A Better Fit for Exec Ed

Attending a traditional executive-education program typically means asking your employer to write a check for thousands of dollars, leaving behind family and colleagues for weeks at a time, and then studying everything from negotiation to marketing with attendees from a variety of unrelated industries. Now a new breed of exec-ed courses is cropping up to better serve managers in search of professional growth. These offerings are shorter and more tailored to the issues facing execs in specific industries.

The demand for more specialized fare is coming from companies that foot the bill. If you're a boss at a pharmaceutical maker, for instance, would you rather spend $23,000 on tuition to have your manager study innovation in the life sciences or take a generic course on innovation? The new classes may not be cheaper on a per-diem basis, but they aim to deliver a bigger bang for the buck.

In addition to creating industry-specific courses, schools are experimenting with more flexible ways of delivering standard management content. In January, Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis launched a series of 15 one-day seminars after interviewing 60 companies about their exec-ed needs. Each class tackles a different aspect of management and leadership, taught by the school's leading scholars in those fields. Olin Partners' Program lets companies buy seats to the seminars in bulk at increasingly steep discounts. One seat goes for $695, while 100 cost just $450 apiece. Their courses run about half the price charged by other top schools.

Leave it to business schools to come up with an income-producing product to teach executives how to manage people who have taken executive-education classes. But there's no value in sending employees off to sharpen their skills if their bosses don't know how to make the most of them.

•	A Better Fit for Exec Ed The companies that pay the tab are demanding more specialization Business Week, Monday, March 7, 2005 Byline: Lauren Gard