Could you benefit from Belonging to a Peer-to-Peer Network?

The old recipes for making a firm a talent factory have eroded. Executive development programs provided formal training specific to organizational levels, and employees were expected to remain with their organizations for long careers. Today, tenures are getting shorter, there are fewer layers and leaders are being thrust into situations for which many feel unprepared. Might a peer network help address the gaps?

The way it used to be…

Executive development, or more specifically executive education, truly got going in the United States and Europe after the second world war. Universities such as Harvard introduced the “Advanced Management Program” and other high-level courses designed to teach practical business leadership skills to executives who might have experience in family firms or in the military but not in the increasingly large global firms that represented an ever-larger portion of the economies of much of the developed world.

In addition to university-based programs, many companies created their own customized curricula often taught on a corporate campus, such as GE’s Crotonville facility. It’s 1956 opening was aimed at the mission of making General Electric the “best managed” company in the world. Indeed, for a while there, being invited to teach at Crotonville was a real feather in…