The future of executive marketing education – Part 2

Q: We ended last Friday, Aug.  23, 2013, with this request from our reader:  “We’d like to ask your column to take another look at your ‘diagnosis and MRx’ of the MBA versus ExecDev programs and correct where they were wrong and unfair.”  We concluded last Friday’s column saying:  “…the world of work (is) well on its way to becoming a knowledge world.  That meant the organizing resource center is no longer primarily skills but knowledge.  But knowledge has a short shelf life and becomes quickly obsolete. … To continue to be effective, executives (now find) they must engage in continuous learning.  Eventually, most (are coming) to realize it’s a process of life-long learning.  …  The MBA?  It (has now become) just the beginning of continuous executive education (and not its end).  That’s where it is headed.  That’s going to be its future.”

Then we raised these questions: “What about those very short but mushrooming executive marketing  seminars?  What’s their future?”  This column is for answering these questions.

A: We continue to take a more “dynamic” concept of executive education by looking at its origin and the history of its function and purpose.  We will do this by focusing on the sources of those continuing executive marketing seminars.

For our purposes, it lends executive development understanding by starting from the history of “corporate universities” (CUs).  In the ’90s, several large US corporations organized CUs that set a trend in continuing executive education. By 1998 the trend saw some 400 companies establishing their CUs in the US.  At the start of the millennium, the count came to more than 2,000.  The three most well-known of these were McDonald’s Hamburger University, Walt Disney and Boeing.

The CU training was continuing executive and employee education.  It’s the companies themselves that provided the training.  It’s not by schools even though every so often the CU “commissioned” a course or two to an MBA professor.

The primary CU training objective differed from one CU to another.  For example, when Basic Advertising still had McDonald’s as its largest client account, the First Life-Time Creative Guild awardee, Minyong Ordonez, told us something unique about the Hamburger University.  It was set-up primarily “to build and nurture a common culture and sense belonging to the company.” On the other hand, according to the Senior MRx-er  who served as one of the first Bank Marketing professors at Citibank’s APTC (Asia-Pacific Training Center) in Singapore, this CU campus aimed primarily at “getting the most out of Citibank’s executive training budget and investments.”  We learned that at one corstrat planning retreat, top executives confronted with the industry’s highest executive attrition rate, accepted Citibank’s known but silent role as Philippine bank executives’ “stepping stone” to other large commercial banks in the country.  APTC was the “stepping stone” school where graduation was paid for by so-many years for every one year of study.

It did not take long before those who learned about the CU training programs thought of going on their own.  It was easy and low-cost to just come out with a good “imitation.”  When this took off, it could just be extended or traded up. Trading up was usually via negotiating for a “learning program license.”  This evolving of the continuing executive learning event model was the business opportunity that the Junior MRx-er uncovered.  He came  into it in a very big way and did all by himself without any help at all from the Senior MRx-er.   The success earned him the 2006 Entrepreneur Magazine “Entrepreneur of the Year Award.”

So what have all these short-term continuing executive learning seminars brought?  We thought that sooner or later, there will be a “consolidation” of sort.  As we noticed although rather slowly that more and more MBA professors are getting invited to “guest” in both the CU and the “boutique” seminars, we thought that soon the schools will again take over.  The CU executive programs as well as the “boutique” seminars will eventually either partner with the schools or be somehow integrated into the school structure or else simply drop of sight.

There’s no sign that anything like or near a “consolidation” will happen.  What we are more probably to witness is a proliferation of what have been, what are and what will be in continuing executive education models.  The MBA will stay but playing a mere “preparatory” role and not a major one.  Continuing executive education will come from at least three basic sources:  (1) the MBA schools, (2) the CUs, and (3) the boutique learning event entities.  Unlike in the MBA-dominated years, now no one will have a monopoly or near monopoly of continuing executive education.

If the MBA schools continue to lag behind in keeping current the state-of-the-art of what most of their professors teach, the CUs and the learning boutiques will take precedence.  Corporate mergers and acquisition may lead to mergers of CUs.  This will sustain for some time the effectiveness of those merged CUs.  But because the learning boutiques are full-time on this “business,” they will eventually lead and become big until mergers and acquisition will also happen within their ranks.  The eventual learning boutique mergers will most likely take place along specialized functions and specialized speakers who keep updating their knowledge base.  For example, Salt & Light and Ardy Roberto in the field of leadership and success, Mansmith & Fielders and Josiah Go in marketing and sales, Business Matters and Francis Kong in entrepreneurship, and so on.

Remember, there’s a whole lot of continuing executive learners out there.  There’s so many of them for some many continuing executive educators.  It’s far from a “red ocean” fiercely contested learner market space.

Keep your questions coming.  Send them to us at [email protected] or [email protected]. God bless!