TRIUM students and alumni celebrate during a program event. The 18-month Global Executive MBA brings together senior leaders from around the world, fostering a tight-knit, international network that extends well beyond graduation. The program is entering its 25th year.
In 2001, the world seemed poised for a second phase of globalization. The Cold War had ended a decade earlier, and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization opened the door for companies to build supply chains stretching from Chinese factories to European assembly lines to North American R&D labs and marketing teams.
That same year, the TRIUM Global Executive MBA enrolled its first cohort. It was the first EMBA, and one of the few business programs anywhere, to weave geopolitics so directly into core business education. A partnership between NYU Stern, the London School of Economics (LSE), and HEC Paris, the program was designed to prepare executives for a golden age of global integration, with goods and services flowing freely across borders.
Students had just begun their first classes in London. Three days later, two planes struck the Twin Towers in New York.
“Our mission, which is to embed geopolitics and political economy in the business school curriculum, I think, was validated on day three of the first module,” says Robert Falkner, TRIUM academic director and a professor of international relations at LSE.
“Clearly this was a reminder that the world of conflict, the world of nationalism, the world of ideology, hadn’t disappeared.”
As TRIUM prepares to mark its 25th anniversary, its vision feels as relevant as ever. What began as an experiment in combining business education with geopolitical literacy has become a framework for training global leaders to navigate a fractured, fast-changing world.
From its inception, TRIUM was a different kind of EMBA. It was the first to leverage the distinct expertise of three premier universities –two world-class business schools and one of the world’s foremost institutions for social sciences and economics.
Robert Falkner, TRIUM academic director
“Most partnerships have one dominant partner and a junior partner. The dominant culture then prevails,” says Falkner. “What we try to do in TRIUM is take the best bits of each of the three partners and then make it into something that’s quite unique, that’s a TRIUM experience.”
It was also among the first to teach the business risks of climate change, a course Falkner introduced in 2008 when few B-schools took the issue seriously.
Today, it consistently ranks among the world’s top Executive MBA programs. It placed No. 6 in the Financial Times’ 2025 executive MBA ranking and No. 5 in 2024, with particularly strong marks for international course experience and alumni outcomes.
Over 18 months, students travel to six cities across four continents. They spend about 10 weeks out of the office in total, but the experience is immersive.
The first three modules, each lasting two weeks, build the foundation at the partner schools. At LSE in London, students examine international relations, conflict, and cooperation through political science and economics. At Stern in New York, they study finance, data analytics, risk, and leadership just steps away from Wall Street. And in Paris, HEC faculty teach strategy implementation, marketing, operations, and innovation.
The final three modules focus on advanced topics hand-picked by TRIUM leadership in relevant and innovative cities. Recent cohorts have traveled to Seoul to study technology and entrepreneurship in Asia including the innovation ecosystems of China, Japan, and South Korea.
Max Nikolaev, TRIUM Global Executive MBA Class of 2022, outside the London School of Economics during the program’s first module.
This November, TRIUM will launch its first African module in Nairobi, Kenya. Students will study emerging economies, sustainability, and renewable energy in a country that runs almost entirely on green power. African faculty, local entrepreneurs, and alumni will help lead the teaching, paired with on-the-ground experiences to give students a deeper understanding of the region.
The program concludes in Dubai with a leadership module and a look at the UAE’s emergence as a global finance hub. There, student teams also present their capstone projects they’ve been working on the last 18 months. Teams can choose one of three paths for their projects – launching a startup, restructuring an existing enterprise, or creating a social venture.
For alumni like Max Nikolaev, the lessons are not merely theoretical.
Nikolaev grew up in the Siberian arctic and worked for two decades in energy, chemicals and advanced materials. He is now based in Houston and is the chief commercial officer at CARBO, a company that manufactures ceramic particles for the oil and gas industry. He graduated from TRIUM in 2022.
“TRIUM’s approach has remained relevant because it was built for interdependence. As supply chains, data, and policy become more entangled, leaders need fluency across markets, institutions, and cultures, not just balance sheets,” he tells Poets&Quants. “TRIUM’s cross-university, cross-region DNA anticipated that world.”
Since graduation, he has made geopolitics an operating input, not just background noise. Each year, his team runs “war games” on likely shocks like tariffs, canal closures, sanctions, or currency swings. They create playbooks on who to buy from next, how to reroute, how to price, and what to pause.
“We tied those playbooks to early-warning indicators and clear decision rights so we can act in days, not quarters,” he says. “The aim is simple: protect customer uptime, keep cost-to-serve predictable, and invest where the rules are moving in our favor.”
A big differentiator for TRIUM is the level of experience it attracts.
“We’ve been quite consistent in attracting what we would describe as the most senior business leader cohort of all the EMBA programs,” Falkner says. The Class of 2027, for example, has an average 16 years of work experience across its 50 students. They come from 39 countries and from 20 different business sectors.
In the early days, most students came from North America and Europe, reflecting the globalization story of the time. Now they come from Mongolia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. These executives are no longer necessarily looking to join Western firms, but to expand and globalize their own companies.
TRIUM alumni belong to the networks of NYU Stern, LSE, and HEC Paris, but the program now has its own powerful network of 1,300 graduates spread across 24 cohorts.
“It’s a very small, but a very high-level network. You have people who joined the program 20 years ago who are now in leading positions. The young ones particularly value that senior alumni community. They get access to companies that they wouldn’t otherwise get,” Falkner says.
“All you need to do is put in the alumni WhatsApp group, ‘I’m going to be in Singapore next week,’ and within 10 minutes you have five messages saying, ‘Hey, let’s go for a drink … I know exactly who you need to meet.’”
Two years ago, three Azeri students joined TRIUM for the first time. Azerbaijan, buoyed by oil and gas wealth, was pushing its companies beyond local borders. These students came to TRIUM to learn how to attract investment and build relationships with French, American, and other global partners.
Mary Buchzeiger, TRIUM EMBA ’23
In June 2024, nearly 100 TRIUM alumni gathered in Baku, Azerbaijan, for one of the program’s largest ever reunions. The event featured the governor of the Central Bank of Azerbaijan and a TRIUM student now leading the country’s telecom business. More importantly, alumni connected with each other in a region many had never done business before.
The global network was the most valuable TRIUM feature for Class of 2023 alumni Mary Buchzeiger.
“If I have a question about a market or need an introduction in a country, I can pick up the phone and call a TRIUM friend in that region. It’s amazing to know I have trusted contacts virtually everywhere,” she tells P&Q. “Having that global brain trust to tap into makes facing complex challenges so much less daunting.”
Buchzeiger was already a seasoned CEO when she joined in 2021. She had taken over her father’s automotive company, Lucerne International, expanded it into Asia, and weathered the offshoring boom of the early 2000s. But the tariff wars of 2018 exposed blind spots.
“It became painfully clear that geopolitical forces could upend even the best business strategy.”
Now, a new round of Trump tariffs and supply chain disruptions pushed her to launch a new venture to help companies navigate the volatility. She credits TRIUM with giving her the confidence to launch, and the foresight to scan for global risks rather than react to them.
On September 6, the TRIUM Global Executive MBA Class of 2025 was awarded their degree certificate in a graduation ceremony and celebrated with family and friends.
Falkner attributes part of TRIUM’s endurance to the differences between its partners. LSE is not a business school, bringing deep expertise in political economy and global affairs. HEC Paris and NYU Stern bring their strengths in strategy, operations, finance, and leadership.
“TRIUM always offers that radically global perspective on EMBA training. I don’t think any individual business school can do that in the way that a three-way partnership can,” he says.
As it enters its next quarter century, TRIUM is doubling down on in-person immersion while layering in new content on AI and ESG. Faculty are working across the three schools to teach both how AI will transform business models and how it can be used in teaching and learning. Sustainability, climate change, and social impact are also woven throughout the updated curriculum.
Falkner begins the first class of Module 1 with globalization, but the name of the course has changed.
“It used to be called, I think, ‘Globalization: What is it?’ Everyone gets that now,” he says. “So now the course is called ‘The Political Economy of [De]globalization.”
The question today is whether the world is truly de-globalizing or simply slowing down. Falkner calls it “slowbalization,” a slowdown and fragmentation into regional clusters.
What will happen in the next five to 10 years is anybody’s guess. That uncertainty will likely keep TRIUM’s brand of EMBA in business.
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