A New Direction For Executive Education? More Interest in Customized Programs

By John Kerr -- Supply Chain Management Review, 4/1/2008

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More companies are calling the shots with regard to executive education. While open enrollment programs are helpful with specific functional skills building, today there are many more demands for customized programs that span continents, delivery channels, and academic partners. For example, two-thirds of the exec ed programs offered at Penn State nowadays are tailored to the client's needs, according to Professor W. L. (Skip) Grenoble, executive director of the Center for Supply Chain Research at Penn State's Smeal College of Business.

These days, companies that are attuned to their long-term needs for leadership talent will earmark top-notch executive education programs for their best and brightest. “We're always trying to develop more and better leaders, regardless of their functional orientation,” says Welch Foods' Dee Biggs. “As individuals are identified as high potential employees we spend more money on them with executive education.” Those companies are most likely to prefer to have multiple points of contact with a university—marketing with marketing, operations with operations, and so on. They will look for academic alliances to support their needs more broadly than any one institution might be able to provide, either globally or simply in terms of available faculty members. So when IBM brought 30 or so of its high potentials together last year in Shanghai, the custom program was delivered by a group of universities that included Michigan State and Penn State.

Stanford's Hau Lee gives his view: “Increasing collaboration is the trend, and the collaboration is with both industrial partners and with other academic institutions. To jointly explore global supply chain issues we partner with the European Supply Chain Forum at Eindhoven University of the Netherlands, and the Hong Kong Logistics and Supply Chain Forum at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. We also partner with MIT and Wharton to conduct joint seminars.”

Leading companies typically want plenty of control of the curriculum—networking sessions and break-outs included. Increasingly, their education goals mesh with their business objectives. When Thunderbird worked recently with Cisco Systems on broad programs to tie specific disciplines to the company's overall strategy, Cisco's supply chain vice president brought along a crowd. About 70 people came to Thunderbird for four days of morning-to-night sessions that emphasized the past, current, and future contributions of the company's various supply chain teams to Cisco's big objectives. “They had it all broken out into regional groups,” recalls Thunderbird's Joe Cavinato. “They came out of it with a strategic plan and also tactical plans.”

There will almost certainly be more emphasis on using executive education to tackle a company's specific business challenges—what Stanford's Lee calls “action learning.” Real-life case studies have long been a staple, albeit an interesting one, of most exec ed programs for senior supply chain managers. And computer-based simulations of supply-chain scenarios, such as those now used at Michigan State, are a favorite. But when companies can get a “two-fer” — new skills acquired as well as real-world problems addressed—then the education programs have deep and abiding value. “In the future, I think executive education is going to be more experiential,” says David Closs, professor of marketing and supply chain management at Michigan State. “It could be through cases or action learning—project kinds of things. It will also be more cross-functional.”

As part of the evolving multi-disciplinary approach to supply chain executive education, more schools will offer and expand on social responsibility and sustainability themes. For their parts, companies will look to include participants from functions such as sales—functions with which supply chain managers generally have little interaction, but whose demand-side perspective can be tremendously illuminating.

Customized programs are not only covering the topic of global supply chains but also going where those supply chains reach. Stanford is just one example, offering a Strategic Management of Supply Chains in China program for executives in emerging economies. Georgia Tech's Executive Masters in International Logistics program, already held as far afield as Latin America, is now looking to bring more Chinese executives into the program. At other institutions that already have plenty of global outreach and partnerships, the pressure is on to do more. “Right now, we're being challenged to offer programs in Brazil, and we're really being pushed by our president to offer them in Dubai,” says Michigan State's Closs.

Continue to: Continuing Challenges for Exec Ed

In this article:

• Introduction
• The State of the Classroom
• Academia Under Pressure to Deliver
• Certification Gets Renewed Attention
• Online Education Finds Its Place
• More Interest in Customized Programs
• Continuing Challenges for Exec Ed

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