Executive Education: The Death of the Renaissance Manager?
By Roch Parayre, Ph.D.
Managing Director of Executive Education, DSI
The concept of the "Renaissance Manager" with broad skills and erudite perspectives is a very noble ideal. But with the business reality facing most corporations, this ideal gives way to the view of the manager as a more focused, pragmatic problem-solver. This can be good and bad. On the one hand, it creates a greater focus in executive education on practical applications and return on investment. This has led to an emphasis on programs customized to the specific needs of organizations. On the other hand, there is a danger that leaders may not develop the "Renaissance" perspectives, which are needed more than ever in a world of rapid change and high uncertainty. What are the implications of these changes for the development of managers? How can companies encourage leaders to develop the skills to meet current challenges and the knowledge to define and address the broader issues of the future?
The Demand for Results
The shocks of 9/11, Enron and other scandals, and the collapse of the dot-coms have led to a tectonic shift in management development and executive education. In the short-term, corporate travel restrictions basically obliterated executive education programs for the six months that followed 9/11. But the more fundamental change occurred longer-term. The economic downturn that accompanied these events made companies focus even more on their bottom lines, moving their executive education initiatives (and dollars) away from open-enrollment programs and the development of general management skills, to custom programs and the development of more focused skills.
These custom programs are tailored to immediate company needs and are often taught in-house. At GE's renowned Crotonville training facility, for example, the preferred model is to use GE executives as teachers, rather than business school professors, to disseminate best practices and case studies from their own business to the rest of the GE organizations. This shift toward custom programs was intended to address more focused, company-specific needs -where the investment in executive education can demonstrate a clear and measurable payback.
It is clear that the old model of executive education as edutainment - a mixture of education and entertainment ("I wish college had been this good!") - doesn't satisfy the needs of today's corporate marketplace. Indeed, the Achilles' heel of the executive education experience has always been follow-though (and follow-up) to programs. There is concern that the learning is not applied or that isolated managers return with a different language that their teams don't understand.
Filling the Leadership Gap
The downside of this results-orientation is a potential gap in development of broader management perspectives in some organizations. While companies continue to teach basic supervisory and management skills through in-house programs, broader conceptual approaches and general management skills, which had traditionally been taught in open-enrollment settings, are increasingly passed over. High-potential individuals are expected to acquire these skills on their own, through more informal means.
While tremendously useful, a focus on immediate business results alone will not create leaders. Among other things, senior leaders must embrace multiple perspectives, have superior decision and critical thinking skills, and focus on the outside world and how it is reshaping industries. These are indeed "Renaissance" skills. These broader skills must not be lost if the leadership gap is to be filled.
Ironically, it is in times of significant uncertainty and turmoil that the broadening of skills - both individual as well as organizational -- is required. Managing in an increasingly complex and specialized world means becoming multi-specialized - a term which highlights the increasing need for, and the value of broad, crossover management skills.
A Combination of Pragmatism and Perspective
Does there have to be a tradeoff between a focused, results orientation and a broader view? In our executive education and consulting work, we have developed a variety of approaches to address immediate challenges and also cultivate the broader perspectives needed by "Renaissance" leaders. Among the insights from this work are:
- The Value of Templated Approaches: There is a tremendous appetite for templated approaches and processes, where business decisions and strategies can be "engineered." Even in executive education programs covering a broad reach of topics, there is a need for a thematic thread to weave these different topics together into a useful framework. Last fall, for example, DSI Chairman and CEO Paul Schoemaker and I participated in a day-long Business Week CEO Conference at Wharton. It was organized around DSI's scenario-based strategic planning methodology. This offers a structured process for thinking through strategy and implementing it (including integrating scanning, scenarios, strategic options, monitoring, and other frameworks and tools). It is tailored to individual companies, industries or, in this case, geographic regions, so the results are directly relevant and applicable for the participants. There is no quick fix or silver bullet. Instead, sound heuristic approaches go a long way in getting the job done. It is teaching to fish instead of serving up the guru soup du jour as is done in some workshops and programs.
The response at the CEO Conference showed that even at the most senior levels, there is a need for a structured, templated approach to help in formulating strategy. More broadly, we have indeed found that our template provides a level of structure and intellectual discipline that CEOs, senior executives and their management teams appreciate in developing strategy.
- Combining Consulting and Education: The line between executive education and consulting is increasingly blurred -- and may be blurred even more in the future. As a result, universities - anchored in the traditional delivery approach and often constrained by their mandate in the services they can offer, may not be the ideal vehicle to deliver a multi-pronged approach to business challenges. While well-designed action learning projects can help bring the material home, a more consultative approach is becoming increasingly key. This is difficult to implement. Even highly successful organizations such as the Center for Creative Leadership (in North Carolina), with its long-standing competence in coaching, have struggled with trying to enter the consulting game. A truly consultative approach, combining executive education with consulting, has somehow eluded many of the best organizations.
Our scenario-based planning consulting engagements are focused on developing robust strategies for clients in an uncertain future. These are tailored to the client's specific industry realities and company capabilities. At the same time, we offer perspectives and processes for approaching strategy that change the way the managers involved approach strategic challenges. As Miami Herald Publisher Alberto Ibarguen described DSI's approach in the book Profiting from Uncertainty, "This is the strategic equivalent of a good liberal arts education. It teaches you a broad-based approach that will keep you from being surprised by change."
- Team-Based Approaches: Intact teams from a single organization probably benefit the most from education. Teams can make immediate connections to their workplace during a program, as they get introduced to new concepts and approaches, and the team members emerge with a common language and shared perspective. The energy and momentum experienced during a program also tends to carry over to the workplace more readily because of the team's shared experience, awareness, and new language and concepts. DSI consulting projects bring together a team of executives to develop strategy, leaving to the client firm the legacy of a common language that its management team can all share and apply to future business needs.
Executive Education as a Source of Competitive Advantage
Immediate action and results from executive education are very important, but broader perspectives and developments are also vital. These broad perspectives mean more than keeping up with the latest management buzzwords. Many participants who attend executive education programs are drawn by brand and marquee value of top-tier institutions, in search of the latest-and-greatest, hoping that the state-of-the-art in management research and education will somehow provide them with that elusive panacea.
Yet few are so naïve as to believe that there is a silver bullet that will solve their management problems or their company's business challenges. Even managers in wildly successful companies like Microsoft, where we have conducted a number of workshops over the past 18 months, are coming to the realization that their business challenges are hard, and that there are no quick fixes to them.
DSI's approach to consulting is based on a realization that processes
and frameworks are often more useful than simple recipes. These approaches
allow business leaders to create robust solutions to current problems
and opportunities, and to gain the perspectives needed to meet whatever
might emerge in the years ahead. They help leaders address the business
today and gain the agility of thinking to plan for tomorrow's "Renaissance."
