I’m on my way back from Shanghai after being invited to work with a group of Chinese executives on their product innovation and intrapreneurship strategies, using aspects of my newly developed model for professional/executive education. It’s really an exciting model, that I used with Coca-Cola on their beverage strategy in China, with Tencent, a leading retailer with hundreds of stores, GM, World Health products, and other multi-nationals seeking global innovation.
While many institutions and programs I’ve worked with excel at providing executive education programs with a clear impact, these are more the exception than the rule. For many, I’d say that the time has come for a change.
Historically, executive education has focused on succession planning. The formula was that you take experienced, trusted managers and then have them spend some time being polished by academic experts. And that has become a big business: Business Schools today make about 40% of their revenue from Executive Education. That model needs to be refreshed, if it is to effectively solve the problem of innovating in a global environment.
First, most Executive Programs have mixed reviews in terms of quality. It turns out that half of professors actually score below 3.5/5. In other words not all program professors are “best in class”.
Second, case method and other generic materials are often not relevant. They provide very few targeted insights for the executives. Picking useful cases requires significant industry experience-based judgment and they must be supplemented with additional insights. Many of these programs simply do not have ways to address the actual context, strategy, and threats that their firm’s executives are facing.
Third, and this is a pretty important one, these programs are not accountable. There is no mechanism to follow up to see what came from the experience. Sometimes the courses can be “interesting” or “fun”, but in the next week, its business as usual.
And my best reason to believe that it’s time for a change is that most of these programs are focused on research results of the past. Firms live in the present and plan for the future. In fact, the pace of innovation has been accelerating significantly in the last 100 years and its not slowing down.
The current issue for most firms, as pointed out by banking innovator Carlos Beldarrain, is that, the minimum pace of innovation to simply survive, is also accelerating. The time is right to find a model that works even better.
The Solution:
Here is the challenge I offer to those interested in evolving what is generally today’s state of the art for executive education:
For institutions and programs who can evolve and incorporate these aspects, I respectfully suggest that it will result in a big step forward for both education and innovation.