The FT's new executive education rankings came out today. They have a combined ranking to show the winners in both the open and custom programme categories. You can download the top 50 at: http://on.ft.com/J53SJT

The top 25 are: Harvard; HEC; IMD; CL; IESE; FDC; Easde; Thunderbird; Insead; Essec; Pennsylvania; LBS; Northwestern; IE; Oxford; Cranfield; Western Ontario; Chicago; Virginia; MIT; Columbia; Ipade; Stanford; Bocconi and Ashridge.

It's an interesting ranking, and it's one way to see which schools have a extra form of leverage with employers. Schools that employers turn to for training their own people have a good chance of being the go-to schools for MBAs as well.

Of course there are many things are work in this ranking. Many of the schools are national leaders in countries where there is a strong commitment to developing leaders: CCL; FDC; ESSEC; LBS and so on. But, it suggests to me that schools that well do well in this ranking should have MBA programmes on the way up (especially, I am thinking of European school like Essec, HEC, Esade, Cranfield, Bocconi and Ashridge) when the recession eases. Some of the strong performers in the top 50 have launched or relaunched their MBA in the last several years (Essec, Ashridge, ESMT, Henley, Catolica) and those schools which are part of universities but don't have a full-time MBA (like ESCP, Helsinki and SSE) must be tempted to launch them, perhaps in joint ventures with schools in other regions.