A Pioneering Approach to Business Education

The London Interdisciplinary School (LIS) is shaking up the business education landscape in the United Kingdom. Pioneering a new approach to higher education, this school has designed an MBA program that equips students to develop their own unique leadership style while learning how to solve the most pressing problems of the 21st Century. 

The World Economic Forum called the London Interdisciplinary School an “innovative new concept in higher education.” The Times named it “The most radical, new university to open in decades.” 

LIS Chief Executive Ed Fidoe shares the ideas behind their groundbreaking MBA and tells us why accreditation means nothing when you’re recruiting talent from the world’s most prestigious universities.

Why Traditional MBAs Are Failing to Prepare Leaders For Today’s Biggest Challenges

Ever since his time working at McKinsey in his late twenties, Ed had wondered about the effectiveness of MBAs. Having spoken to people who studied at institutions like Stanford, Harvard, and London Business School, he realized something was missing from the traditional MBA experience. 

“We’ve really unearthed what we think that is now,” he explains. “MBAs are very focused on analysis, not synthesis. They’re focused around the edges of the core part of a business, rather than on that core.” (00:34)

For Ed, academics often claim they have all the answers, instead of looking to the very businesses their students go on to work for. And so LIS looked inward, asking themselves how they could make a genuine difference for modern companies.

The LIS MBA’s Six Major Shifts in Today’s World

Leaders have always needed to understand the world around them. But in this tech-driven world, a firm grasp of the modern climate is more crucial than ever. That’s why the LIS MBA focuses on six key shifts that they believe define modern business: complexity, intelligence, energy, ecosystems, trust, and longevity. 

“These are things that have been changing and shifting for decades,” says Ed. “Think about the shift of intelligence and how we use machines. Human intelligence and how it interacts with artificial intelligence. This is a shift that is hugely important.” (01:37)

Modern businesses will look for leaders who can understand these shifts. Not just individually, but also how they interact with one another. The LIS MBA aims to provide this unusual blend of skills to prepare leaders who can make a genuine difference. 

The Power of Systems Thinking

Ed’s opinion is that MBAs can be quite dismissive of the dynamics of modern business problem-solving. “Reductive problem solving can be really useful… for some problems. Where it’s less useful is where that problem is part of a complex system,” he explains. (02:11)

Key elements of a systems-thinking approach include cause and effect, the interconnected nature of problems, and the unintended consequences of solutions. With the LIS MBA, students learn to overcome this blind spot by developing the ability to hone in on every aspect of their decision-making and see the broader implications with clarity.

From Ed’s perspective, failing to understand the importance of this kind of forward-thinking approach is where traditional business school curricula have fallen short. 

How Foresight and Synthesis Can Change the World

Ed promotes foresight as a valuable quality for leadership. While we can’t predict exactly what the future holds, we can gain a better understanding of ways to analyze the past and present to help inform the path ahead.

“If you think about how case studies work, they are, by definition, backwards-looking,” says Ed. “They’re really useful for pattern recognition, but they are a little bit like a language learning model. They help form judgements about the future, but they can’t construct new ideas or look at existing trends and make predictions about where they may get to and how they’re going to interact with each other.” (05:23)

The LIS MBA aims to equip leaders with the tools to build foresight. To be able to synthesize different ideas, analyze global shifts, and examine how they will interact with one another. It’s this foresight and synthesis that have led to some of the biggest successes in the 20th century. Google, for example, comes from an understanding of how data will be organized and the trend towards digital global connection. Tesla comes from an understanding of the shift towards electric vehicles and clean energy.

For the team at LIS, it’s not just about thinking about solutions to future problems. It’s about understanding where opportunities will arise and how to take advantage of them.

A Truly Disruptive MBA That’s Rewriting the Educational Playbook

Ed believes the outdated nature of traditional MBAs makes LIS an outlier. And while the established accreditation bodies are a hallmark of quality, this is a school that breaks the mold in more ways than one, providing a high-value credential.

“We’re not interested in being recognized by the normal [MBA] accreditation bodies,” Ed says. “In fact, if those bodies approved us, we’d probably not be disruptive enough. What we care about is being recognized by the employers; the organizations that we are working with directly, and that the students will be working with afterwards.” (09:18)

The proof, he says, is in the quality of people who are being drawn to this groundbreaking institution.

“We’re recruiting academics from MIT, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, LSC, UCL. [These are] top academics who have been in institutions which are highly recognized in all kinds of ways.” (09:40)

Ultimately, Ed believes that the LIS MBA will demonstrate its worth when its graduates go on to achieve extraordinary things.

In the Company of Brilliant People

The most surprising thing you’ll encounter during the LIS MBA program? The diversity of people and the exchange of ideas you’ll experience on campus.

As Ed explains, “You bump into a theoretical physicist, you have one conversation. Then you walk round the corner and there’s an anthropologist or an artist. The range of different conversations that you have and that you witness people having with each other is completely extraordinary.” (10:15) 

An MBA taught by polymaths, attended by highly experienced business leaders, culminates in a powerful incubator of critical minds and methods. It’s this meeting of diverse minds and the broadening of your horizons that makes the LIS MBA experience truly unique.   

Want to study at the London Interdisciplinary School? Take our eligibility quiz to see if you qualify!