FT REPORT - BUSINESS EDUCATION 2008: Back to school for lessons on leadership

"If you catch them four or five years [after receiving their MBAs] they will tell you they wish they'd paid more attention to their organisational behaviour professors, because it turns out those are the skills they now need most in the job," he says.

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FT REPORT - BUSINESS EDUCATION 2008: Back to school for lessons on leadership

By Andrew Baxter
Published: May 12, 2008

Seventeen years after receiving his MBA, Todd Loudenslager was back at school last month. The senior risk officer at US Bancorp's consumer bank, now 51, was taking part in the Kellogg School of Management's Post-MBA programme.

The programme claims to be unique - a three-week course, just for MBAs, that enables participants to catch up on business trends and management thinking in the decade or more since they received their qualification, and brush up their leadership skills.

"My boss had said there was a need to get me into some kind of advanced education, something at a higher and broader level than bankers' school," says Mr Loudenslager.

The Kellogg programme is not the only way MBAs can refresh their knowledge with short courses. In the UK, Ashridge Business School runs a three-day MBA Refresher weekend, while Harvard Business School in the US has its three-day Breakthrough Insights programme, open to the school's MBA and executive education alumni. It also has a week-long programme aimed mainly at women MBAs returning to the workplace, called "A New Path".

Then there are any number of executive education courses with content that appeals to middle-ranking or senior executives who may have long since given up trying to get into the suit - or dress - they bought for their MBA award ceremony.

The leadership programmes at Henley Management College are popular with MBAs, as is the three-week, Advanced Management Programme. At Cranfield School of Management, short courses that attract MBAs include the Business Leaders Programme (five plus seven days) and the five-day Director as Strategic Leader course.

At ESCP-EAP European School of Management, the Milestone executive education programmes are particularly attractive to MBAs wishing to move up to the next level of leadership, says Davide Sola, the school's UK director. An example is the school's three-day Advanced Leadership Workshop.

The need to catch up on new academic research and business trends is one obvious reason for MBAs to feel the urge to get back into the classroom. Sometimes participants on advanced management programmes may even get a head start on others when it comes to exposure to new thinking.

The business adviser Ram Charan, for example, has long been a teacher in programmes at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. Recently, says Kip Kelly, Fuqua's director of executive education, Mr Charan has been teaching from his new book on innovation* even before it hit bookshops.

Refreshing leadership skills that may not have seemed so important to MBAs aged, typically, 28 or 29, is another reason to come back to school. Everyone would have taken some kind of leadership class in their MBA, says Brenda Ellington Booth, Kellogg's academic director for executive programmes, but for younger participants this would have been "interesting but not that relevant. Now you have more experience, you may be in a different industry, you have more direct and indirect reports, so we have a leadership week [the final week of the Kellogg programme]."

Narayan Pant, Insead's dean of executive education, says a lot of MBAs come back to the school's leadership programmes for this very reason. "If you catch them four or five years [after receiving their MBAs] they will tell you they wish they'd paid more attention to their organisational behaviour professors, because it turns out those are the skills they now need most in the job," he says.

Stephen Burnett, Kellogg's associate dean and director of executive education programmes, says many courses attract MBAs but are not designed on the assumption that participants have the qualification.

"This means that you always have to revisit a few basics to ensure that everybody is up to speed," says Prof Burnett. "With our post-MBA programme, we don't have to do that, because we know what you had and can build on that."

The $23,000 course is intensive and Mr Loudenslager says it "often felt like a firehose". But he says the time - 10 hours of classes a day from Monday to Friday and half a day on the first Saturday - was used wisely.

Away from the short courses of executive education, there is the Post-MBA Diploma in Advanced Management offered by Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto. Thunderbird School of Global Management in Phoenix runs a Post-MBA Masters in Global Management. There is more on these courses in an extended version of this article at: www.ft.com/businesseducation

*The Game Changer - How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation, by A.G. Lafley and Ram Charan. Crown Business