Reflections on Executive Education

Authors:  Prof Bettina Büchel and former IMD Research Fellow, Don Antunes

First Published:  October 2007

Companies are increasingly recognizing executive education as a crucial tool for developing their managers, the underlying assumption being that it can improve managerial decision-making by creating and transmitting knowledge, which in turn has a positive impact on company performance. Collaboration with outsiders such as business schools, consultants, coaches and trainers has the potential to impact organizational performance but needs to be wisely employed.

To ensure success, leading executive education providers have to meet high expectations and need to excel in faculty recruitment and development, in the design of programs as well as in the creation of cutting-edge research that can be used to support the delivery. To be a competitive player in this arena, a provider needs to produce real-world impact for those involved.

Four themes emerged from a recent series of interviews recently conducted with individuals representing companies (Allianz Group, Hitachi Group and Tetra Pak) with extensive experience in executive education, as well as leading business schools and consulting firms venturing into the executive education arena (Wharton, Columbia, McKinsey, Mercer Consulting and Monitor Executive Education). The purpose of these interviews was to capture the views of users and providers on the Executive Education landscape.

What users want

Services demanded by users range from skill and competency building to strategy implementation and driving change.

Interviewees agreed that the most important value derived from using outside executive education partners is “to drive change.” Executive education providers can indeed create the awareness for the need of strategic change among executives and thereby strengthen their ability to drive change once back in their organizations. Increasingly, companies ask executive education providers as well as consulting firms to help drive change by working with their senior executives.

However, many business school leaders still see themselves as educators whose primary goal is to expand the mind-set of executives and not to help implement strategy or drive change. The newer trend for business schools is the demand for services leading directly to performance improvements by speeding up capability development or ensuring commitment to a strategy.

An increase in the motivation level of executives was also raised as another reason for using executive education. After attending a program, executives may be more energized to return to work with new ideas. In addition, by meeting people they do not normally interact with, executives can expand and revitalize their personal business networks. Social network researchers have long argued that the density of executives’ networks and their ability to act as a bridge to others outside the department or organization have a direct influence on individual, and over time, company performance.

The role of research and thought leadership

Current demand by heavy executive education users suggests that research for interventions should be increasingly customized and applied. Thus, the link between executive education teaching and research may need to be more clearly established within business schools, and consulting firms need to improve the diffusion of the lessons learned from practices. While traditional business school competitors must build their knowledge and expertise in a way that is perceived as “applicable” to an increasingly demanding customer, consultants need to ensure that they have the intellectual capital to make clients demand their services. In addition, the recruitment and retention of individuals able to deliver executive education experiences may also need to be enhanced.

Results and outcomes of executive education

Another key theme that emerged from interviews is the need to invest more time and effort in evaluating executive education outcomes. Company boards challenge the spending of significant amounts of money on executive education, and there is a clear need to know the value added of such activities. At the team and project level, the value added delivered by executive education is more easily measurable, but the creation and transfer of knowledge at the individual level is largely unexplored.

It might be argued that if executive education participants are aware that there will be a follow up to measure the success of their learning, they are more likely to apply what they learned and thereby care more about how they do in their jobs. This requires executive education providers to adopt a new approach to post program support and for providers and users of executive education to work hand in hand over extended periods of time. Follow-up post-program can only be ensured if this activity is an integral part of company policy.

Implications and conjectures

The research conducted in this study demonstrated that academics involved in executive education need to develop the capacity not only to apply their own research to the organizational and individual context, but also to create research content that matters to practice.

Executives choosing between different providers need to be more explicit about what they hope to achieve with a particular program when deciding with whom to partner. Business schools, consultants, coaches, and others offer different advantages and disadvantages. Business schools may have the benefits of mind-set expansion and of being more able to focus on increasing the cognitive and behavioral complexity of participants, which should allow executives to develop new mental models or increase their behavioral repertoire. Consultants are able to derive lessons learned from previous engagements. Behavioral coaches primarily work on developing leaders. Each choice involves trade-offs that may not yet be explicit when it comes to choosing among different types of executive education providers.

The users of executive education are likely to have a major influence in determining its future shape. Perhaps the smartest way to use executive education is to appropriate the “learning to learn” that should come from having partners such as business schools for an extended period of time and learning how to design effective programs of change.

Professor Büchel is Director of the Strategic Leadership for Women and the Orchestrating Winning Performance programs at IMD, Lausanne, Switzerland.