News

Unilever Chooses Darden for Emerging Market Growth

26 May 2009

The Darden School of Business is delivering a custom Executive Education program for Unilever to train its senior executives from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (RUB).

Unilever, a major, multinational manufacturer of food, home care and personal products, chose Darden to deliver the custom program, designed to develop leaders who can accelerate high growth in emerging markets around the globe.

“Darden understands the unique challenges of growth in emerging markets and can design highly customized learning experiences for global clients like Unilever who are attempting to accelerate their growth in these regions,” said Lou Centini, senior director ofDarden Executive Education .

The five-module program, which launched in fall 2008, will be delivered to Unilever RUB’s managers through 2010 in Moscow, Charlottesville, London and Beijing. The Beijing module in 2010 will take place at Darden partner school Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business. The module will combine business school training, company tours and meetings with Chinese managers to demonstrate to participants how the program’s lessons can be applied to different settings.

“We are providing Unilever with a broad, integrated experience,” said Darden Professor Anton Ovchinnikov, originally from Russia, who is the program’s faculty leader. “A major challenge in a high-growth, emerging market like Russia is to develop and retain talent.”

Ludmila Tsatskina, leadership development manager and part of Unilever’s European leadership team, says that Unilever selected Darden to provide the program because of the School’s unique ability to teach the “necessary management tools, not just classroom theory. We needed an action-oriented, flexible program that could provide solutions for our high-growth company,” she said.

Unilever currently has a double digit growth rate in RUB, which is expected to increase significantly – despite the global financial crisis – in part as a result of the Darden program. The program includes courses on strategic decision-making, supply chain management, finance, marketing, global economy and leading growth.

The next module will occur in Moscow in the fall of 2009. In between each module, the participants are working – in collaboration with Darden faculty – on real-time problems presented to them by the Unilever RUB board and CEO.

See Darden Executive Education Profile pages