professor of Management Science at Queen’s, added Income/Outcome to the opening residency of the EMBA program. A month ago Nikolai and I ran the first 1-day workshop for the joint EMBA program at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. We had some 70 students, and were assisted by Paul and another extremely experienced Assistant Professor, John Moore. We did a day of Train-the-Trainer with them the next day.
This month I ran another workshop for a new intake of EMBA students at Cornell in Ithaca, NY. Again 80 students, divided into two groups of 6 large teams each, again assisted by John and Paul. And a week later, our long-time colleague Helmut Hergeth – yet another Associate Professor of Business, but this time from the College of Textiles at NC State – went back to Cornell to teach yet another 80 students.
John and Paul say that the biggest benefit of the workshop, and one that justifies the whole day, is that no student will ever again confuse issues of profit with issues of cash flow. I acknowledge this in the workshops, but I also believe the greatest benefit is that we provide everyone with a way to visualize all the business issues that they will deal with throughout the EMBA, and see them in the context of the activity of the whole business – understand their value, their limitations, their impact on other aspects of the business, etc. This holistic understanding will also increase retention of learning, because all the learning will be contextualized and interconnected, rather than being largely isolated and apparently irrelevant pieces of information.
John and Paul have stated that it seems more effective to continue to bring Andromeda in for the lead facilitation, rather than trying to manage that experiential class themselves. They happily run the game’s market competition, and help with payments and loans and improvement options… but they value having a highly skilled facilitator in charge. After all, Nikolai, Helmut and I have all been teaching Income/Outcome in universities and Fortune 50 companies for well over ten years.
And almost simultaneously, Aalborg University in Denmark has booked us for the same thing: two 1-day EMBA workshops (though only 30 people in each) in September, with two days of Train-the-Trainer.
I am delighted by the growth of our workshops in academia as well as the corporate world, and internationally as well as in the US. (And we have our own innovations underway, to reach even larger audiences.) Why not give us a call, and find out what’s so exciting!