Max Noble
Max Noble · The School

The School.

Two classrooms. One method. The same question every week: is this a good business?

Friday afternoon in Copenhagen. A room of experienced leaders open their own company’s accounts and look for the moment things could start to go wrong. Earlier that week, a class of business students did the same with LEGO. Everything you read on Max Noble is tested here first, on people who are allowed to argue back.

The Executive MBA HHX
The method

One tool at a time, until the whole picture stands.

In both rooms I teach the same thing: the Max Noble Strategy Platform. Students learn one tool at a time and use it on a real company the same day. Week by week they build a complete picture of a business: the world around it, what it is good at, what threatens it, and what it should do next. Then the numbers. I call the accounts the bonus tool, and it may be the most important one. Companies can tell stories. Their accounts are less imaginative.

  1. Read

    Everyone reads before class. The lecture is short because the reading was not.

  2. Learn

    One tool, explained in plain words, with what it shows and what it hides.

  3. Shared case

    We use it together on a famous company, so everyone sees it work once.

  4. Your company

    Then on a real business, the one each student has chosen to study.

  5. Feedback

    Small groups, with someone whose job is to ask the uncomfortable question.

The two classrooms

Leaders on Fridays. Business students all week.

Classroom one · Executive MBA

Strategy and Innovation

Executive MBA · Copenhagen and online

Experienced leaders, taught in Danish. Each of them brings one company, usually their own. Over the term they take it apart and put it back together on paper: the outside view, the inside view, the numbers, and a recommendation they would defend in front of their own board.

Nobody has to use every tool. Choosing the right three, and saying why, is harder. That is the point.

  • The Assignment · a written strategic analysis of their own company, ending in clear recommendations
  • The video · five to seven minutes, presenting it in their own face and voice
  • The grade · on a British university scale
Classroom two · HHX

Business Economics

Virksomhedsøkonomi · Copenhagen

Business students at upper secondary school. The same tools the executives use, in plain words, on companies they already know: LEGO, Mærsk, LVMH. They learn to read a company the way you read a person. What it says, what it does, and whether the two match.

They are tougher judges than most boards. Nobody has told them yet what they are not supposed to say.

  • The strategy · where a company is going, and whether it can get there
  • The accounts · reading the annual report until the numbers tell a story
  • The verdict · a clear opinion, with the evidence to carry it
The material

Written here, then sent out into the world.

Every class gets a 5 Minute Study: one company, one moment, five minutes to understand it. The executives get their own edition and HHX gets another. The best of them grow into the full case reports in The Case Files. This term, it has been a lot of LEGO. There are worse companies to spend an autumn with.

  1. EMBA · No. 04
    LEGO, 2004: read the accountsThe year the bricks lost money. What the numbers said before anyone said it out loud.
  2. EMBA · No. 05
    On Monday you must chooseOctober 2004. You have just become LEGO’s chief executive. The best case, the worst case, and your decision.
  3. EMBA · No. 06
    Who was LEGO really playing against?The rivals that mattered, and the ones that only looked dangerous.
  4. EMBA · No. 08
    Why Billund?How a small town in Jutland became the home of a world champion.
  5. HHX · R01–R02
    LEGO, 2004 and todayThe same company read twice, twenty years apart. Spot the difference in the accounts.
Read the LEGO case All Case Files
Max Noble
Who teaches

I teach what I study.

I spent more than ten years at Nokia, including the years it fell. That is where I learned that clever people can walk a great company off a cliff, one sensible decision at a time. The School is where I try to make sure the next generation of leaders spots the cliff earlier. The Strategy Warroom grew out of this classroom too.

  • Lecturer in Strategy, Finance and Innovation, Executive MBA
  • Teacher of Business Economics, HHX
  • MSc in Applied Economics and Finance, Copenhagen Business School
For schools and teams

Want this in your classroom?

I give the same lessons as a guest lecture for business schools and HHX classes, and as a masterclass for leadership teams: Read a company in five minutes. Tell me who will be in the room, and I will tell you what they will leave with.

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