Like a Great Opera

"A way to make SDA Bocconi recognizable to the world? Drawing inspiration from Aida". Yes, Giuseppe Verdi's operatic masterpiece. And if for Bruno Busacca and his team it was above all an acronym aimed at enhancing the strengths of the management school (Ambidexterity, Internationalization, Development, Accountability), the choice of the acronym was inspirational rather than happenstance, as it was based on an excellence of Italian culture. "Indeed, the various accreditors who had to evaluate us really liked it."
Busacca was Dean of SDA Bocconi School of Management from 2012 to 2016, and like all those who preceded him and followed him, he inherited a mission: "To value the great work done by those who directed the School before me and hand an even better business school to my successor. The period in which Busacca was at the reins of the School was not, however, the easiest: "These were the years that followed the great international economic crisis caused by Lehman Bros, with companies reluctant to invest. This forced us, especially at the beginning, to make great imaginative efforts to attract students to our courses. But we got through it well. The secret? Knowing how to provide such a diversified offer of programs that, despite the crisis, we inevitably had the right product for everyone".
And quality, it is worth adding. Because Bruno Busacca oversaw confirmation of the coveted goal that SDA had reached in previous years, the so-called Triple Crown. "This is the accreditation received by the three main bodies for executive education", explains Busacca, "Equis, AMBA and AACSB. An honor that is attributed to just over 50 business schools in the world and which was the result of our rapid ascent in the most prestigious international rankings. But it is also a burden because it meant greater responsibility."

There are many prestigious personalities who passed through the classrooms of SDA, along with the events related to them during the years of his tenure as Dean. Busacca remembers three in particular: "Andrea Illy and our long chats when he was president of Altagamma, but also Jean-Michel Blanquer, then president of ESSEC but then also Minister of National Education in the French government, with whom we launched the Executive Master in Luxury Management, an itinerant program with modules in various cities around the world. Finally," continues Busacca, "a memory that still makes me smile is when the then managing director Bruno Pavesi and I were feverishly reviewing the minutiae of protocol while awaiting the arrival of the Norwegian royals".

The future of executive training will be marked by change, a change somewhat accelerated by the pandemic but which could be glimpsed even before then. Busacca imagines it this way: "More and more, a hybrid and integrated teaching model will be adopted, with the aim of maintaining interaction in the classroom only for high-value activities, such as business experiments. Another large area will be that of life-long learning, the continuous development of skills starting from undergraduate studies, with the involvement of alumni and corporations, who will have to tell us what they want from us. The School will have to guide students towards the challenges of the future."