Executive learning event organizations, where to?

QUESTION:    My brother and I are the same learning event organization owners who wrote you last week.  We have some reservations about your diagnosis and predictions regarding our industry and what will happen to the MBA schools’ degree versus their nondegree programs.   But we fully agree with your two predicted trends: (1) that the multiplying learning event organizations will consolidate and the business schools will absorb many of them; and (2) that in the business schools, the nondegree program or continuing executive education will become the priority over the degree programs.
We wish to prepare for such likely developments.  One of the things we started early last year was to partner with another learning event company.  We did this so that in the event that your prediction of a leveling off of our industry into just three or four participants will happen, our combination company will be one of those left standing. We’re  trying to bring in a third partner to improve our chances.
What else should we do?  Please help.
ANSWER:   I wanted to respond to your request by e-mail but allowing me to respond via this column means two good things.  First, you don’t mind if your “competitors” share in my diagnosis and MRx and this is good.  Second, you realize that what matters in my diagnosis and MRx is execution and you’re confident your execution style is better, if not the best.  This is good as well.
In the circumstances you’re in, that you are into mergers and acquisitions, is one of your practical options.  But it’s only one.  You have to have one or two more.
We tend to lock ourselves to one option especially when the one that comes along  looks good enough.  Don’t.  Go for at least a second one.  A third is even better.
A second option is still in partnering.  But this time, partner with a business school.
This is a better option if you consider that your industry consolidation is likely to go in favor of business schools.   What’s the best way to go about this partnering?
Go for the soft sell; avoid the hard sell.
Suppose, for example, that you are the owner of the leading learning event organization in marketing and sales, Mansmith and Fielders Inc. (MFI).
As its founder, you are an alumnus of De La Salle University, College of Business (DLSU-COB) and Asian Institute of Management (AIM).  You can therefore think of partnering with either or both DLSU-COB and AIM.  What’s the unobtrusive way to partnering?
For your planning, you may want to start with AIM.  That’s because you know that at present, AIM practically has no more marketing and sales faculty since the retirement several years ago of almost all of its well-known marketing professors.   You also know that in the country and in Asia, AIM is more known and respected for its executive education program than its MBA.
Your entry soft sell selling script to AIM can target handling one of the marketing courses like Marketing Strategy, which is MFI’s best seller seminar.  AIM may decide to try your Marketing Strategy in its MBA and not in its Executive Development Program (EDP).  After this goes well, negotiate for participation in the Executive Education.  Then proceed to the next and wider level.
What can work against this approach?  It’s not a “what” issue but a “who.”  There will always be one or two professors, chairs or deans who will feel threatened of the possibility of your eventually taking over not just a course but a total EDP like, for example, its AMP (Advanced Marketing Program).  This is a grounded apprehension because at AIM, teaching assignment to an EDP is mainly a function of student ratings and all the MFI mentors and coaches are the industry’s highest rated.
So what’s your “Plan B?”  You’re still at the planning stage.  So prepare just as serious a plan for your partnering with DLSU-COB.  What are your significant considerations in this plan?  The first and most important is the kind of school DLSU-COB is or wants to be.
Its statement of vision/mission defines De La Salle as a research university primarily and as a teaching university only secondarily.  All of the school’s colleges have gotten into leading edge research except for one college.  That’s the COB, the College of Business.
But  efforts are on-going to establish a research-driven COB.  This means DLSU-COB is not your best choice for partnering because you’re more into teaching than into research.
Your need is for a school that’s more into what I referred to in my last Friday’s column as skills and knowledge usage training than into primarily knowledge creating and broadening, more into the art of marketing  than its science.
That school is DLSU’s other business college, namely, College of Saint Benilde (CSB).  It follows then that your better partnering target is CSB.
Almost everyone knows about the old CSB image.  It’s a “dumping ground” for those rejected by DLSU-COP Taft.  But that’s gone.
Today, CSB is known as one of the best.  In restaurant and hotel management, it is acknowledged as the best.
Is this where you stop your option search?  It’s not.  You can also think of continuing with your first option of partnering with other learning event organizations so you can stay in that industry.  Then combine this with your second option of partnering with AIM and/or with DLSU-CSB.
This defines a third option for you.
(Keep your questions coming.  Send them to me at [email protected].)