Educating Global Business Leaders—From the discrete to the continuous.

Paul Danos, Dean Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

The top MBA programs are part of a global business leadership development process that encompasses a vast number of players in schools and business and non-business organizations. We take enormously talented and highly educated people, who are already in the midst of a career, and give them enhanced options and new trajectories on the leadership track. And in today’s market, more and more, our graduates work for organizations with global perspectives, no longer with regional or even national outlooks. It is also apparent that the learning of leadership is a journey without an end.

Tags(clickable): Leadership, Education, MBA, Business School

Give the enormity of the challenges entailed in developing effective global leaders, our MBA programs should be viewed as only one (albeit a very important) part of a life-long and continuous process of learning, growing and maturing. This has come home to me recently as Tuck launches a new program for MBA’s who have departed business in the past and now want to re-enter. They are educated, experienced and eager to contribute but need a refresher and a path back into leadership, after perhaps ten or fifteen years of being home with children or engaged in non-business activities.

I also see innovations in leadership development as we work in helping corporations fashion plans for their executives, most of whom have MBA’s, but who after many years of continuous experience need to energize their leadership momentum. I have found that the benefit of education can be as great for a fifty-five year old veteran as it is for our twenty-seven year old student; and we as a school are able to transfer the techniques we create for corporations into our MBA curriculum.

The highest form of business leadership today may start with a first-rate MBA experience, but it certainly doesn’t stop there. We, as top business schools, must be open to developing a seamless and continuous pattern of leadership education, and all our programs will benefit from the cross-fertilization that results.

Comments

[Zach Owens]

It seems to me that being involved with forums such as this is an excellent way for leaders to stay active and enthusiastic about learning. I’d be interested to hear if the deans who regularly contribute to Blogs find it to be a motivating practice.