Schools are under pressure to design and deliver programmes that answer company concerns over time spent on courses and relevance of content, reports Della Bradshaw

In May last year the Sloan School at MIT and Iese ran a short programme on managing information technology at Iese in Barcelona. The two schools struggled to fill 30 seats. This year, with a slight change of title - the programme is now called Strategic Management in the Information Age: Beyond E-commerce - there were 800 applicants for the 65 places.

Such has been the demand that would-be applicants have even tried to bribe office staff at Iese to get them on the programme.

The scenario typifies two aspects of the rapidly changing market for short executive courses. First, while the market generally for open enrolment programmes is slowing down, there is a huge demand - particularly in Europe - for open enrolment programmes in specific topics, such as e-commerce and leadership. The slow-down is highlighted in this year's Financial Times survey of the top 30 open enrolment schools (outlined in subsequent pages). Of those participating in the survey, 20 had a growth rate of 10 per cent or less over the past year and seven showed zero growth or a decline in business.

Second, the move by business schools to work together in delivering both open enrolment and custom programmes, and to work with think-tanks and consultancies, is accelerating. Even the best business schools now realise they have neither the global presence nor the wealth of knowledgeable faculty to satisfy all the requirements of their largest international customers.

This trend extends as far as executive MBA programmes. This month, Columbia Business School, in New York, and London Business School announced a joint executive MBA, the first time two of the world's top 10 schools have agreed to work together on such a high-profile degree programme.

While growth in open enrolment programmes has been patchy, business schools report that growth in demand for custom programmes - that is, programmes designed for specific companies - has been growing exponentially, and many have had to turn away business.

Distributed learning, using the latest technology to deliver programmes throughout the organisation, is the flavour of the month. And from business school to HR department, "active learning", using problem- solving to create learning, has become the accepted mantra of the educator.

oreover, a few pockets of local business aside, the market for custom programmes is proving a truly global one, with US-headquartered companies working with European business schools and European corporations looking to the US for partners. The Fuqua school at Duke University in North Carolina, for example, has more custom business in Europe now than it has in the US.

The sea change in executive education over the past few years has meant that the business schools, or at least the most successful ones, have had radically to change the way they design and deliver programmes for an increasingly sophisticated and time-conscious audience.

Time spent on courses is increasingly one of the big issues, says Wanda Wallace, associate dean for executive education at the Fuqua school, as is the immediate relevance of the information. "It's become just in time instead of just in case," she says.

So, too, the time taken to develop programmes has shrunk to reflect changes in the market. Columbia, for example, has just completed a portfolio of four e-business programmes, each designed in just a few months.

While programme content has been paramount, the process for delivering the programmes is proving of increasing importance, says Steve Hicks, director for custom programmes at the Kenan-Flagler school at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. "It's not just customised content, it's customised process."

One obvious example, he cites, is having an executive in the classroom, who can be used in the learning process. "Senior managers do not know how to teach but they are very knowledgeable about the company."

With top faculty, now described as facilitators rather than lecturers, orchestrating the course participants, the learning is increasingly immediate and relevant.

"It used to be I could leave the classroom during a programme," says Mr Hicks. "Now I can't or I feel I lose the pulse."

The need for more globally-orientated programmes has happily coincided with the development of technology, in particular the internet, to deliver such programmes.

Increasingly, companies are demanding technology support for programmes so that they can be delivered in a number of face-to-face modules with on-line group work conducted between modules, says Bob Halperin, associate dean and director of the school of executive education at Babson College. "It's changing the education from an event into a process."

The next generation of distance learning technology, from hybrid technology/education companies such as Pensare, UNext and University Access, will enable even more sophisticated delivery mechanisms. In particular, the technology will enable the business school to train the very top executives in a company and then use the technology so that the information can cascade down.

This philosophy has already been exercised at the Fuqua school, says Ms Wallace. "I believe the power of executive education is to reach different levels in a company in quick succession."

The novelty of such distributed learning means that the schools themselves are learning how to use the technology on the hoof.

"Every time we have worked with distributed learning with a client we have learnt something," says Ms Wallace. "We have extended our model."

any business schools report they are increasingly working with fewer, bigger clients, often delivering different levels of programme to different levels of managers. This means business schools can involve a much broader range of faculty in the programmes, to conduct research and write case studies - not just gurus who give inspirational speeches.

This has a positive effect all round, says Doug Ready, president of ICEDR, the executive education research organisation in Lexington, Massachusetts. "This makes even the more traditional faculty enthusiastic. It is no longer just a small cadre who are getting rich from executive education."

Just as business schools, traditionally competitors, are learning to work together, so they have found strange bedfellows with consultancies, think-tanks and even media companies in other instances, jointly delivering programmes.

But most business schools still draw a distinct line between their role and that of a consultancy. "We're not interested in building solutions, we're interested in building capabilities," says Ms Wallace.

As management training has crept higher up the corporate agenda, with executive education much more integrated into the other processes in the organisation, corporate universities have proliferated - there are now some 1,700 in the US alone.

While these have replaced much of the demand for general manager and lower level programmes, it is not all bad news for business schools, many of which are now employed by the corporate universities to deliver programmes, points out Brandt Allen, associate dean for executive education at the Darden school at the University of Virginia. "We get the businesses back but we get them as custom business instead of open enrolment programmes."

FT Executive Education 2000: top 20 schools
1	Columbia Business School
2	Northwestern University (Kellogg)
3	IMD
4	Harvard Business School
5=	University of Michigan Business School
	University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)
7	Duke University (Fuqua)
8	University of Virginia (Darden)
9	Iese
10=	Cranfield University School of Management
	INSEAD
12=	London Business School
	UNC (Kenan-Flagler)
14	Ashridge
15=	Instituto de Empresa
	UCLA (Anderson)
17=	Groupe HEC-CPA
	Thunderbird
19	Stockholm School of Economics
20	University of Western Ontario
Rankings compiled from this year's Financial Times Executive Education 2000 survey. Open enrolment and custom programme rankings given equal weight

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