Innovation: A Digital Toolkit For Business Grads

When Lee Newman started work at McKinsey & Co. in 1992 after graduating with his MBA from MIT Sloan, he often opened a book that would prove incredibly useful. It was titled “Getting a Good Start – A Primer for New Client Service Staff.” The book introduced newcomers to the consulting giant the McKinsey way of working, problem solving, and communicating.

Now Dean of IE Business School in Spain, Newman has come up with an innovative idea for graduates of the school’s master’s programs. Besides handing them their degrees at graduation, he intends to provide a digital toolkit for graduates to help them have immediate impact in the world of work.

It borrows heavily from the McKinsey book Newman devoured in his early days as an associate consultant. IE’s Impact Skills Accelerator will effectively be a cheat sheet of sorts on key workplace skills designed to give students the ability to make things happen in the face of difficult business challenges, difficult workplace situations and difficult people.

A CHEAT SHEET OF CRITICAL SKILLS NEEDED TO HAVE IMMEDIATE IMPACT

While those skills are often translated in the classroom over many courses, they also can be easily forgotten as the years past. Newman, who still has a photocopy of the McKinsey book, wants to make sure there’s a quick and easy way for graduates to access them in a neat toolkit.

“One of the amazing things about McKinsey as a firm is the strength of its culture and ways of working,” he says in an interview with Poets&Quants. “You feel part of the firm because you all have a common foundation in terms of approaches. And on top of that you construct your unique way of doing things. We are pursuing the same — building an IE Business School way of approaching the critical skills every business professional needs to have impact, built around a common toolbox and set of courses in which the toolbox is taught.”

The toolkit will cover the following core issues:

Thinking Skills:  Critical Thinking, Creative Thinking, Problem Solving, Project Managemen

Behavioral Skills:  Self-Transformation, High Performance Teams, Selling & Storymaking, Public Speaking, and Power & Influence

Digital Skills:  Data Fluency

WILL USE BRANDED TOOLS & FRAMEWORKS UNDER LICENSE

Some of topics will be branded tools and frameworks from vendors outside IE Business School. For problem solving tools, for example, Newman is partnering with former McKinsey Partner Charles Conn and former McKinsey Director Robert McLean, the authors of Bullet-Proof Problem Solving.

For project management, he’ll lean on the Project Canvas method of IE adjunct Antonio Nieto Rodriguez who wrote the Harvard Business Review’s Guide on Project Management and was formerly Chairman of the Board of the Project Management Institute.

For counsel on how to create a high performance team, Newman will center the advice around the Belbin methodology, and for self-transformation, he will borrow from the DISC assessment, one of the top corporate strengths assessments and a behavioral change app from one of the top consulting firms.

TOOLKIT WILL BE HANDED TO GRADUATES OF ITS MIM, MBA AND OTHER MASTER’S PROGRAMS

This coming Fall, IE Business School will launch the Impact Skills Accelerator toolkit in its Master’s in Management program, the full-time International MBA, the Master in Digital Business & Innovation, and the Executive Master in Digital Transformation & Innovation Leadership.

The school has already incorporated some adapted elements of the Impact Skills Accelerator in its new EMBA in Leadership which launched earlier this Spring, planning to further implement it next year. Then, IE will add the toolkit to all of its remaining Business Masters in the Fall of 2024.

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