IMD Annual Report 2019

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IMD ANNUAL REPORT 2019

Enabling both individual and organizational impact Historically, most business schools started their activities with degree programs. These programs involve one student at a time contracting with the institution. They are hence very much focused on ensuring individual impact. On the executive developmentside, thesituationwastypicallynot very different. Open programs, which bring participants from different companies, also aim at achieving impact for the individual attending the program. The sponsoring organization may then hope that the individual will implement some changes within the organization, which will hopefully generate organizational impact, but the primary objective of open programs starts with the individual. Custom programs can certainly be designed for organizational impact, but until recently most programs still tended to be designed for individual impact, which would hopefully cumulate into some organizational impact. For example, whengiven the choicebetweensending cross- sections of managers or intact teams of managers, most companies historically preferred to send cross-sections. They felt that sending mixed groups of executives created

If individual impact is a major objective, how can business schools ensure this objective is met? One of the dimensions on which IMD has been working hard over the last few years is the identification of designanddeliveryconditionsmorelikely toproduce a sustainable individual improvement . Indeed, let’s be frank: Too often in the past, managers attending programs returned to their employer full of energy and drive to become more effective but, within weeks, tended to revert back to their normal ways. Too many executive development programs did not lead to sustainable change. Over the last few years, research in neuroscience and other fields has offered a better understanding of the root causes of this phenomenon. These new insights have helped us to identify a number of design choices that can enhance the probability of a lasting impact. networking benefits supplementing the individual learning. But networking benefits are a much less direct way of enhancing organizational performance than ensuring that an intact team goes through the same simultaneous shared experience and, as a result, can hold one another accountable for implementation following the program.

Many “executive development” programs

ORGANIZATIONAL IMPACT

INDIVIDUAL IMPACT