The weekend MBA: The essentials of business success

Learn the fundamental tools for future-proofing your professional success during two inspiring days of keynotes, seminars and workshops.

Have you ever dreamed of studying for an MBA? Is now the time to seize a world-shaping moment of change as your opportunity to grow with new skills and knowledge? Following the sell-out success of our annual One-day MBA, we are bringing our innovative programme to a global online audience, to invite you into the same virtual lecture theatre as leading academics as they explore the latest insights into strategy, marketing, consumer behaviour and personal leadership over two high-impact days.

No matter where you are in the world, or the impact of the pandemic on your career or business, you will receive unprecedented access to content normally locked away in the ivory towers of universities at a fraction of the cost. So forget clichés about learning to live with ‘a new normal’ in business; our thought-provoking roster of academic luminaries will challenge you to strive for more than normality - and envision a better, more resilient future for yourself.

Rather than staring at a series of presentations on screen, you will participate in two intensive days that will combine hands-on workshops and keynote lectures with supplementary practical activities for you to complete after the course ends. You will also have the opportunity to engage in intimate in-conversations with some of the UK’s most innovative entrepreneurs, who teach Master of Business Administration programmes at world-leading institutions such as Imperial College Business School, Columbia University and Judge Business School.

Under their expert guidance, you will discover how to tap into your leadership potential to realign your strategy, unlock new competencies to pivot your career and reconnect with customers in a post-pandemic world - and do it all with renewed optimism and energy to tackle whatever business challenges come next.

If you’ve ever considered applying for an MBA, or want to reinvigorate and advance your professional acumen, this is an essential investment in learning the new rules of how to thrive in business.

”A wonderful day which I’d highly recommend.”

”I thought this course was fascinating, the topics were so interesting and hugely important and relevant for me, and for others I spoke to.”

This online workshop is part of our new autumn programme of digital masterclasses that we are offering. To help you go back to school with a fresh perspective, we are offering a very limited supply of introductory tickets for each event, discounted up to 20% - once they’re gone, they’re gone!

Course content

• Transforming your business strategy: Professor George Yip from Imperial College Business School will offer his latest research on how to make radical changes to a company’s business model.
• Adapting your marketing strategy: Professor Jaideep Prabhu from the University of Cambridge will discuss the importance of building your business strategy with marketing and branding at its centre.
• Personal leadership and behaviour modification: Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic from University College London and Columbia University will be talking about personal leadership, taking a positive look at what you can do to survive and thrive as a leader in the coming months.
• Responsible investment to build back better after a crisis: Professor Alex Edmans from the London Business School will lead a lecture in what it means to be a responsible business in this time of crisis. Rather than approaching responsibility in business as fluffy or vague, he will tackle it in a rigorous and commercial way – demonstrating how and why responsibility is not just ‘worthy’, but also simply good business. He will offer practical, evidence-based to-dos to help you build your business back better.
• Using scenario thinking to improve strategic business decision making: Professor George Wright from Strathclyde Business School will cover the essential principles of decision making analysis for business leaders and entrepreneurs.
• The big themes facing business in the present day: Dan Roberts, former business editor of The Guardian, will introduce and explore the greatest challenges facing business today, from Covid-19 and Brexit to the past of technological change and ESG (environmental, social and governance) disclosure.
• After hours Q&A: Tessa Clarke, the founder and CEO of OLIO, will be joining us on the final day to discuss her experiences starting her own business after completing an MBA at Stanford University, including what she wished she’d known and the challenges she faced. Handpicked by Meghan Markle as a “force for change” in Vogue, she will be imparting valuable advice and answering your questions.
• Other speakers and topics to be announced very soon.

Please note that this is not an accredited course.

Host profile

• Nathalie Nahai is an international speaker and the author of the bestselling book, Webs of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion. Her work explores the intersection between persuasive technology, ethics and the psychology of behaviour, and her clients include Google, PwC, Unilever and Harvard Business Review. She speaks on the psychological dynamics behind consumer behaviour, teaching people how to ethically apply behavioural science principles to enhance their website, content marketing, product design and customer experience. A member of the BIMA Human Insights Council, she also hosts The Hive Podcast, Seeking the Self and several Guardian podcasts.

Tutor profiles

• George Yip is a professor of marketing and strategy at Imperial College Business School. He serves on the editorial advisory board of MIT Sloan Management Review, and has held business positions at companies including Unilever and PwC. View his academic profile here.
• Jaideep Prabhu is professor of marketing and Jawaharlal Nehru professor of Indian business at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. He has published in leading academic journals and his work has been profiled by the BBC, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, The Economist, The Financial Times, Le Monde, The New York Times, and The Times. He is the co-author of Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth, described by The Economist as “the most comprehensive book yet” on the subject of frugal innovation. His most recent book, Frugal Innovation, was published in February 2015 and won the CMI’s Management Book of the Year Award 2016.
• Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is an organisational psychologist with an international authority in psychological profiling, talent management, leadership development and people analytics. The author of 10 books and over 150 scientific papers, he is currently the chief talent scientist at ManpowerGroup, co-founder of DeeperSignals and Metaprofiling, and professor of business psychology at University College London and Columbia University. Previously he has held academic positions at New York University and the London School of Economics, and he frequently lectures at Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School, London Business School, and IMD.
• Alex Edmans is professor of Finance at London Business School. He has a PhD from MIT as a Fulbright Scholar, and was previously a tenured professor at Wharton and an investment banker at Morgan Stanley. He has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, testified in the UK Parliament, and given the TED talk What to Trust in a Post-Truth World and the TEDx talk The Social Responsibility of Business with a combined 2m views. He serves as Mercers School Memorial Professor of Business at Gresham College, giving a series of lectures to the public, and on Royal London Asset Management’s Responsible Investment Advisory Committee. His book, Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit, headed the Financial Times list of Business Books of the Month for March 2020 and was featured in the FT’s Summer Books of 2020. He has been named to Poets and Quants Best 40 Professors Under 40 and Thinkers50 Radar.
• George Wright is professor of Management Science at Strathclyde Business School, and founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Behavioural Decision Making. He is the author of Scenario Thinking Preparing your organization for the future in an unpredictable world (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and he researches on the role and quality of judgment in decision making and in anticipating the future. His consultancy activity is focused on scenario thinking. View his academic profile here.
• Dan Roberts is a former business editor of The Guardian, where he spent 10 years in roles that also included Brexit policy editor, Washington bureau chief and head of national news in the UK. Prior to that he spent 15 years as a business journalist at the Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, Birmingham Post and Yorkshire Evening Press. Currently he works as a partner at the strategic advisory firm Brunswick, where he advises companies in the public eye on a range of financial, political and social challenges. He is a graduate of York University and lives in North London.
• Tessa Clarke is the founder and CEO of OLIO, the world’s first neighbour-to-neighbour food sharing app, which is solving the problem of household food waste at scale. OLIO has grown to over 2m users in just over four years and its impact has been widely recognised, most notably by the United Nations who highlighted OLIO as a “beacon” for the world, and by Vivatech who awarded OLIO “Next European Unicorn”. Tessa met her co-founder Saasha Celestial-One while they were studying for their MBAs at Stanford. She is passionate about the sharing economy as a solution for a sustainable world, and about “profit with purpose” as the next business paradigm.

You will be sent a link to the webinar 1hr before the start time of 2.30pm (BST).

This masterclass is available globally. If you are joining us from outside the United Kingdom, please use this time zone converter to check your local live streaming time.

2.30pm BST | 3.30pm CEST | 6.30am PDT | 9.30am EDT

All Guardian Masterclasses are fully accessible but please contact us at masterclasses@theguardian.com if you have any queries or concerns.

Full course and returns information on the Masterclasses website