Leading educators, joined by leading practitioners

The Senior Practitioner Faculty is a group of senior business leaders appointed to teach at IEDC, alongside our academic faculty.

IEDC Bled School of Management was founded in 1986, the first school of its kind in the region. It was built in the middle of transformation, for leaders who were living through it. Our mission for the next forty years follows from that: a place that has lived transformation, and a school where leaders learn to lead it.

We appoint senior practitioners because a school with that mission needs people at the front of the room who have recently done the thing they are teaching.

What it is

Members are chief executives, founders, chairs and investors. They hold a named seat on the school's faculty and they teach here while still running businesses of their own.

Their teaching happens alongside an academic colleague, usually in the same session. A professor of strategy and a chief executive who has restructured one will take a group through the same problem from different starting points, and those are often the sessions participants talk about afterwards.

A practitioner joins a programme where the subject calls for one. Participants meet them at the points where a first-hand account is what the session needs, and the rest of the teaching stays with our academic faculty.

What members do

Members co-teach sessions on our open programmes. They work through cases from their own companies, frequently ones that are still unresolved, and they take part in the school's forums.

They also work with IEDC Custom. When a management team is dealing with a specific challenge, a member who has been over the same ground can be brought into the programme for exactly that part of it.

Members give a few days a year. IEDC handles the programme design, the preparation and the classroom mechanics, so for a member that usually comes down to a preparation call or two and then the day itself.

The standard

Every appointment comes down to a single question.

Would the leaders we work with find this person really valuable to have in the room?

Answering it means looking for senior operating responsibility at a company of real scale, and a record long enough to show that it was not one good year. We look for experience that matches what our participants are dealing with now, and for a reputation we are comfortable putting the school's name beside.

Teaching experience is not required. IEDC prepares members who have not taught before, and we have found that the harder thing to supply is judgement.

These are guidelines and we treat them as such. We have appointed people who did not obviously fit them, and we expect to again.

Where members teach

Leadership and people

Building teams, developing successors, and the move from running a function to running an organisation.

Growth, commercial and value creation

Pricing, sales and go-to-market, margin discipline, and what it takes to grow a business without losing money in the process.

Transformation, AI and digital

Technology decisions, and the considerably harder work of getting an organisation to adopt them.

Board, ownership and succession

Founder transitions, ownership structures, and how boards and management work together when it matters.

Where you will meet them

Members teach on our open programmes and appear at the school's forums. For companies, the usual route is IEDC Custom, where a programme is designed around the company's own agenda, or around a problem it is trying to solve.

Where you will meet them

Members teach on our open programmes and appear at the school's forums. For companies, the usual route is IEDC Custom, where a programme is designed around the company's own agenda, or around a problem it is trying to solve.

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Accreditations of the School