Global Leadership Institute

Economic, social, and technological innovations have radically transformed the global workplace, placing new demands on organizations to stay one step ahead. These demands require organizations to be agile, strategic, and able to give rise to a new type of leader. This new type of leader must be equipped with the leadership skills to adapt to a highly collaborative work environment, while also holding the expertise to respond to modern business concerns in the face of rapid technology evolution.

Chicago Booth’s Global Leadership Institute (GLI) aims to transition emerging leaders into strategic, enterprise-focused executives. The program utilizes The Chicago Approach™ to business—a multi-discipline based approach to elevate the management skills of executives by focusing on leadership, strategy, decision-making, and finance. GLI also incorporates relevant topics such as innovation, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and corporate social responsibility to help leaders stay ahead. This program aims to provide the tools and frameworks to preserve and grow your organization as disruptive market changes occur.

By attending, you will: 

• Improve your executive decision-making skills to better drive your organization’s strategic direction in times of digital and economic disruption
• Learn best practices in negotiation techniques and develop frameworks for making sound decisions
• Become a more effective leader and discover the dynamics of interpersonal and team behavior related to organizational performance and effectiveness
• Gain the tools to think strategically and predict the impact of industry evolution to remain competitive and maintain profitability
• Develop tactical innovation tools that will help leverage outside perspectives for insights and new ideas
• Discover the fundamental principles of finance and accounting to make profitable financial decisions
• Learn how an organization can become more socially conscious through their impact in society
• Discover how artificial intelligence and analytics can be used to make smarter and more profitable business decisions Learn how to anticipate disruptive market changes and act with strategic agility
• Discover effective cybersecurity tools and the role you can play in protecting your organization from global data breaches and digital attacks.

Format and Locations

Module 1: Leadership for the Global Executive
Format: In Person
Location: Chicago Booth Gleacher Center, Chicago
Time: 5 days

Module 2: The Chicago Booth Approach to Finance
Format: Distance learning
Time Commitment: 4-6 hours/week

Module 3: Define your Leadership Style
Format: Distance learning
Time Commitment: Three 1.5 hour webinars

Module 4: Cybersecurity for Executives
Format: Distance learning
Time Commitment: 4-6 hours/week

Module 5: Becoming the Transformative Leader of the Future
Format: In Person
Location: Chicago Booth campus in London
Time: 5 days

This program is designed for skilled professionals seeking to grow their leadership and management skills as their responsibilities expand across their organization. Executives who manage a P&L and share in the responsibility of driving the strategic direction and decision-making of their unit and/or organization will benefit from this program.

This program will benefit a wide range of industries and sectors – especially those in leadership functions undergoing dynamic change. This could include, corporate executives, country heads in multinational businesses, business owners, scientists, engineers, IT professionals, lawyers, government officials, architects, and entrepreneurs. Attendees should have 10 plus years of professional work experience.

• Experiential learning, or simply known as learning by doing, is woven throughout the program. Executives will have the opportunity to visit Chicago and London-based organizations, collaborate together on teams, and engage in activities that bring concepts to life outside of the classroom.
• To reinforce the learning, participants will work on individual projects during the program that can be shared with their sponsors or, direct managers when they go back to work. The program also features group work and activities across the modules to increase collaboration and decision-making in a team environment.
• To maximize the impact and time away from work, this program includes multiple formats for learning - online, live webinars, experiential, and classroom.
• This program incorporates team activities such as dinners and social outings in London and Chicago. Participants who complete the program will become a member of the Chicago Booth community after the program ends and become a member of a GLI social network.

Additional Benefits

• The Global Leadership Institute awards a Chicago Booth certificate of completion at the completion of the program.
• Participants will receive a Chicago Booth Executive Education Global Leadership Institute digital badge upon completion of the program. This badge serves as an online credential of their accomplishment and recognition of the achievement. Badges can be shared among social networks such as LinkedIn.
• Stay connected with each other and Chicago Booth after the program ends. Certificate holders will become a part of the Booth community and will receive invitation to the Booth Economic Outlooks located throughout globe, a complimentary subscription to the Chicago Booth Review publication, and access to Executive Education private social media groups and regional networking events.

Session Descriptions

• Negotiations and Decision-Making: Learn techniques based on the latest advancements in the field of negotiation and decision strategy to enhance your influence within your organization and professional network. You’ll learn to recognize flaws in their negotiation and decision-making approach and develop frameworks for making sound decisions and negotiate effectively.
• Strategic Leader in a VUCA World: Too often, executives over-rely on the experiences and thought patterns that have been successful in the past. In a completely static environment, this might allow them to continue to make good decisions but the business environment is changing rapidly and becoming increasingly complex. In this session, executives will gain the tools to scan the business environment, seek out alternative perspectives, and consider innovative approaches.
• Choosing Leadership: Participants will explore their assumptions about leadership, management and followership; better understand the outcomes of their everyday behavioral choices and practice skill-building for executive leadership effectiveness.
• AI and New Analytic Methods: Artificial intelligence and technology can impact an organization’s decision-making to make more powerful business outcomes for your customers. With advances in machine learning, AI and other new technologies, this session will address how organizations can use data to enhance their strategic decisions to improve their ROI.
• Corporate Social Responsibility: Learn from Chicago Booth’s Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation faculty how to examine the broader social sector in which your organization operates, grow while focusing on social responsibility, and become a purpose-driven leader.
• Define your Leadership Style: In this online module, you will identify, refine and develop your leadership style by building on Booth’s distinct approach to leadership. You’ll design and implement a series of in-work experiments and analyze the results. You’ll leave with a plan to continue developing and experimenting throughout your career.
• The Chicago Booth Approach to Finance: In this online module, you’ll learn the fundamental principles of finance and accounting to become a more impactful leader and financial decision-maker. You’ll gain the frameworks to quantitatively evaluate choices and understand how these choices affect an organization’s incentives and resources.
• Cybersecurity for Executives: In this online module, you’ll learn how to play a unique role in helping your organization stay safe by learning effective cybersecurity management strategies and the role you can play in protecting their organization from global data breaches and digital attacks.

GLI is designed to offer the most learning options—with in-person, online, and experiential education. It’s a flexible formula for fast-tracking your professional development in the kind of challenging, intensive environment that has made Booth one of the top-ranked business schools in the world. GLI is composed of two non-consecutive weeks of in-person classroom education and three online, distance modules.

The program is designed so busy global leaders may continue to collaborate and network virtually with other participants and faculty members throughout the entire program. What’s more, participants will experience immersive learning with Chicago and London-based company visits, hearing from industry leaders, and learning from each other. Group and individual projects, as well as experiential learning, bring The Chicago Approach to life in the GLI program.

What past participants say about our Comprehensive Management programs:

I started to get involved in a lot of international business, and I needed formal, deeper preparation. I was interested in more than technical or finance skills—more ways to structure strategy and social behavior. On the first day the professor said, ‘We are not going to teach you what to think, but how to think.’ I didn't believe it, but it was true. I found that the balance between the case analysis and walking through structural, academic facts was important. Making decisions that way has been really helpful for me and my environment, which includes more than just my organization. It includes my community as well. One of the best things I got out of the program was a structured approach to social capital. We are citizens of big corporations, big cities and big countries. I'm engaged not just with people in my company in the U.S. but in places like China, Brazil, Colombia, and South Africa. Logging into those networks and structuring the kind of relationships I'm going to have, rather than letting them flow to what’s most convenient, is key for my success and the future of my business.

- Bernardo Valenzuela, Vice President, Global Operations, Navistar Truck Group

I head up all the divisions that interface directly with our clients—the national sales, training and deployment, enterprise, and client services teams. I just kept going up the ladder with my career accomplishments. Without my MBA, I felt a little hesitant, but this program gave me the confidence I needed...Every professor was very engaged and gave us everything they had. They took time to boil down the relevant issues specific to the class. They would look at the roster and say, 'OK, I see that I have 10 marketing execs in here and I know that you're going to get more out of this particular area, so I want to spend some extra time on that and answer your questions.

- Lori Hardwick, Executive Vice President, Advisory Services, Envestnet Asset Management

I've been a part of a couple of start-ups that were successful, and I turned around a company for a private equity firm that then was sold. I started my own business that helps start-ups and middle-market companies practice the models I’ve done successfully in the past. The Chicago Booth program helped me find gaps in my strategy that I knew I had to strengthen, add new components, and refine them. As I became more familiar with the program, what I found really interesting were the opportunities to continue that education. It was a learning continuum, not only through the Advanced Management Program, but also with the variety of organizations and networks I could plug myself into. Any time I need more information or feel I need to learn more, I have the opportunity to pursue that. There are a lot of opportunities to engage the network of folks out there in given areas. I got involved in the university, the clubs, and the roundtables and met a lot of people that way. I know they’re going to provide certain expertise that I don’t have. The discussions are challenging and innovating. They’re practitioners talking about what they've done and how they've done it, and they share a Chicago Booth background.

- Peter Wilkins, CEO, Omaxen Group

In my core class there is a real global flavor and diversity of people and their responsibilities. With a good topic discussion, you come away with as much from the dialogue and interaction between classmates as you do from the professors. The questions the students ask—and that everybody builds off—drive the professors to expand on subjects that are really applicable. And you get a combination of multiple professors, so it's fresh.

- Russell Mitchell Jr., Vice President of Technology, Armstrong Building Products , Armstrong World Industries