The perfect school for you

Philip Cardamone had been with Brainlab, a boutique medical company, for 12 years when he decided he needed to do an AMP. “As the company grew, I realised that it had been a long time since I had been to school. We were achieving targets alright, but were we doing the right things for our people and organisation?” says Cardamone, now vice president (Asia Pacific), Brainlab.

But there was one catch. He was heading the company’s Asia-Pacific operations, and could not afford to go away for several weeks. He needed something that he could complete at his own pace.

He finally chose the programme offered by University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. The course has three core modules and three electives. The core modules are held in Chicago in September, March and the final one in September the following year. The electives are also held at different times of the year. These are regular open enrolment executive development programmes. You can choose the one most relevant to you — Finance for Executives, M&As and High Performance Leadership among others. You can extend your course to the next year as well.

There is a reason why Chicago Booth designed its AMP to be flexible. For one, it is very difficult for companies to send someone away for anything beyond two weeks at a stretch; two, if a CFO goes to an AMP and spends time learning how to calculate the net present value, that’s a waste of time.

There’s another benefit of this structure. “Our brains have a limitation of cognition and absorbing. So the programme structure allows participants to go back and reflect on what they have learnt, apply it in their organisation and come back and discuss that in class,” says Paula Beckmann, senior associate director, Executive Education at Chicago Booth.

The downside, of course, is the additional cost. Says Cardamone, “I am based in Australia and for me to fly to the US six times costs more than the course!”