Executive education programs are generally quite small in participant numbers to facilitate discussion and enable experiential learning tasks. It is therefore something of a surprise to learn that the flagship program from top-ranked exec-ed provider IMD in Switzerland has just run with 540 participants. But Orchestrating Winning Performance (OWP) is no ordinary exec-ed program. This year’s participants came from 57 countries, 287 companies and included 25 company teams.

It is not just the conference sized number of participants, nor indeed the quality of them that makes it stand out though. OWP is, as its program co-director Prof Bettina Büchel told IEDP, “very much a community event for IMD internally as well…all the faculty try to be involved.” And it needs to be, to facilitate worthwhile discussions and appeal to the varied interests and demands of such a large number of executives requires a wide-spectrum of faculty to offer their latest research and thinking. As Prof Büchel confirms “OWP is a total R&D event for IMD, no research is specifically developed for the program, it is just that all the faculty bring their latest research. It motivates everyone and bringing your new perspectives to deliver at the sessions is a key value driver with faculty of the program.”

So what do you get in your five days in Lausanne? Like any good exec-ed program it is highly structured. Participants may leave at the end of the week invigorated and refreshed but this has not happened due to plenty of down-time or relaxation. The days are split into six sessions – two morning and three afternoon sessions and an evening session. The mornings and afternoons both have an initial one hour session with everyone in attendance and then the participants break up into pre-selected streams. There was a choice of seven different morning and six afternoon streams to select from – however the conference analogy ends here. The streamed sessions are not changeable once you arrive, and they continue from the previous day so must be stuck with throughout the week – these are full learning interventions, facilitated by experienced faculty with discussions, case studies, role play and group work to engage with.

Prof Büchel noted that the leadership streams remained the most popular of the electives, with upto 90 participants attending the most popular ones. But this year’s choices also included Navigating Strategic Trade-Offs; Service Innovation; New Ideas in Corporate Finance; Winning through Supply Chain and others. Tim McGrath, Chief Commercial Officer at Hays Recruitment who attended the program as part of a group of 24 from his company, commented that the real value of his week came through the ability of the faculty to stimulate energetic discussion amongst the participants. And the fact that the groups were considerably larger than he had experienced at other development programs did not stop their ability to achieve this.

The Hays group split themselves up across the different electives. McGrath only had one other Hays colleague in his morning stream, Navigating Strategic Trade-Offs and four others in the larger afternoon stream, Managing Complex Organisations. He noted that they were the only recruitment company attending the program, but this enabled plenty of new ideas and experiences from other participants from different sectors to be accessed and generated. “By the second session we were no longer sitting with our colleagues, the streamed group had taken on its own dynamic.”

Prof Büchel describes the OWP program as being very “future-oriented” and this focus is enhanced by the wide range of experiences of the participants. The Digital Natives session, for example, included senior board directors along with a handful of the IMD MBA class who were attending for the first time this year. IMD MBA’s are older than most schools, largely in the early 30’s, so they bring several years’ experience in any case. Büchel noted that the younger members were digital natives and this allowed the more senior participants who were having to learn to manage this new group to have a more useful and interactive discussion.

The evening sessions maintained the same level of intellectual input and energy. Three eminent guest speakers presented their own takes on leadership and management. Nicholas Nassim Taleb gave a sophisticated presentation on managing risk and the appearance of Black Swan events; David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, shared the stories behind the campaign and current strategic issues facing the administration and examined the importance of strategy in managing campaigns, public policy initiatives and crises; and Sir Matthew Pinsent the three-times gold medal winning Olympian explained, in a “completely inspiring” talk according to Hays Recruitment’s Tim McGrath,  how the British rowing team’s extraordinary performance was created and maintained.

This year’s future orientation motif was enriched with the iPad. All participants were issued with an iPad at the outset of the program, which was pre-loaded with the program materials and enabled participants to email each other, discuss topics as well as vote in classes and view videos. There was a concern that it might be a distraction, tempting participants to play with their new Apple toy rather than engage in the sessions – however this did not occur. Rather it was observed that the iPad enhanced the program experience rather than detracted from it. Over half the program attendees purchased theirs to take away with them at the end of the week.

OWP is unlike any other short executive program in terms of scale and scope. However, the standout features that set this and other world-class executive development programs apart from the mass of others offered is surprisingly consistent: the quality and currency of the research backed content of the streams; the rare ability of the professors to act as discussion facilitators and provokers, (McGrath commented that he had not experienced the combination of “challenging, interactive yet relaxed and humorous” presentation elsewhere before); and the consequent level of other participants’ experience and input.

IMD’s Orchestrating Winning Performance is run once a year. For more information on 2011 and 2012 dates see the program profile on IEDP.