HBSAA President’s Report
Strengthening Ties with Executive Education Graduates
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| Fischer |
It’s been a busy — and productive — spring for the dedicated volunteers who make up the Alumni Association Board of Directors. I want to quickly recap the highlights.
The Global Leadership Forum Committee, chaired by Jean-Marc Daillance (MBA ’84), has put the finishing touches on plans for the next forum, set for June 15–17 in Shanghai. It’s a great opportunity for alumni to hear from global business leaders, U.S. and Chinese officials, and HBS faculty. While visiting Shanghai, forum participants will experience firsthand the extraordinary dynamism that makes China one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. I hope many of you have made plans to attend.
The Clubs and Associations Committee, chaired by Roslyn Braeman Payne (MBA ’70), continues to analyze alumni club needs and work on recommendations for building club membership. (See related story.)
The Alumni Career Services Committee, chaired by Jim Gibbons (MBA ’94), is making progress on recommendations to leverage existing resources and develop new ones to assist alumni with lifetime career development needs.
Last fall, the board created an Executive Education Alumni Committee, chaired by Laura Teller (MBA ’84), to better understand the needs of this large and important segment of the HBS community. I want to use the balance of this letter to update you on the committee’s impressive progress. I’ll go into similar detail about the other committees in future letters.
First, let me put the Executive Education Committee’s work in context. The HBS global community includes more than 25,000 alumni who have completed residential Comprehensive General Management or Owner/President Management Executive Education programs. That’s an impressive number, representing business owners and senior managers across the entire spectrum of manufacturing and service enterprises in the United States and upward of 100 other nations.
Executive Education alumni are different from MBA alumni in important ways. Unlike the MBA Program, Executive Education primarily attracts professionals in midcareer. Most programs require company sponsorship of individual students. And Executive Education programs often draw a higher percentage of foreign participants than the MBA Program. In my PMD class, two-thirds of the students came from abroad.
So it’s clear that Executive Education participants have a different mindset. We need to better understand how this group feels about the School while they are here and after they leave. By serving them better, the committee hopes to build the level of engagement among Executive Education alumni in a number of ways: greater participation in HBS clubs and associations, increased attendance at alumni conferences, and broader engagement in the alumni community. To expedite its work, the committee created three subcommittees with specific tasks.
The Focus Group Subcommittee, chaired by Janet Clarke (AMP 111, 1992), organized a number of group discussions this spring with Executive Education alumni in cities across the United States and abroad. They explored questions such as: How connected do you feel to HBS today? How has that changed over time? Does your local HBS club or association meet your needs?
The On-Campus Focus Group Subcommittee, chaired by Gordon Silver (MBA ’71, JD ’72), looked for ways to foster a stronger sense of connection with the School while Executive Education participants are on campus attending sessions. The subcommittee also has considered changes in the School’s approach to Executive Education reunions after noting that the MBA reunion model does not work as well for Executive Education alumni.
The Survey Subcommittee, chaired by Cathy Benko (MBA ’89), has worked on developing questions designed to identify specific ways to help Executive Education alumni stay in touch with each other and the School. The subcommittee’s work will be incorporated into a larger, School-sponsored Executive Education survey currently under development. That survey strives to enhance the School’s understanding of the role the HBS experience may have played in helping graduates along their diverse career paths. It will be distributed in the fall.
The Executive Education Alumni Committee will have a draft report ready in time for our June meeting. We’ll fine-tune the report’s recommendations and submit a final a version to the HBS administration over the summer. I look forward to sharing our recommendations with you in a future letter. With more than 65,000 HBS alumni around the world, our goal is to make sure that everyone is part of one big community.
The Alumni Board sees itself as an advocate for you and your interests and concerns. I encourage you to contact any of us to share your thoughts and ideas.
