The Humanist Dean — ICL's Mission–Margin Test

A four-round, advanced higher-education / executive-education simulation set inside Instituto Cumbre de Liderazgo (ICL), a mission-driven exec-ed unit of a private university in Monterrey, Mexico (founded 2009; MXN 220M annual revenue; 28% contribution margin; 34 staff, 80 adjunct faculty, 22 certified coaches; ~2,400 participants/year). On 10 April 2026 the dean tasks you, the Executive Education Director, with launching a new flagship open-enrollment program — “Líderes con Propósito” (Leaders with Purpose) — for September 2026. The board has set a hard dual mandate: clear a fixed MXN 18,000,000 design-and-delivery budget AND contribute MXN 6,000,000 of margin in the first cohort, while staying demonstrably faithful to ICL's founding commitment to humanistic management — developing leaders as whole persons grounded in dignity and the common good (Arandia). Three senior humanistic-management professors have warned they will not teach a “leadership-as-ROI bootcamp,” and the brochure, pricing and faculty contracts must be locked by 15 May 2026 or launch slips to 2027, forfeiting the MXN 6M margin. Across four rounds you (1) diagnose where mission and margin genuinely conflict versus reinforce each other and state a design philosophy; (2) choose the governing framing — humanistic/purpose, ROI/career-acceleration, or a deliberate hybrid — and set tuition (target MX$95,000) and a defensible cohort size against break-even (~190), the margin threshold (~253) and the 320 cap; (3) allocate the MXN 18M across modules, coaching, experiential components, marketing and participant services and set the coaching-to-content ratio (coaches MX$2,200/h vs content faculty MX$1,400/h) — the costed operationalisation of the humanistic promise; and (4) defend the program to a board that fears unprofitability and senior faculty who fear commodification, holding both without collapsing into pure idealism or pure commerce. The math rewards value-based pricing into a purpose-led, higher-willingness-to-pay audience with a transformational-but-solvent coaching ratio and an authentic, faculty-backed design — and punishes the five classic errors: commercialising away the differentiation, mission-pure idealism that misses margin, uncosted coaching ambition that blows up the P&L, framing-design incoherence (a humanistic brochure over a lecture-heavy design), and ignoring the faculty mission-guardians. Final KPIs track Margin (MXN M vs the MXN 6M target), Mission Fidelity (a dignity/values-alignment score), Participant NPS, and Enrollment.