At Executive Education, representatives from major agencies and organizations often approach us to design tailored programs to meet the growth needs of their organizations.  Our panel of program developers and faculty members work closely with these organizations to build a program curriculum that will fit their needs, with the resources available to them, in an amount of time they can manage. 

The success of the custom programs we design comes from the investment an organization or agency makes in implementing the change and lessons learned that inevitably come from an intense training experience made as a group. Employee buy-in is crucial to creating and maintaining long-term solutions that work.  All of our custom programs seek to create a critical mass for change within the organizations with which we work.

Program design varies depending on the custom program.  Here is a sampling of the work Executive Education has done in the past:

• A new leader takes over a major governmental agency.  To build familiarity among a newly-formed team and to give that team a unifying training experience, the leader asks Executive Education to design a program curriculum that will focus on working together in a changing environment with a new strategic direction – for over 130 executives.  The leader and members of his team attend a one-week session, brought to them at their organizational headquarters in Washington, DC, and taught by Kennedy School faculty.

• A major national non-profit organization is focused on building its internal capacity.  Executive Education and faculty members from the Kennedy School design a program that influences how the group thinks about the strategic direction of its organization.  In addition, part of the training includes helping senior executives understand how to implement the skills they’ve learned in their everyday professional activities.  From this partnership, members gained helpful insights into the organization’s future and made informed decisions about choosing the leadership that would guide it.

• The deputy director of a major intelligence agency asks Executive Education to design a program that will help top-level agency workers better understand the national policy-making process and the way intelligence issues, and other issues relevant to the work they do, are used in national decision-making.

• Representatives from a national government commission a five-week program tailored for their future leaders in government and civil service.  Over several years, many government executives benefit from the experience of the program.  The program is designed with the goal of bringing together an important group of senior officials and exposing them to the same ideas at the same time to create continuity of decisions and actions within the government.