A Six-Month Reflection
I’m sitting next to a river writing this blog, the gentle burble of mountain water rushing carelessly on. A bottle of wine sits chilling in the glacial waters. Landjaeger and apricots (my favorite Swiss snacks) sit within reach. And I can’t help but feel like a very different person today than I was in February when I wrote my first blog for the IMD MBA.
There’s a saying that you become like the people you spend time with. It should be unsurprising, then, that the immersive learning at IMD has led me to grow so close to my colleagues in the MBA. And, in turn, led me to become more like those around me.
The people around me have sharpened my thinking, shown me my blind spots, and held me accountable to my goals. And I hope that says as much about my colleagues as it does about me.
The pace of work at IMD has been relentless. I’ve spent over 200 hours networking over the past few months and taken 15 exams in all manner of subjects: accounting, finance, entrepreneurship, sustainability, and many more. I’ve worked across almost a dozen teams collaborating on projects, delivering presentations, and strategizing for startups. And across all these experiences, I only feel my momentum growing as learning begets reflection begets growth.
Company visit to J.P. Morgan the day before flying to Singapore.
Despite the relentless sprint of the program, I’m finding my rhythm—one that I think will last well beyond my time at IMD. My cadence alternates between speeding up and slowing down, diverging and converging, looking inwards to reflect and outwards to my teams for feedback. And at this moment, I’m sitting next to the river to reflect on the Singapore Future Lab.
The Future Lab
After six months at IMD Switzerland, the entire MBA cohort packed up and flew to Singapore for a month of immersive learning about technology.
Everyone expects an AI deep dive to be about technology; it turns out it’s really about people.
This year at IMD I have been tirelessly experimenting with AI integration. I’ve used AI as a sparring partner, an editor, a financial consultant, a tutor, a teammate, and a psychoanalyst: the use cases seem endless. Despite this experimentation, the Future Lab module was the first time I truly grasped the significant impact that AI can have when properly understood.
Our shared learning in Switzerland gave rise to a common language in Singapore—enabling a rich and complex discourse about all things AI.
Our initial discussions were wide-ranging: we interrogated the difference between probabilistic and deterministic outputs, scrutinized data center infrastructure as a lever for geopolitical power, evaluated energy policy as AI policy, and became intimately familiar with the numerous chokepoints of the global AI economy. But perhaps the most enriching aspect of the Future Lab was the conversations I had with my peers.
The Vibe-Coding Workshop
A week of classroom learning culminated in one of my favorite workshops so far: vibe-coding. First, we were armed with just enough knowledge to build using Claude Code. Then every single member of the IMD MBA set to work designing, building, and delivering a fully functional AI tool by the end of the day. With my background in design thinking I was not surprised to enjoy the build process. But I was surprised by the part I loved most: doing it together, in one room, and seeing all eighty-eight MBAs get swept into the frustratingly addictive process of building something new.
Technical skills are not the focus of an IMD MBA. So, after months of studying leadership theory and team dynamics, this workshop reconnected me to the joy of obsessing over product design.
Authoring something new requires giving a bit of myself. In doing so, I expose this part of myself to the world. And everyone in that workshop gave something from themselves to the AI tool they created. I saw new sides of colleagues who I was already deeply familiar with, and it has reiterated one of the greatest lessons from IMD:
There are always new angles to discover: in ourselves, our people, and even the things we most know.
From language learning tools to fertility diagnostics, the ideas were as diverse and brilliant as the people in the cohort.
My project, benchmarkai, was inspired by a comment from our AI professor, Amit Joshi, about competitive intelligence. When it comes to AI integration, everyone wants to know what everyone else is doing. This question prompted me to deep dive on market signals and value creation—building a tool to decipher AI activity in the market (and it brought out the nerd in me!). benchmarkai generates real-time reports on AI integration in a company, and places it against competitor firms. Read the full article I wrote on LinkedIn.
The cover photo of an article I wrote about benchmarkai.
Bridging technical literacy with leadership skills makes the IMD MBA unique. We constantly practice learning quickly, leading people, and synthesizing cross-functional ideas with imperfect information. The entire workshop highlighted a clear takeaway about technology: AI potential is realized through leading people and mobilizing organizations.
A Weekend in Borneo
For two weeks we built agents, vibe-coded, cleaned data and built models with AI. The rapid pace of learning, failure, and success was both exhilarating and exhausting. In the middle of the Future Lab, we received a very welcome long weekend. True to a group of MBAs, almost everyone headed to the beach!
After six months spent in the dungeons at IMD, giving “kind” feedback, and psychoanalyzing ourselves and our peers, I’ve developed many lifelong friendships. This made it even more special to travel to Borneo with the promise of sandy beaches, jungle hiking, and orangutans.
Dinner in Borneo.
Highlights of the trip included sunset golf, visiting a sea turtle hatching site with our diving guide, Eng, and our family dinners. I don’t talk enough about family meals, but it’s something special to sit down at a table with friends to eat, drink, and laugh. Whether at IMD for lunch or in Borneo over a bowl of Laksa, these memories are the ones that will last with me long after the program. And these are the experiences that teach me more than any academic project (even though the vibe-coding workshop was fun…!).
Henry Dalby is part of our 2026 MBA class.
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