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Decide Confidently and Lead Anywhere

The Chicago Approach is a leadership method, one that makes you more analytical, more confident, and more effective wherever you lead.

Leadership development at Booth isn’t a course you take or a credential you earn. It’s a way of thinking you can’t unlearn.

It gets built into you through the curriculum, the faculty, the people beside you, and experiences that push you further than you expected to go. Above all, The Chicago Approach™ trains you to answer questions and question answers.

That habit of mind is what turns a sharp analyst into a decisive leader, and it holds up under pressure from peers who will make you defend it.

Professor Anil Kashyap

How Chicago Booth Educates Leaders

How Chicago Booth Educates Leaders

It starts sooner than you’d expect and lasts long past graduation—from the first week of the MBA and specialized masters program experience to Executive Education for leaders already running organizations. Here’s how Booth builds it.

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The Chicago Approach to Leadership

The method that sharpens your thinking sharpens your leadership. The Chicago Approach trains you to interrogate assumptions, stress-test decisions with evidence, and defend positions that aren’t obvious.

In courses like Interpersonal Dynamics and Power and Influence in Organizations, that rigor gets applied to the human side of leading: how you read people, build influence, and make decisions that bring people with you rather than leave them behind. Booth doesn’t treat leadership as a soft skill. It builds clearer thinking and stronger leadership at the same time.

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LEAD

Leadership you practice from week one. LEAD was among the first experiential leadership programs at any top business school, and it remains one of the most distinctive. Every Booth MBA student completes it, starting in the first week. Through simulations, peer feedback, outdoor challenges, and structured reflection, you develop leadership behaviors in practice—not theory—and gather real data on how you lead and where you can grow.

Harry Davis Teaching

Harry L. Davis Center for Leadership

Where your leadership keeps developing after the classroom. Named for the legendary Booth professor whose work helped define how the field develops leaders, the Harry L. Davis Center for Leadership is a hub for leadership research, programming, and experimentation for students and alumni alike.

Students engage through speaker events, leadership labs, and programming that extends The Chicago Approach into organizational and personal leadership. For alumni, it offers ongoing ways to grow your impact—proof that Booth’s investment in your leadership doesn’t end at graduation.

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Leadership Development for Executives

Development for leaders already in the room where decisions happen. For senior leaders already running organizations, Booth’s Executive Education programs bring the same analytical, evidence-based approach that defines the MBA—built for the stakes of executive decision-making.

Programs in leadership, strategy and innovation, and AI apply The Chicago Approach to what executives face right now: building high-performing teams, deciding under uncertainty, and leading through change. 

Leadership Is a Performance Art

The art and science of leadership come together in Leadership Studio, an MBA course, and Leadership Rehearsal, a one-day program for alumni.

Dongyu Mao, MBA ’25, enrolled in Leadership Studio—a Booth course that combines The Chicago Approach with performance-based coaching—as he prepared to return to Boston Consulting Group in a new role.

“The experience helped me reconcile the tension between authenticity and adaptation, allowing my inner ensemble to grow in harmony,” he says. “I left the studio not just with tools but with a deeper sense of self that continues to guide me.”

Read Dongyu Mao’s Story

The Impact of Booth’s Leadership Education

The proof of Booth’s leadership development is in what alumni do with it.

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15K+

Booth graduates lead at the C-suite level across the world’s most influential organizations. The leaders Booth builds don’t stop at the top of the room. They run it.

15K+
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4/5

Graduating students who say Booth improved their ability to lead with confidence. Booth doesn’t wait for the promotion to make you a leader. It makes you one first.

4/5
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79%

Graduating students who say Booth improved their ability to navigate ambiguous situations. The hardest problems don’t come with instructions. Booth graduates don’t need them.

79%

Learn to Lead in Any Market

The Chicago Approach produces judgment that travels across markets, cultures, and contexts.

Booth’s EMBA students live that firsthand, taking classes across Chicago, London, and Hong Kong: leading in genuinely different business environments, adapting to different market realities, and building global leadership fluency the only way it’s really built—by doing it.

Chicago skyline

Chicago: Leading at the Center of One of the World’s Great Corporate Ecosystems

Chicago puts Booth students in direct proximity to Fortune 500 headquarters, major financial institutions, and the executives leading some of the world’s most consequential organizations. Leading in that environment teaches something specific: how to make decisions that hold up at scale—in complex organizations, with high stakes, and in rooms where the analytical standard is high. The leadership fluency you build in Chicago is fit for the biggest stages in business.

Skyline of London

London: Leading Across Cultures, Contexts, and Markets

London’s position as Europe’s financial capital—and one of the world’s most internationally diverse cities—puts Booth students in leadership situations that don’t come with a single playbook. Navigating different regulatory environments, leading teams drawn from dozens of cultures, and making decisions that work across European and global markets require a different kind of leadership adaptability. London is where that adaptability gets built, tested, and refined.

Hong Kong skyline

Hong Kong: Leading at the Gateway to the World’s Fastest-Growing Markets

Hong Kong puts Booth students at the intersection of Eastern and Western business cultures, at the gateway to mainland China, Southeast Asia, and the broader Asia–Pacific region. Leading here means developing the ability to operate in markets that are moving faster, changing more dramatically, and requiring more intellectual agility than almost anywhere else on earth. The leadership perspective you build in Hong Kong doesn’t just prepare you for Asia. It prepares you for the complexity of global business everywhere.

Leadership That Extends Beyond Business

Booth’s commitment to developing leaders extends beyond the corporate world. These programs recognize and develop students whose leadership ambitions reach into civic life, public policy, and social change, and who want a Booth education to be the foundation for that work.

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Introduce Yourself

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Find Your Program

Every Booth program develops leaders. Find the one built for where you are in your career.

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MBA Programs

Put your bold ideas into action. No matter which degree program you choose, learn from world-class faculty and join the same influential network, and the same dynamic community.


MBA Programs

Keep Exploring Why Booth

Leadership is one expression of what the Booth experience produces. Explore the others.

The Sokolov Executive MBA Program is registered under the Hong Kong Education Bureau. Registration No.: 262427. It is a matter of discretion for individual employers to recognise any qualification to which this course may lead.