During the five years Southpointe Corporation had used its custom Leadership Development Program (LDP), a significant number of existing and high-potential managers from all the company's functional areas and geographic regions had been through the LDP. Now in response to some ongoing leadership development concerns, Southpointe's CEO, wants to develop a “key experiences” program for a handful of managers viewed as viable executive team candidates. Excerpt UVA-G-0634 Jul. 29, 2013 SOUTHPOINTE CORPORATION—KEY EXPERIENCES Carol Kahn, Southpointe Corporation's executive vice president of human resources, was very pleased with the custom Leadership Development Program (LDP) that Evergreen Executive Education, LLC, had designed for Southpointe and been delivering for the previous five years. A significant number of existing and high-potential managers from all the company's functional areas and geographic regions had been through the LDP. Designing, administering, reviewing, funding, and populating the LDP offerings had been no small task. That program was now running smoothly, on a once per year basis, and no longer required as much attention from her as it had. But in response to some ongoing leadership development concerns expressed by Southpointe's CEO, she now thought it was imperative to develop an in-house sequel to the LDP. More specifically, she decided it was important to develop a “key experiences” program for a handful of managers viewed as viable executive team canidates in the next four to eight years. Such a program would play a vital role in the company's overall approach to executive succession planning. She looked forward to finally spending some concentrated time over the next few days crafting a general set of guidelines and foci for it. Southpointe Corporation Southpointe, based near North Carolina's Research Triangle, was a large, publicly held company with revenues topping the $ 13 billion mark. The company had 14,000 employees, most of whom were based in the United States. About 1,500 were located in Europe and the Middle East. The company was engaged in the design and manufacture of high-end security systems and navigation equipment. Many of Southpointe's products were favored by numerous agencies of both federal and local governments. Recently, the company had signed some long-term contracts with several overseas governments to develop state-of-the-art scanning technology for various types of cargo containers and for personal identification purposes. . . .
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