The EMBA programme structure

The Cambridge Executive MBA, is a 20-month degree programme for senior executives. The programme format has been designed to fit with the schedules of busy executives, so you don’t need to spend significant time away from your place of work. It is delivered over 16 weekends and four blocks, three week-long blocks, and one four-day block.

Core courses

The programme comprises core courses designed to ensure you understand the role of different business disciplines required to run an organisation and are familiar with their key tools and methodologies, appreciate the way in which they operate in the wider organisational context, and are fully conversant with the language and terminology they use. In addition to the core courses, are electives designed to enable you to focus on areas of particular interest. Participants each choose two electives. Subjects vary year by year and are chosen to best represent the interests of the cohort.

Electives

The elective week runs for four days, starting on a Wednesday and running through to Saturday. After graduation, we offer our alumni the opportunity to return to Cambridge each year to undertake an elective, free of charge, alongside current participants. In most cases, participants have an ongoing commitment to their current organisation and employer and receive support from them. With this in mind, the focus for career development is placed on personal professional development, rather than traditional career services.

Personal and professional development

The Personal & Professional Development programme provides an opportunity to expand your self-awareness and develop your business skills. As part of the PPD, we offer a personalised executive coaching programme. Each participant has their own personal coach to help develop them in an area of their own choosing.

Orientation Week

Orientation Week takes place in September, at the start of the programme and does an intensive introduction to all aspects of the programme. It gives you a chance to settle back into the academic mindset and to start to get to know fellow participants. The international business study trip has been designed so that learning takes place in situ. The trip combines formal lectures, case studies, and structured discussion with local practitioners, experts, and on-site visits. The class meets local business leaders and government officials and visits leading domestic and international organisations to understand at firsthand the varied responses to globalisation.

Collaboration and networking

Collaboration and networking are essential components of the programme. Throughout the course, there are a number of opportunities for group work. And groups are changed around, so that participants have the opportunity to work with different members of the class.

Team Consulting Project

The Team Consulting Project requires you to work as a consulting team for a client of your choice. It can cover any aspect of business and may be located in any commercial, industrial, public sector, or not-for-profit organisation anywhere in the world. The individual project may be on any aspect of business or management. The project should engage with an issue of practical management concern and include a critical analysis of the relevant professional and academic literature. It’s a chance to delve deeper into a subject you feel passionate about.

Virtual learning environment (VLE)

The virtual learning environment is a web-based platform that enables you to continue learning while you are away from Cambridge. Prior to the start of each term, the study materials for each course will be available on the VLE. Participants use the VLE to post general inquiries, announcements, and observations, and their classmates benefit from seeing these and sharing their responses. It is compulsory to attend all the credited courses, whether they are assessed or not. A variety of assessment methods are used during the programme, including formal university written exams, individual and group written assignments, group and individual presentations, and in-class tests.

Weekend learning

Participants arrive in Cambridge to start class at 10:00 on Friday. Lunch is an opportunity to catch up and network with classmates. Classes begin again in the afternoon and continue until 19:00 Once a term, participants go to one of Cambridge University’s 31 Colleges for drinks and dinner.

At dinner, you will hear from the speaker, either a leadership in action speaker who focuses on the challenges, triumphs, and lessons of running organisations, or a practitioner insight speaker, who shares his/her experience of specific areas of business, such as marketing or finance. Classes begin again at 8:30 AM on Saturday morning and continue through to 17:45.

Participants return home on Saturday evening, ready to apply what they’ve learned over the weekend to their work the following week. The Cambridge EMBA; see where it takes you.

[MUSIC PLAYING] Cambridge is an incredibly special place in the UK. I think it’s an incredibly special place on the world stage. It’s one of a very small number of places and, obviously, Silicon Valley being the original example, that can claim to be a technology cluster or a business cluster with a straight face.

It’s got that critical mass of technical academic expertise, which is often the source of the ideas. Yeah, you can build great businesses on the back of just being good at business. But the wonderful thing about the business is that grad of Cambridge is, often, they have at their heart some sort of kernel of real cleverness.

You don’t just have the clever. You don’t just have the clever thing. You have the clever thing. And then you drop that into an environment, and then things crystallise. It’s like kind of crystallising a cloud.

You drop this little crystal in. And then all of this accumulated capital, accumulated business expertise, the accumulated connections required to take a good idea and bring it to scale, those are the things that Cambridge offers. And those are the things, I think, it’s very hard to find almost anywhere else in the world.

The Cambridge educational experience is unique because it’s not just about being in the classroom. It’s being part of a collaborative community. So we believe that many of our EMBA participants really learn a lot from each other. So a lot of that collaboration, a lot about learning from each other, so it’s about taking what they learn here back into the workplace but also taking what their experience in the workplace back here and sharing with their colleagues.

Cambridge has produced them over 108 Nobel Prize winners over the years. We have a great business school. And obviously, our students and participants are part of a great institution, where the learning process is very natural. We can always link business ideas to a whole range of different topics.

My background is in finance and investment banking. And in 2005, I started my own company. Later, I engaged in a total of 11 startup companies as a founder or a co-founder. Currently serve as CEO for one of those companies,

Judge Business School and the MBA present a valuable laboratory, where ideas and initiatives can be discussed and challenged and sharpened and potentially develop into companies. This presents a very, very valuable access to knowledge, to the network, and to really enhance my companies.

We met before the course at one of the open events. We both worked in technology innovation. During the course, we kind of realised there was a real opportunity to do a new type of innovation consulting firm. Shortly after the course, we’ve decided to talk quite seriously about it and then started Catalyst Corporation, which is our new innovation consultancy.

With Catalyst, we’ve tried to form a new form of innovation consultancy. What we’d seen in our background working on innovation is, although a lot of innovations were successful, quite a lot of companies either lose all their creativity when they’ve come to deliver, or you have some really exceptional, great creative ideas that don’t ever make it to market. What we realised is if we couple great creativity with some serious analytical business thinking, we can help ensure that companies have innovations that work and will deliver them value.

The Judge Executive MBA starts with a week in Cambridge in September. The course itself is on a Friday and a Saturday each month, where we all get together in Cambridge to study and learn together. Obviously, in between the monthly weekends, there’s personal study that you need to do in your own time, which is around reading, using a virtual learning environment, group exercises, and discussions with your course mates about the material that we’re studying.

So I had a tiny baby when I started the course. Managing the workload whilst also looking after a very small baby was quite challenging. But I managed to find balance asking for help from my family. And now that she’s a little bit older, I’ve got into a rhythm of studying for a couple of hours every evening after she’s gone to bed. For me, that kind of work/life balance works really well.

So it’s really hard to point to one part of the company that hasn’t been influenced either partially or significantly by the EMBA. Obviously, we’re a consultant. So we work across a range of functional disciplines.

And the EMBA content really reflects that. So that’s from practical things, like the things we learned from management and accounting and finance, to particularly looking at the management of working capital and financial planning and financial structure of the business. And the other things that were really useful are the softer skills, management practise, organisational behaviour courses. They gave us an opportunity to be really conscious about designing the culture of the type of company that we wanted to own and work in.

Often, what I do is I pick an elective that is going to grow my current career. So for example I would pick an elective about disruptive innovation or fast strategy, which really helped me grow my role in innovation within my sector, which is satellite communication. And then I would pick other electives that are, for example, how to be an effective board director and without knowing how it is going to impact my career.

And surprisingly, fast forward 12 months later, I am now a board member. Sometimes when you stretch your goals and you explore new areas, you open your horizons. And you never know what’s going to come afterwards.

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