A school that knows “how to transform constantly” and shows itself to be “very strong in innovating its way of teaching.” Former student of Instituto de Empresa (IE) Business School in Madrid, Antonin Lainé, is full of praise for this famous school whose new tower stands tall since 2021, next to the skyscrapers of Cuatro Torres, in the northern district of the Spanish capital. At 49, this senior executive at Amazon Web Services in Paris, took the tech path thanks to the executive MBA he was able to pursue in 2012, after starting his career as a civil engineer on the TGV Tours-Bordeaux construction site for a major construction company. “It’s a somewhat unique business school, because not only does it cultivate the entrepreneurial spirit, which is not always the case, but it also does so with a humanistic approach,” he explains, before adding: “It transformed me by giving me management keys that I absolutely did not have, and by teaching me to work extremely quickly, while going to the bottom of things.” Skills that he initially used in strategy consulting at McKinsey, before joining the cloud giant.
The prestige of IE Business School, founded in 1973 and the first in the world to offer distance learning MBAs, is undeniable. Many influential figures have graduated from there, such as Maya Martinez-Davis, president of pharmaceutical laboratory GSK in the United States, Meinrad Spenger, co-founder of the telecommunications operator MÁSMÓVIL, Juan Ignacio Entrecanales, vice president of the Spanish construction group Acciona… In global rankings, the institution regularly reaches the top, making it a reference institution in higher education, especially since it has created five other branches within its premises: law, architecture, technology, political science, and humanities. Within the leadership team are prominent figures such as Pablo Isla, former head of Inditex, the parent company of Zara, and Enrico Letta, former Italian prime minister, dean of the IE School of Politics, Economics & Global Affairs. Other prominent personalities come to give lectures, such as Ana Botín, president of Santander Bank, or Ignacio Sánchez Galán, CEO of Iberdrola.
