Strategic Executive Development: The Five Essential Investments

A great companion to Jim Bolt's other recent book, The Future of Executive Development, this latest book provides a detailed look at all the essential pieces of leadership development that is high impact and strategic to an organization's business. Whatever the specific focus of your leadership effort is--whether the driver for you is high potential development or transformation, this book offers detailed, practical help and examples which will guide your efforts. Clearly written and documented, this is an invaluable guide for leadership development practitioners within organizations as well as consultants like myself.

Through case studies from major organizations, the book provides: a framework for developing executive develop strategies, systems and programs; highlights of the state-of-the-art in terms of what approaches are proving most effective and promising for the future; insights on maximizing the yield on investment in development; and evidence of the business impact of executive development and examples of ways companies have measured and validated impact. The book's nine chapters cover: trends and forecasts; aligning development strategies and programs with business objectives; the 5 high-impact uses of executive development; creating strategic unity and alignment; successful transition of new executives; accelerating executive development of emerging leaders; transforming organizations; addressing business challenges; and the business impact of executive development. Information is provided from a 2004 survey of executive development practices. Other value-added features include: design of typical action-oriented learning activities; web-based survey: typical question themes; and different ways to measure executive development.

This book seeks to investigate and explain the"investments in executive development that have the biggest impact." The authors are all executives with Executive Development Associates (edanetworks.com), a leading consulting firm specializing in the strategic use of executive development. In 2004 EDA cunducted an in depth survey with senior management of nine major companies. This book is largely the result of what these executives had to say combined with the years of experience that EDA has had in preparing specialized training classes for executives. As people have worked their way up the organization, they have had to develop leadership and numerous other skills. At the executive level they are now faced with new challenges. These particularly involve strategic decisions for which they have not been previously responsible. Without going into the details of the book, the problems these new executives face include directing the corporation into new organizational forms, bringing new leaders up the chain, and preparing to meet the big changes that are coming in their corporate world. For change is always coming, and to ignore it is to effectively kill the company. What will happen to your company with dramatic jumps in the price of energy? What effect will the Kyoto protocol have? These are the known challenges. You can be sure that the future has a bunch of surprises that executives will have to meet if their companies are to survive. This book contains not the answers to these problems, but how to prepare executives to effectively face them.