TY - JOUR
T1 - Avoiding the valley of death in educating strategists
AU - Ramírez, Rafael
AU - Rowland, Nicholas J.
AU - Spaniol, Matthew J.
AU - White, Andrew
N1 - Funding Information: We would like to acknowledge the financial support of Saïd Business School, University of Oxford for this paper. This was for the expenses that were incurred for data collection and analysis. Publisher Copyright: © 2020 The Author(s) Copyright: Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - Billions of dollars and hundreds of millions of hours are invested every year in executive education. However, much of this investment dies in a familiar “Valley of Death” (VoD) wherein what is learned in the classroom is not applied when the strategist returns back to work. Based on 30 in-depth interviews and live observation, we investigate the architecture of an executive education program designed to avoid the VoD. In the observed program, senior partners of a strategy consulting firm, and their key strategist clients, are brought together to co-learn strategy associated with scenario planning, and, at the same time, improve their ongoing business relations. We find that adopting a “paired learning structure” and utilizing “live case content” results in “group-level co-learning” (or the co-production of knowledge) that, participants report, avoids the VoD. This research contributes to the scholarship on learning architecture in executive education by establishing linkages to the literature on client-partner relationships, modelling the student, and service co-production in knowledge-intensive organizations, and, in the end, provides a blueprint that professional service firms and business schools, seeking to produce more value for their participants, can jointly emulate.
AB - Billions of dollars and hundreds of millions of hours are invested every year in executive education. However, much of this investment dies in a familiar “Valley of Death” (VoD) wherein what is learned in the classroom is not applied when the strategist returns back to work. Based on 30 in-depth interviews and live observation, we investigate the architecture of an executive education program designed to avoid the VoD. In the observed program, senior partners of a strategy consulting firm, and their key strategist clients, are brought together to co-learn strategy associated with scenario planning, and, at the same time, improve their ongoing business relations. We find that adopting a “paired learning structure” and utilizing “live case content” results in “group-level co-learning” (or the co-production of knowledge) that, participants report, avoids the VoD. This research contributes to the scholarship on learning architecture in executive education by establishing linkages to the literature on client-partner relationships, modelling the student, and service co-production in knowledge-intensive organizations, and, in the end, provides a blueprint that professional service firms and business schools, seeking to produce more value for their participants, can jointly emulate.
U2 - 10.1016/j.lrp.2020.102000
DO - 10.1016/j.lrp.2020.102000
M3 - Journal article
AN - SCOPUS:85087774007
SN - 0024-6301
VL - 54
JO - Long Range Planning
JF - Long Range Planning
IS - 3
M1 - 102000
ER -