The Exec-Ed Zone

Neil Roden, HR director at the beleagured Royal Bank of Scotland has highlighted a change of tack in acquiring talent. At a recent Talent Management conference in London, Roden said RBS would be focusing much more on internal talent and leadership development to fill its top managment positions. Previously when the going was considerably easier RBS could afford to throw the cash around to get whoever they wanted - now they have realised that it is often much cheaper to "grow your own". People Managment magazine has the full story.

The more I do the more I realise that "what you know" has increasingly little relevance when up next to "who you know".

Networking is really a personalised version of marketing and sales. If you don't know anyone it is very difficult to get things done. Everyone is busy, but you are much more likely to answer the phone to someone you know than someone you've never heard of.

It is doubtful that former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair is really worth his $1million a year salary as an occasional adviser to JP Morgan for his knowledge and wisdom - there are a lot of clever people already at JPMorgan, but his ability to pick up a phone and get a deal done or started is pretty unique. The networking value of a popular former Prime Minister is formidable.

Business Schools have long known this and the best ones remain the best ones partly on the breadth and depth of their alumni associations. It is no surprise that the Exec-Ed departments of these schools push the fact that when executives have completed a two-week program they can claim alumni status. This may seem harsh to undergrads or MBA's who have to toil for 2-4 years for the same reward, but they will not have been paying $10k a week for the privilege though.

The Economist has run an interesting article on the phenomena of institutional networks, comparing the ties of these, often venerable, institutions against the social networks everyone is scrambling to build on the web today. Time will tell if the web-based networks will retain their appeal in the decades to come as an Oxford or Chicago GSB alumnus badge has done.

The FT reports that some of the US public business schools are feeling quite perky in relation to their normally much better-off private counterparts.

On the weekend that Harvard University has announced a fall in its endowment fund of $11bn - and with that a substantial fall in income, Haas Business School at Berkley on the other side of the US is quoted as "never have been as strong as we are now".

This unusual position is due to the reliance that the private insitutions have been able to make on their endowments while the public schools have not had that luxury - but with many endowed portfolios having pursued high-return (and therefore high risk) strategies in recent years they are finding that their property and oil and gas led holdings are now not producing the returns they expected - in fact quite the reverse.

It would appear that the mistakes of the financial markets, that many believe were fostered and encouraged by the Business Schools - particularly the Harvards and Stanfords of the sector, are now catching-up with those insitutions themselves. There may be a little schadenfreude in seeing that they at least did practice what they preached.

The similarities between Boy George and the Organisational Behaviour experts at CCL may be too faint to trace - but CCL is keen on changing organisational culture, and believe it should lie at the heart of the majority of corporate change agendas.

Forbes magazine highlights this in a recent article by CCL senior faculty member John McGuire. He sets out his theme as:

"History shows that change initiatives--realignment, restructuring, re-engineering and the rest--succeed only one time out of every four.

Why so much failure? Because senior leaders blame their organizational problems on faulty structures, systems and processes, and those are the things they try to fix. They are partly right, but there is usually another, more powerful, factor at work too: the company's culture."

before going on to list the five critical elements needed to be addressed to manage such change. Read the article here.

See Centre for Creative Leadership's Profile here

Following the stories last week on the cost of executive programs at NAB and DSM - here is an inside look at what those executives are having to put up with...

The essence of the piece is a quote from Schulich's Driector of Executive Education, Allan Middleton:

People enrolled in our programs don't slack around," Mr. Middleton says.

"They're here to learn and they're here to work. And when small things go wrong -- cold coffee, mediocre food, uncomfortable chairs -- this can really upset participants."

Indeed, in many instances, such small annoyances can quickly morph into big-time bugaboos. The end result: "Those distractions really begin to hurt the focus for learning," Mr. Middleton says.

"When all those little things go wrong, this can really negatively impact the learning experience."

Mr. Middleton notes the top factors when it comes to students choosing an elite business school such as Schulich is the reputation of the school, followed closely by the reputation of the programs and, of course, the faculty.

However, the "tipping point" when it comes to students choosing one institution over another can sometimes boil down to the living arrangements and the on-campus infrastructure, such as the quality of the food service and recreational facilities.

See the Schulich Profile on IEDP.info