Peter Lorange: What does the former head of IMD want with his new school?
MBA News Barbara Bierach / 10-01-2010
Peter Lorange, the much admired former principal of the Lausanne-based business school IMD, bought Zurich’s Graduate School of Business Administration (GSBA) in August 2009 and renamed it the Lorange Institute of Business. But what does an academic like Lorange want with a small organisation with neither, university status nor international accreditation? The school, with a turnover of 8.7 million Swiss francs in 2008, was founded in 1968 by Dr. Albert Stähli and has a somewhat tainted reputation, to say the least.
In the latest edition of EFMD's newsletter, the new owner and chairman of the school explains his rationale: "I wanted to attempt to create a business school that would stand for top quality but that would be different in its design, structure and processes than what has been the norm so far."
So what does the school actually do? The Lorange Institute is focused on executive education; its program includes an Executive MBA and a suite of six executive specialist masters programs, covering subjects as Marketing, Wealth Management, Shipping and Logistics Management, Talent and Intellectual Capital Management, Business Driven Information Management and Sports and Entertainment Management. A short Certificate of Advanced Studies in Business Administration program, 20 short 2-day programs that serve as both parts of the various Master Science tracks and can be taken also by executives as independent, freestanding courses plus in-company programs are also on offer. The school teaches only part-time, mainly local students aged between 25 and 45.
The Zurich faculty, too, is all part-time and visiting - teachers are brought in from other business schools. But this, argues Lorange, can be a virtue, avoiding the silo mentality of a full-time faculty. It allows a school to do some "cherry picking", bringing in experts in particular subjects.
This business model, though, will not help him to enhance the school's reputation since a key factor in that will be accreditation. Currently the school has none and Lorange has been talking to the key accreditation bodies EFMD, AACSB and AMBA - but there will be problems. All of them regard a fixed and stable faculty as a key element in quality.
Also, the EFMD's publication asks Lorange: "Setting up a self-proclaimed new style of business school does, of course, beg the question of what was wrong with the old style?" He answers: "The speed of innovation within business schools is too slow in terms of both the content of programs and courses and also the pedagogical process." He also believes that business schools bear some responsibility for the latest economic crisis. "One of the underlying factors was the linear thinking that many professors seem to have in regard to their research and their teaching - knowing more and more about less and less."
In Lorange's view they did not alert managers to the critical importance of cycles in business. He argues that all businesses go up and down and that it is crucial in decision making to have a better instinct for such turning points. At the Lorange Institute, he says, such issues will be central rather than traditional linear positive/negative thinking.
Peter Lorange has given himself five years to turn the Zurich school into "one of the world's leading business schools" and to prove that his theoretical concept of a new model for business schools works.
http://www.efmd.org/images/stories/efmd/globalfocus10/Issue_2_2010_plorange.pdf
