The Exec-Ed Zone

Those two great titans of European business schools, INSEAD and London Business School, held "Leadership Summits" recently. While the two do not appear to compete head-to-head like Barcelona and Real Madrid football clubs, or Google and Microsoft, (they seem to prefer to give out a an impression of academic exclusivity, where they and a select handful of others command the rarefied heights of management education that others can only dream of ) they are no doubt aware of the others existence and what they are up to.

It is therefore surprising that with little more than a week between them INSEAD held its first "Annual Leadership Summit" at Fontainebleau on Friday 22nd June and LBS ran its fifth "Annual Global Leadership Summit" on Monday 2nd July. The proximity of the two events invites comparison. Who managed to attract the better speakers? Did either actually achieve anything (aren't summits supposed to?) or were they just conferences with a particularly impressive line-up? Which had the better theme? and so on.

INSEAD won on volume of speakers, 27, of which seven were alumni and five others faculty. However, to my admittedly Anglophile knowledge base, London Business School won on celebrity with the media tartish professors Niall Fergusson and Lord Winston on board. 

INSEAD chose to focus on Europe, as 2007 is the 50th anniversary of both the origins of the European Union and of INSEAD itself. Its theme was "Is Europe Still Relevant?" . The gist of the speeches was clearly - and unsurprisingly - that it still is. Greg Case, the CEO of Aon Corporation, said inn his opening keynote address that Europe is at the core of his company’s activities. “Well over half of what we do is outside the US and the most dominant piece of that by far is in Europe.” He adds he only sees ‘incredible relevance’ which is increasing. “Is the European economy as relevant as it once was?” asked Alice Rivlin of The Brookings Institution. “Yes, absolutely, the citizens of Europe are better off now in an economically integrated Europe than when each country was going it alone. In the US, for example -- where the economy has been integrated for 200 years -- the economy of the state of Michigan is in dire shape, but no one in Michigan believes that they would be better off if Michigan were not part of the Union.”

LBS opted for a wider platform as its "Global Leadership Summit" demanded perhaps. Niall Ferguson launched the event with an explosive  and typically polemical historical analysis of geo-political risk prompting a rather doom and gloom outlook for the economic future, saying that war was “less improbable than we assume”. He took up Nassim Nicholas Taleb's point that "Black Swans do exist" and needed to be taken seriously. Professor of Management Practice in Organisational Behaviour,  Lynda Gratton , actually brought the Leadership Summit to a discussion on Leaders with her ideas on "hotspots " in the workplace.

The decider discussion between the two events was probably their respective explorations of the impact and progress of emerging economies. INSEAD led with "Europe as a Power:  Financial and Macroeconomic Challenges Ahead" that examined the rise of the BRIC economies and the threat they may pose to Europe's economic position. LBS adopted a more particular approach to the emerging economy threat by examining how successful the new MNC's of emerging nations really are. Associate professor of Management Practice in Strategic International Management at LBS, Dr Don Sull likened a successful company from these economies as having survuved in " a harsh Darwinian selection environment" where they are challenged by MNC's from the West and low-cost upstarts from their own side.

The only way to evaluate what the quality of discussion was really like is to have been there - or as a second option listen to the podcasts. Luckily both INSEAD and LBS are winners in the technology provision race and you can while away some hours learning from their selected leaders at their respective websites. (INSEAD's Knowledge newsletter and LBS's courtesy of the Times Online.)