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15 - Executive education: contributing to organizational competitive advantage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2010

James G. S. Clawson
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
Mark E. Haskins
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
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Summary

I am not young enough to know everything.

– Oscar Wilde

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Conger and Xin (2000, p. 73) opined that companies should consider the possibility that, “Executive education has the potential to become a truly strategic tool [and it] has the potential to play an even greater role as an essential lever to facilitate strategic transitions.” In an even more provocative sense, Watling et al. (2003, p. 225) noted that employee learning “is an increasingly recognized source of competitive advantage” for companies that seek to excel. For those and other reasons, corporate demand for executive education is large and growing. General Electric is often posited as a prototype company committed to education, spending $1 billion annually on training and education (Craven, 2004). On an individual basis, one recent survey found that executives spend, on average, about six days a year in some sort of executive education program and those surveyed asserted that that was “too little” (Farris et al., 2003). And hear this: “Executives do not believe their people have the skills needed to compete effectively” (Cheese, 2003, p. 12). To address the ever-growing corporate demand for executive education, “the number and quality of non-degree executive education providers has grown dramatically in recent years [to include] business schools, private and public companies, corporate universities, trade associations, foundations, consulting firms, and freelance educators” (Lippert, 2001, p. 6). Chances are, if you are (or will soon be) a university business school professor or a corporate trainer, you will have the opportunity to participate in designing, developing, and/or delivering an executive education program.

Type
Chapter
Information
Teaching Management
A Field Guide for Professors, Consultants, and Corporate Trainers
, pp. 242 - 274
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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