Chicago Booth Executive Program in El Gouna, Egypt
With great appreciation to a generous gift from the Sawiris Family, and in collaboration with the Sawiris Foundation in Egypt, Chicago Booth Executive Education has developed a one-of-a-kind executive education program in El Gouna, Egypt.
Egypt's complex environment faces disruptive global forces. Bold decision-makers, skilled strategists,
and exceptional leaders are needed to achieve Egypt's Vision 2030 goals and beyond. In the third offering of The Chicago Booth Executive Program in El Gouna, faculty and
participants come together–virtually and in person–to address key challenges facing Egypt
and the world during this time of economic, social, and environmental change.
This program provides Egyptian private and public sector executives with transformational skills to improve their leadership and advance their teams and organizations. This comprehensive management program utilizes The Chicago Approach™ to business—a multi-disciplined, collaborative approach to help participants define issues, ask better questions, and develop better solutions across the areas of leadership, strategy, decision-making, and finance. By attending, you'll combine Booth's data-driven frameworks with your real-world experience to deepen learnings. You'll learn from top faculty, guest speakers, and peers through interactive classroom sessions, group presentations, after-class events, and unique team projects. At the end of this experience, you'll be better equipped to accelerate innovation and make evidence-based decisions during times of uncertainty. Ultimately, you'll gain the tools to become a better leader for your organization and support Egypt's growth in the years ahead.
This experiential program provides a combination of benefits that no other senior executive program can claim. This is a comprehensive management program that incorporates world-class faculty with a blend of traditional and team-based learning.
By attending this program, you will:
- Improve management, decision-making and leadership in times of digital, economic and social disruption
- Discover how to use data to enhance strategic decision-making in an increasingly complex and evolving digital environment
- Develop tactical innovation tools that will help leverage outside perspectives for insights and new ideas
- Acquire the analytical frameworks to increase ROI and improve your decision-making process based on customer insights
- Learn how to anticipate disruptive market changes and act with strategic agility
- Discover what financial lessons can be drawn from recent crises to better prepare for future economic risks and operational challenges
- Learn best practices in behavioral science and negotiation techniques and develop frameworks for making sound decisions
- Identify, replicate, and nurture high-performance behaviors and work groups throughout the organization
World-Class Guest Speakers
This program features world-class guest speakers; 2024 guest speakers will be announced in fall 2023.
Past guest speakers have included Raghuram Rajan, the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at Chicago Booth and one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People.
Why Attend?
- Experiential Learning: Experiential learning, or simply known as learning by doing, is woven throughout the program. In the serene setting of El Gouna, executives will have the opportunity to collaborate on teams and engage in activities that bring concepts to life outside of the classroom.
- Exclusive Speakers: The program includes distinguished global leaders as keynote and dinner speakers. They will inspire and motivate participants to reach their highest potential. The speakers present topics that will augment and align with the classroom learning experience.
- Group Projects and Collaboration: Participants will learn from each other, from practitioners, and from faculty. Group activities throughout the program help increase collaboration and decision-making in a team environment. To reinforce the curriculum and apply it to future real-world challenges, participants will work in mixed public/private sector groups on a final group project, culminating in a presentation at the end of the program.
- Networking: Participants will experience not only high-impact learning but also social activities over the course of the program. Participants will have the opportunity to join group dinners and receptions, and connect with each other even after the program ends.
- The Chicago ApproachTM: Booth's approach to business education has yielded some of the most groundbreaking business insights and advances in the 20th and 21st centuries. You'll learn multidisciplinary frameworks that will empower you to define problems, ask better questions, and develop better solutions. You'll be able to turn business challenges into opportunities, in any industry, anywhere in the world.
This program is designed for senior-level executives in charge of creating value for their organizations. This program brings public and private sector leaders together; the class size is around 50 executives split between public and private organizations. A variety of industries are represented.
The program is an excellent fit for executives who are responsible for enhancing their organizations by combating competition and market disruption, leading digital transformation and innovation, working with policymakers and government officials, evaluating new ventures, managing change or improving the growth of the organization.
Recommended Profile:
- 12 years plus work experience (many participants have 15-20+ years of experience)
- English language proficiency
- Senior executives (responsible for leading and/or managing a large team)
- Individuals identified as high-performers within their organization
- P&L owners, responsible for strategic direction of department and/or business unit, managing line of business or multiple lines of business, country manager, regional head (MENA)
- Many participants hold an MBA or Master's degree
Recommended private sector titles include Head of Strategy, Head of Innovation, EVP, SVP, Managing Director, Senior Director, General Counsel, Executive Director, Division President, Country Manager, etc.
For public sector executives, titles may include Vice Minister, General Manager, Chief of Cabinet, Advisor to the Ministry, Assistant to the Minister, Dean of Faculties, Director, Undersecretary, and Deputy Minister.
Each applicant must be nominated by their employer in order to be considered for the program.
Randall Kroszner
From 2001 to 2003, Dr. Kroszner was a member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA). He was involved in formulating policy on a wide range of issues, including responses to corporate governance scandals, government-sponsored enterprise reform, pension reform, terrorism risk insurance, tax reform, currency crisis management, sovereign debt restructuring, the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and international trade and development.
Since 1990, Dr. Kroszner has taught at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Dr. Kroszner was Director of the George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State. He served as editor of the Journal of Law & Economics and has been associate editor of a number of other academic and policy journals. He was a member of the board of directors at the National Association for Business Economics and the Financial Management Association.
Dr. Kroszner serves as the Chair of the Financial Research Advisory Committee of the Office of Financial Research of the U.S. Treasury. He is a member of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago’s Academic Advisory Council and of the board of advisors of the Paulson Institute. In addition, he is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is member of the board of trustees of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and a member of the board of directors of the Renaissance Society.
Dr. Kroszner has been a visiting scholar at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the IMF, the Stockholm School of Economics, the Stockholm University, the Free University of Berlin, Germany, the London School of Economics, and the American Enterprise Institute. He was the John M. Olin Visiting Fellow in Law and Economics at the University of Chicago Law School the Bertil Danielson Visiting Professor of Banking and Finance at the Stockholm School of Economics, and the SK Chaired Visiting Professor at Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea.
His research interests include regulation of financial institutions, international financial crises, the Great Depression, monetary economics, corporate governance, debt restructuring and bankruptcy, and political economy. His paper on managerial stock ownership (with Clifford Holderness and Dennis Sheehan) won the Brattle Prize for best corporate finance paper in the Journal of Finance. His book co-authored with Nobel laureate Robert J. Shiller, Reforming U.S. Financial Markets: Reflections Before and Beyond Dodd-Frank (MIT Press) appeared on the Washington Post’s Book World political best sellers list.
Dr. Kroszner is a frequent commentator in the international media. He provides advice to financial institutions, government organizations, and central banks throughout the world.
Dr. Kroszner received a Sc.B. (magna cum laude) in applied mathematics-economics (honors) from Brown University in 1984 and an M.A. (1987) and Ph.D. (1990), both in economics, from Harvard University.
Sanjog Misra
Professor Misra's research has been published in the Econometrica, The Journal of Marketing Research, The Journal of Political Economy, Marketing Science, Quantitative Marketing and Economics, the Journal of Law and Economics, among others. He has served as the co-editor of Quantitative Marketing and Economics and as area editor at Management Science, the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, Marketing Science, Quantitative Marketing and Economics, the International Journal of Research in Marketing and the Journal of Marketing Research.
Misra is actively involved in partnering with firms in his research and has worked as an advisor to a number of companies such as Transunion, Oath, Verizon, Eli Lilly, Adventis, Mercer Consulting, Sprint, MGM, Bausch & Lomb, Xerox Corporation and Ziprecruiter with the aim of helping them design efficient, analytics-based, management systems that result in better decisions. He currently serves as an advisor to startups in the marketing technology, measurement and AI space. At Booth Professor Misra teaches courses on Algorithmic Marketing. These courses bring his practical and research expertise in the algorithmic marketing domain into the classroom. He is hopeful that these classes will get students ready for the next evolution of marketing that he believes is already underway.
Prior to joining Booth, Misra was Professor of Marketing at UCLA Anderson School of Management and Professor at the Simon School of Business at the University of Rochester. In addition he has been visiting faculty at the Johnson School of Management at Cornell University and the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.
George Wu
Prior to joining the Chicago Booth faculty in 1997, Wu was on the faculty of Harvard Business School as an assistant and associate professor in the managerial economics area and then in the negotiation and decision making group. He also has worked as a lecturer at Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to graduate school, Wu worked as a decision analyst at Procter Gamble.
Wu is a Department Editor of Management Science and is on numerous other editorial boards, including Decision Analysis, Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, and Theory and Decision. He earned a bachelor's degree cum laude in applied mathematics with a concentration in decision and control in 1985, a master's degree in applied mathematics in 1987, and a PhD in decision sciences in 1991, all from Harvard.
Wu was honored as the 2020 recipient of the Chicago Urban League’s Humanitarian Award. You may read more about the award and the program here. He also received the Class of 2020 Emory Williams Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Kathleen Fitzgerald
Kathleen also holds the position of Senior Director of Academic Support at the University Of Chicago Booth School Of Business in Chicago, London and Hong Kong in which she prepares students of Chicago Booth Executive MBA program for the rigors of Chicago’s quantitative approach to finance, economics, statistics, and marketing.
Her professional experience includes auditing and tax consulting at Ernst & Young, LLP and forensic accounting consulting at Chicago Partners.
Kathleen graduated from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst with a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics in 1990 and a MBA in 1994. She passed the Unified C.P.A. examination in 1994 and holds a Masters in Business Administration from the University of Chicago.
Susan Lucia Annunzio
Acclaimed Leadership Coach, Author, and President and CEO of the Center for High Performance, Lucia Annunzio is known by her clients as the “CEO-Whisperer.” She has spent over 25 years observing, analyzing, and coaching CEO, C-Suite, and Board dynamics. She has discerned that an organization is only as great as the team that leads it and that there is a direct correlation between the way an organization performs and the way its leadership team functions.
Lucia’s work is based on CfHP’s proprietary global research on the factors that accelerate or inhibit profitable growth. It achieved critical acclaim and was presented at such prestigious venues as the World Economic Forum, The International Conference on Knowledge, Culture and Change at the University of Greenwich, and Vacature’s, “Talent Economy” launch event in Belgium.
Lucia is the author of Contagious Success (Portfolio, 2004), a dynamic, best-selling, management book that revealed the global standard for high performance. Contagious Success was voted Fast Company's Readers' Choice. Lucia also authored two additional prominent business books: Communicoding (Fine, 1990; Penguin USA, 1991) and Evolutionary Leadership (Simon & Schuster, 2001; Fireside, 2002). She is frequently quoted in the business press such as the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and CNBC.
Lucia is a former Adjunct Professor of Management at the University of Chicago Booth Graduate School of Business, where she is currently part of the Executive Education faculty and teaches the most popular program, High Performance Leadership. She has been a guest lecturer at INSEAD business school in Fontainebleau, France, Kellogg Graduate School of Management, and Instituto De Empresa in Madrid. She also taught at General Electric’s Crotonville Corporate Training Center.
She is a long-standing member of the Economic Club of Chicago as well as the Chicago Club and the Astor Club. She has sat on various not-for-profit boards including the Joffrey Ballet and the Museum of Contemporary Art. She is currently devoting her philanthropy to National MS Society.
The curriculum blends traditional and experiential learning to illustrate the challenges and opportunities facing industries in today’s growing markets. While the program includes concepts and business cases from businesses around the world, the curriculum is specifically designed for the region.
Program Core Sessions
- Know the Business: Financial Statements*
- Strategic Risk Management and Financial Fragility
- Driving Innovation and Change in Organizations
- High-Performance Leadership
- Innovation Leadership
- Executing Breakthrough and Disruptive Innovation
- Strategic Project Management
- Behavioral Economics
- Negotiations and Decision Making
- Artificial Intelligence and New Analytical Methods
- Marketing Analytics for Growth
I wouldn’t call the Chicago Booth Executive Program just a program! It was a two-week journey for a truly beneficial learning experience. The uniqueness of the journey is not only in the provided material, but it is also about the people, both on the teaching and learning sides. I find it an epic opportunity to gather this public/private sector group of participants and get them to share experiences and lessons learned together. I am grateful to be part of this cohort, and I consider myself lucky to be in this group.
—Mary Safwat, Head of Fintech Enablement Office, Central Bank of Egypt
It is not just the experienced instructors or the rich materials and intellectual discussions that made this program unique. The diversity of backgrounds and the excellent carefully selected participants made the overall experience an incredible learning experience with a lot of values to take home.
—Haitham Hamza, Under Secretary of MOHESR, Ministry of Higher Education
It was amazing to have the opportunity to learn on campus in El Gouna from the University of Chicago Booth professors networking with Egypt’s future leaders from the public and private sectors. Sharing real-life experiences was magnificent. It was an experience that no one should miss.
—Mohamed El Khouly, Head of Trading, Misr Digital Innovation
The best thing I got out of the program is the partnerships that were built between the public and private sectors in Egypt at a time when they were much needed. Leadership, empathy, and data-driven analysis are the three main learnings I’m excited to bring back to my workplace, as they will help us cause and command the disruptions needed to create the Egypt we all long for. If I were to recommend the executive program of Chicago Booth to a colleague, I would simply say, “If you want to build your confidence and strength to make a disruptive and powerful impact, search for the Avengers of Disruption – the Chicago Booth Program – and make it your goal to be a part of their program!’”
—Alaa Abdel-Rahman. Associate Minister of Finance for International Relations, Ministry of Finance, Egypt
I liked the compelling content and topics covered and how well the organization program was. I benefitted most from the frameworks and will implement what I learned in negotiations. Chicago Booth really met expectations and more.
—Sherif Abdullah, Board Member and CFO, Natural Electricity Technology Company
Very unique experience and truly one of a kind. The teaching staff is amazing, the content is extremely up-to-date, and the organization and the location make it a seamless and enjoyable experience! Most importantly, we built a network that will last a lifetime.—Mohamed El-Shazly, General Manager, Cilantro
In only two weeks, I have gained enormous knowledge and insight into practice and concepts that make a better and more effective leader. I am very enthusiastic about implementing this new knowledge in my workplace as much as possible. At this stage of my career, it was very nice to be back in the classroom and to reflect and learn about things that we do in our everyday business to optimize, perfect, and enhance how we manage and lead our organizations. The network of amazing and exceptionally talented executives and leaders from the private and public sectors I have gained from this program is priceless.
—Manal Abdel-Hamid, CEO, OSL Entertainment Projects
This program provided two important values; long-term insights into strategy planning, innovation and daily skills in the fields of decision making, negotiation and risk mitigation. Highly recommend.
—Sameh Elkaffas, Lecturer of Cardiology, Kaser AlAiny Cairo University
What I like most about this program is bringing together such a large group with different backgrounds. Trying the make the “decision making” link among the different topics was on the challenging side but definitely worthwhile. This program is a great opportunity to touch base on topics away from one’s field of expertise.
—Dalia Abou El Rouss, Corporate Banking Early Warning Signals Head, Commercial International Bank, Egypt
Learnings from fellow participants combined with world class academic instruction provided unique insights. Looking to take back new frameworks on identifying risks and growth opportunities with the team. Once in a lifetime opportunity.
—Amer El Salanekly, Investment Professional, Ezdehar Management
I liked getting to know and apply the University of Chicago approach. I am excited and inspired to take back what I learned about strategy, risk management and leadership. I hope to inspire our company to create higher value based on what I have learned.
—Samy Awad, General Manager, Abco United
I liked the public and private mix. I liked the subjects and materials. I am really excited about the innovation techniques as well as the high performance environment attributes. I would tell my colleagues: ‘It is a life experience.
—Emad Essam Abdel Malek, Country Manager Egypt. BASF Construction Chemicals Egypt SAE
The course is a door (mind) opener, highly recommend! ‘It is a life-changing course’ for my career.
—Ramez Sayegh, Director, Oracom Construction
The private/public sector mix was outstanding. Key learning: we should be stubborn on vision and flexible on details.
—Mohamed AbouShady, Head of Sales & PepsiCo Egypt Business, Pepsi Cola Egypt
This is an exceptional program that brings the best practices of management.
—Karim Elsabee, Executive Vice Chairman/CEO, Reliance Egypt
The Chicago Booth Executive Program is an application-based program and includes a formal admissions process. In order for your application to be considered complete, we require the following to be submitted through our online portal:
- Required application questions
- Letter of Recommendation
- CV/Resume
All application materials are required to be considered for the program.
For more information about the application process and decision dates, please view our application FAQ.
2024 Program Dates
The application deadline for the 2024 session is February 15, 2024 at 11:59pm Central Time.
Program Timeline:
- Virtual launch: May 29
- Online finance sessions: June 5 and 12
- In-person session: June 22–July 5
Location
El Gouna campus
Mohamed Ibrahim Kamel St.
84513 El Gouna, Egypt