The Exec-Ed Zone

The PwC 11th Annual CEO Survey has once again highlighted the concerns senior business leaders have about trying to recruit and retain talented employees. Top of their list of concerns in this area are people who have specialist knowledge plus leadership abilities.

When examining the issue of People & Change a number of statements were put to the CEO's asking for their responses. The most positive reaction was attached to the statement "The People Agenda is one of my top priorities" and the greatest disagreement was with "My HR organisation is equipped to handle any change required to compete for talent".

There was less clear space in identifying the single hardest skill to find. The results were pretty close, the top three being:

• combined technical and business experience (67%)
• global experience (65%)
• ability to develop and lead others (63%)
• creativity and innovativeness (63%)

This should be music to the ears of the L&D sector as leadership programs have been the main stay of their offerings for many years (although this could indicate that they are not developing the leaders that CEO's are demanding) and innovation has been one of the buzz programs for the last couple of years.

Global experience is harder to teach - in general it must be lived, worked, earned - but the number of India and China based programs that are now appearing does indicate that they are latching on to this too.

That leaves the greatest concern of CEO's regarding the combination of leadership and technical expertise. And it is an area that the executive development providers are having to catch-up on very quickly.

If proof were needed of the problems associated with this mismatch - we only have to look at the banking sector since last summer. The credit crisis is a direct result of a lack of leadership and technical knowledge. See Prof Jacques Pezier's article he wrote for us at IEDP.info before Christmas, where he said the fault lay not with the financial modelling wizards at the banks who simply created money-making systems out of junk - as they had been asked to do; but with their bosses who failed to see the bigger picture and the risks attached. They were so delighted that their brainy technicians had evolved some alchemy-like models to create money out of junk that they failed to examine where the costs lay. Rudi Plettinx, a regular contributor to this blog and MD off CCL Europe tackles the same problem more generically in an article last week.

Yesterday BusinessWeek published a piece on what courses 12 US business school deans were recommending to their MBA and undergrad students so that they would be able to avoid similiar errors.

In a similar vein we shall shortly be publishing a report from around the world's leading business schools to find out if they have seen any increase in the number of programs being taken in complex financial instruments, leadership and corporate governance. I hope to see that they have - which would indicate that the CEO's are acting on their fears, but I am not convinced it will be so.