Strategy Execution Through Education

Traditional executive education plugs gaps in an individual’s array of competencies: it makes a person better at what he or she does.  Customized executive education can have a profound additional benefit: it’s a business lever enabling implementation of a company’s strategy. 

Suppose that a large global company has a new strategy that includes outsourcing some business processes so they can concentrate on their core business.  Having a few key managers skilled at working with vendors (an “individual competency”) is not sufficient.  To extract the full value of outsourcing, that company needs the “organizational capability” to partner really well with vendors.  Without it, there may be miscommunications, finger-pointing, conflicting priorities, and eventually a downward spiral of dysfunctional or at least transactional behaviors. 

For the new approach to succeed, large numbers of people may need to change what they know, what they do, and what they believe.  What needs to change could be different at different levels, in different functions, or in different geographies.  In terms of our example, the VP of global sales back at headquarters in London and the director of quality control for the plant in Kazakhstan have different requirements of their supplier partner.  

At Duke CE we certainly do develop individuals—we plug gaps as in traditional executive education—but we do it within the context of building a company’s organizational capabilities.  Our education enables execution of the strategic activities that will take the client’s company to its business destination.