A Soft Skills Training Model for Executive Education

Abstract

It is an imperative for executive education (EE) to assess the learning needs of participants, the course contents and the knowledge, skills, and teaching methods of instructors to be effective and sustainable. An increasing number of scholars are disagreeing with the way business schools are conducting their business (Andrews and Tyson, 2004; Mintzberg, 2004; Pfeffer and Fong, 2002). While many have long ago postulated that learning and contents must shift toward a global focus (Conger and Xin, 2000; Greenwalt, 1999), others acknowledge that business schools “are still on the wrong track” (Bennis and O’Toole, 2005), emphasizing a “relevance-rigor-gap” (Tushman et al., 2007). It seems that there has been a backlash which drove contents and teaching methods toward over-emphasizing hard core business techniques and neglecting soft skills and which has consequently focused on rules-based rather than on principles-based content.