The Exec-Ed Zone

BusinessWeek launched its twice yearly executive education rankings last week. The BusinessWeek ranking is compiled from a survey of companies, 188 responded this year. Quite what the results really tell the reader is a little hard to gauge.

For anyone with an average knowledge of business schools, and that should be anyone who is responsible for spending budgets on executive education, there ought to be a level of automatic, almost intuitive, recognition of which schools are the global leaders. We don't need a ranking to tell us that Harvard, Wharton, Chicago and Stanford are leaders in N America and that IMD, INSEAD, LBS and IESE are equivalents in Europe.

Rankings in executive education are even more spurious as they do not reflect a single program but a wide variety taught by different faculty to different levels of executives across different subject areas. So while Kellogg might be great at Marketing programs and Chicago at finance what does it tell you about their abilities on strategy or emerging market leadership. Nada.

Then if you compare BusinessWeek's latest list with that of the FT's more globally comprehensive list you have to ask where is HEC (ranked overall third by the FT in May this year) in the BW list? Not listed. Essec, a leading Paris "Grand Ecole" makes it to 13th in the FT's ranking but along with the Brazilian Fundacao Dom Cabral or the UK's Oxford Said doesn't make it to BW's list.

Ultimately the rankings are nice bits of branding but close to useless for anyone actually seeking an appropriate exec-ed program.

Business Week has just published a special focus piece on the best business programs on design, its role and incorporation into business methodolgy and practice.

It is noticeable that design is gaining a heightened profile in business education - and these schools (or often pairs of schools as they are often joint offerings between design schools and business schools) are some of the most prominent. BW has done a good job to recognise that many of the design leaders are outside of the US too!

Read the BusinessWeek piece here.