KEY POINTS

• The growth and complexity of businesses today is spurring strong growth and fierce competition in the executive education segment.

• Companies and executives want development opportunities that are grounded in real life.

• In order to maximize academic value, business schools must adopt an interactive, two-way learning approach where propositional knowledge meets prescriptive knowledge.

• This interactive, two-way learning partnership benefits all involved – practitioners and professors alike.

INTRODUCTION

The challenge for business schools is to create value for their learning partners by establishing the critical link between real-life issues and research-based management insights. While this viewpoint may be quite commonplace nowadays, it is still rare to find schools that do it well. Too often, even those schools with the best intentions have failed to translate their ambitions into action. They frequently treat the teaching of executives as a one-way process, talking “to them” rather than “with them.” They have not grasped how to deliver their research findings in more meaningful and interesting ways so that practicing managers can internalize them and apply them to their real-world situations.