Mixing Memories And Desires: Understanding The Need Of An Executive Programme

At the outset, let us understand that Executive Education refers to academic courses at business schools globally for executives, business leaders, and functional managers. These programs are generally non-credit based, but sometimes lead to certificates and some offer continuing education units accepted by professional bodies and institutes depending upon recognition bodies. In recent times, the executive development program has become the most significant and relevant part of career building for employees who rigorously strive to take on new challenges. As the global business ecosystem becomes increasingly composite, the demand for quality programs delivering relevant outcomes has risen.

These Executive customized programs, which are tailored for and offered to executives of any organisation, represent the fastest growing segment of the market. These programs help organizations increase management efficiency by integrating the science of business and performance management into specialized programs that enable executives to develop a new set of knowledge, skills, and attitudes.

For doing this, Research and Innovation to have helped provide deeper insights, better tools and, overall, more sophisticated program design. A lot many research projects shows that an organization with a clearly articulated and business vision and capability strategy will have a higher market value than a firm that does not. 

At various institutes, open enrolment programs are too available as part of university-based Executive Education courses, which occur throughout the year with a regular cycle, and are available to participants from different organizations. While some shorter Executive Education programs aim at specific roles or sectors, or on enhancing specific leadership skills, such as persuasion, negotiation, and communication.

Looking back at the history, The Executive Education can be traced back from the war history when the United States developed critical mass after World War II. By the late 1970s, nearly 20 business schools in the United States were offering some form of Executive Education. Throughout the 1970s university-based Executive Education continued to evolve as an industry. Several on-campus residential facilities were constructed at several universities, demonstrating the value of a stand-alone facility dedicated to Executive Education programs. This spurred the development of such facilities at schools nationwide and the subsequent expansion of short open enrolment programs. Executive Education further developed in the 1980s and 1990s as the increasing pace and scope of global business demanded higher levels of education among employees.

Organizations today urgently require new managerial and executive capabilities to cope with an array of challenges, from coping with narrowing profitability gaps to enabling continual innovation; increasing customer responsiveness to meeting regulatory requirements; contending with demand-side volatility and uncertainty to managing increasingly complex new services and value chains. To meet these objectives, organizations must develop predictive prowess, agility, innovativeness, resiliency, creativity, and other novel capabilities they are finding difficult to cultivate in their executive and managerial teams. 

The executive skill set cannot be merely one of the specialized skills that enable individual performers to add value to their groups, clients, organizations, or life projects. It must be a combination of skills the values of which are super-additive, which is to say, the value of possessing the skills together exceeds the value of one or a few summed across the individuals who possess them. Just as the skill sets of playwright, neurosurgeon, and AI researcher are clearly identifiable and distinguishable from one another, even if at first perhaps difficult to articulate and measure, so the skill sets of the executive and high potential manager are clearly discernible, if perhaps even more difficult to articulate and measure. Unlike the skill sets of specialists, which are often densely packed around one core set of tasks, the executive skill set is broadly distributed and its mapping must hence distinguish between cognitive and non-cognitive skills on one hand and individual and relational skills on the other.

The competitive landscape of Executive Education is feeling a tectonic shift even as demand grows for managerial skills. The challenges & constraints of Executive Education However, are led by several factors. One, the business schools’ pedagogical and teaching tools are optimized for the development of the cognitive, technical, and algorithmic skills associated with functional disciplines. Moreover, they focus on teaching the canonical models and methods that constitute a standard managerial toolkit, which is usually suited to address only well-defined and well-structured business problems. Even the business schools’ learning configurations such as the instructor to learner ratio and the interaction formats are weighted towards large classes that optimize the time of faculty, graders, and teaching assistants.

All these factors limit the opportunities for the development of the behavioral skills including communicative, relational, effective, and X-skills that are increasingly in demand in organizations. Those skills usually require intensive, iterative, personalized, and specific feedback. Two, the business schools’ learning production functions the specific combinations of learners, content, context, and instructors that produce learning experiences aren’t easily adaptable to the demands for new skills or new ways of learning. Barring a few exceptions, they must fit in with the academic machinery of the business schools’ parent universities. Three, the business schools’ learning production functions depend on a workforce, consisting of academics, that has high fixed costs. The structure can be modified only in the long run because of academics’ tenure-based employment and compensation systems. Consequently, the business schools’ responses to the disintermediation, disaggregation, and de-coupling unleashed by the digital economy seem to be greatly constrained at present.