Programme Content
As you grow, how do you balance the need to apply business discipline with the desire to stay entrepreneurial? How do you handle pressure for growth on the part of equity partners? And how do you scale management systems?
These are the questions that rapidly growing companies face every day. These are the questions explored in the Executive Program for Growing Companies. It’s two weeks, packed with thought-provoking curriculum, real business challenges, and a focus on the strategic leadership skills needed to drive and sustain growth.
Below is just a sample of the sessions you’ll experience as part of the program.
This set of sessions takes the perspective of the general manager and is concerned with leadership of growing companies in highly dynamic environments. The major purpose of the sessions is to sharpen your capacity for strategic thinking and to provide frameworks to help company leaders set direction and lead the strategy-making process in sometimes turbulent environments.
Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) can fuel innovation, efficiency, and insight across many industries, yet their power carries real risks. This session has two parts. First, we will build a common vocabulary for responsible analytics and AI, clarifying types of AI models and using examples to surface some common pitfalls. Second, we will zoom in on fairness and bias through a widely used class of machine-learning AI models. Using a real-world case, we will show how AI can reproduce or even amplify historical bias embedded in data, and why well-intended “quick fixes” often promoted by policymakers or pundits can backfire and entrench inequities. We will then outline a few practical mitigation approaches and ethical practices. By the end, participants should have a better understanding of common AI models and the judgment to apply them more responsibly
Why do industry leaders often lose their innovative edge, and how can they retain it? Research and consulting work over the past 10 years show that short-term success may actually increase the chances of long-term failure. To avoid this “success syndrome,” managers must be effective at managing incremental change and leading revolutionary or discontinuous change.
The purpose of this set of sessions is to explore how managers can balance this tension and use the cultures in their organizations as a potential competitive advantage.
The emphasis will be on thinking about culture as a social control system defined by norms that are linked to critical strategic objectives and can be managed through executive leadership. These sessions will develop a framework for diagnosing and understanding both the statics and the dynamics of organizational culture.
Scaling is a skill necessary for leaders of small startups, teams, and departments, as well as large organizations. This session helps you to come to grips with two challenges of scaling excellence – getting people to do MORE and getting them to do it BETTER. You will develop the mindset that scaling excellence is all about building a mindset rather than merely creating a short-lived footprint.
Before the program begins, you have the option to submit details about a growth-related strategic challenge that you’re facing in your organization. During the program, groups of participants from noncompeting industries will apply their vast experience and new learning to propose solutions to each business challenge. This structured peer learning exercise is an excellent way to engage with each other and apply the program content.
