Developing paradigmatic awareness in university business schools: The challenge for executive education

The question of how university-based forms of executive education can effectively contribute to the enhancement of practitioner capabilities using the insights of the humanities remains underexplored. The sustained pressure in business schools to adopt a teaching curriculum and pedagogical approach that appears immediately relevant to the perceived needs of practitioners is overwhelming. Yet, universities are distinct from consultancies or other professional management institutes in that traditionally they provide well-established forums for intellectual exchange and encourage crossfertilization among academic disciplines. We maintain that university-based business schools are uniquely positioned to use their internal university-wide expertise and core capabilities to inculcate paradigmatic awareness among business executives to enable them to enlarge their horizons of understanding and hence extend their decisional possibilities. For us, this is the true competitive advantage of university-based business schools over corporate universities, management training institutes, and consultancies. We maintain that university-based business schools can paradoxically be invaluable to business and industry, not by becoming overly anxious about immediate relevance, but by recognizing that the education and development of the individual as a whole through exposure to a plurality of paradigms and perspectives, is what sets universities apart and makes them distinct from other executive education providers. Their real value to the practitioner world is in offering truly fresh insights and genuine radical alternatives to executive problem situations through novel interpretations that are counterintuitive to received wisdom and best practice

Learning on demand, at your own pace, in rapid bite-sized-chunks: the future shape of management development?

Abstract Recent decades have witnessed an unprecedented growth in management and executive education which, paradoxically, has been accompanied by a crisis of confidence manifested in debates about its direction, relevance, and effectiveness. Outside academia, innovative corporate training enterprises increasingly provide the type of management training where learning is distributed at the time of need, embedded in a work context, and delivered in rapid "bite-sized pieces," which aim to meet participants' needs in terms of depth of information coverage, timeliness of delivery, and job relatedness. We draw on a series of interviews associated with one such enterprise that is believed to be an exemplar for innovative thinking in this field to explore the possibility that innovations of this type may have something to offer other mainstream providers of management learning and education in terms of the type and style of delivery employed