A New Direction For Executive Education? Continuing Challenges

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

Previous page: More Interest in Customized Programs

It's worth pausing to ponder the big question: Does executive education really work?

The answer is a qualified “yes.” If there was unconditional approval for the outputs of talent development initiatives— from the earliest undergraduate levels through internal professional development programs and executive education—it would not have been necessary for P&G, IBM, Intel and others to come together to investigate the issue, starting with the survey launched recently.

Among the survey's aims are to clarify what standards best define “supply chain” educational programs and identify which schools are providing the most supply chain management graduates. (The survey does not plan to “rank” schools.) According to P&G's Jake Barr, the shortage of highly-skilled supply chain managers prompting companies like his to conduct their own private research to find out why. “We weren't getting the quality of graduates that we needed,” he said.

Yet executive education is clearly succeeding overall. Continuing demand for everything from certification programs and online courses to highly customized programs for senior supply chain leaders speaks to its effectiveness on many levels. In fact, demand is enough that some institutions are hard-pressed to field sufficient faculty members to meet the needs—or at least enough experienced “A-list” faculty. And that points to a talent crunch of another kind.

Exacerbating demand is the need for faculty members themselves to demonstrate a good grounding in global supply chain dynamics—at a strategic level as well as in grounded tactical operations areas. That's one reason for the recent appointments of seasoned practitioners as top academicians. Prominent among those transplants are Corey Billington, professor of procurement and operations management at IMD, after leading supply chain transformations at Hewlett-Packard, and Paul Dittmann, former supply chain chief at Whirlpool and now director of the Office of Corporate Partnership at the University of Tennessee's College of Business Administration.

Customized programs will also continue to dilute the pool of teaching talent. For instance, Thunderbird has dedicated two faculty members—they've stepped out of teaching—to drive 20 one-week programs for a leading European pharmaceuticals company.

Executive education will continue to follow informal paths. IBM's Tim Carroll reports that he is regularly in front of Big Blue's clients, not in a business development capacity but to answer their questions to help them learn about and absorb IBM's best practices. And Carroll himself is using a personal coach to help him keep his leadership skills polished.

But where and how do senior leaders of his caliber learn more? And what do they need to learn now? Carroll and others at his level have many opportunities to exchange ideas at exclusive gatherings such as Georgia Tech's Supply Chain Executive Forum and Stanford's Global Supply Chain Management Forum. But even there, the topics typically center around issues well-known to many of the participants.

“I'm always hungry for what the next new idea is,” says Carroll. “What's the wow statement? That's what I look for out of these forums. I'm not convinced we're there yet.”

Neither Carroll nor other supply chain leaders have the answers. Nor do the teachers that we spoke with…not yet, anyway. The picture becomes more complex the more cross-functional the supply chain discipline becomes: Already it may as easily be led by a former corporate lawyer or a finance person as a longtime logistics or supply management expert.

SCMR's editors would like to invite readers to contribute their best ideas of how top-tier executive education can and must change now. Use the comment box below to submit your thoughts.

In the meantime, though, the exploration might benefit from an inward look, especially if in the future supply chain leadership roles are going to be more transitional than in the past. Greybeard Advisors' Rudzki contends that too few organizations yet have a comprehensive view of their supply chain “leadership inventory.” He offers one path forward: “As a CPO, I viewed the HR office as one of my two top most important organizational allies. The other was finance. HR has to be a significant partner to make all of this happen.”

Author Information
John Kerr is special projects editor at Supply Chain Management Review.

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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