Giovanni Magliari

The key for me was the word “change”. I was a change management specialist and in a professional transition phase myself. When a friend who had done a programme at INSEAD sent me the EMC brochure, my eyes lit up. I had a flash forward and saw myself with lots of new flow charts and frameworks for my Powerpoint presentations. I couldn’t have been more wrong!

When I finally met Prof. Roger Lehman for my interview at Frankfurt airport, I was in for a surprise. He was dressed informally and talked to me in a very conversational way. He told me a story about a participant who stood up in Module three and started shouting for Powerpoint slides. By then it was dawning on me that this EMC was the programme I had been unconsciously looking for.

Today, it makes me emotional just talking about the programme. Of course, the academic piece was great. I’ll never forget the first sessions about counter-transference and free association. And the professional network that EMC opens up is invaluable. But the methodology and the experience itself – the way the Programme Directors guided us and we guided each other – is what makes EMC special. We cried together and laughed together, but it was only afterwards that we realised the value of it.

For my part, I now have enlarged responsibilities – still in change management. But the programme changed the way I looked at change itself. I realised that change is never linear and that you can’t change others’ behaviour, unless you start with your own. I still have to decide when to switch it on, but the EMC way of thinking is in me forever.