Harvard to Launch Short Courses for Business Leaders

Harvard to Launch Short Courses for Business Leaders

Harvard Business School plans to gather up to 1,000 next generation business leaders in India for a one-and-a-half day executive training programme, the first such short duration course from one of the world's most famous business schools. It is also in the process of launching more focused, need-based programmes that will take learning from small classrooms to bigger conclaves of up to 20,000 students.

The school has identified Bengaluru for the launch of the first programme, which will be held sometime next year.

Frances X Frei, the new head of executive education at Harvard Business School (HBS), told ET that the programme will be delivered by a mix of HBS experts, startup founders from Bengaluru and HBS alumni who are serial entrepreneurs.

“One of the things we want to do is called HBS global. We will go to international cities to give them an experience of HBS,“Frei said. “The first one of these we will be running in India, where we are targeting about a 1,000 startups to go through a one-and-a-half day executive education programme in Bengaluru.“

Frei, who is professor in the technology and operations management unit at HBS and senior associate dean for executive education, said traditionally, most of HBS' executive education programmes are 5-7 days long. So, the new programmes will offer a mix of both formats.

On HBS' future plans, Frei said: “The last few years our campus has undergone massive transformation in terms of getting the infrastructure in place. Now we have the most functional and most beautiful campus in the world where we can bring in small and large groups. We will do more and varied things on the campus and also more varied things off campus“.

She said HBS is also planning a women centric programme in South Asia, for which it is targeting participation of 20,000 students.

“We want to go from small classrooms to bigger conclaves and India and China will always be our first choices,“ Frei said.  “Those are our first ideas and we will do it by July 2017.“

There will also be new executive education programmes for not-for-profits as HBS wants to reach more people with varied content and engage with India more deeply.

“We want to have more focused need-based programmes that is why Bengaluru and startups. It is an unbelievable hub and if we don't do that, we are probably ignoring the Indian context,“ she said.

HBS is also giving alumni status for the first time to members of an executive education programme that it is running in India on senior executive leadership. It now plans to extend the alumni status to programmes run in other countries as well.

“If there are two big places outside of the US that we have cared a lot about they are India and China. India is much more accessible for us because they speak English. This is a moment in history we look back at sensational time in India. We go where in the world the transformations are occurring and we can give a little bit of a nudge and it becomes an inflexion point.“ 

Source | Economic Times | 25 October 2016

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