A corporate syllabus: Schools create courses for firms

The two guys from The Wharton School, the University of Pennsylvania’s business school, were in town last week to talk about their book, ”On Building Corporate Value.” But it didn’t take long before they got around to describing how they were building Wharton’s value by customizing their offerings. ”Our custom programs are doing very well,” said Robert E. Mittelstaedt, one of the authors and the director of Wharton’s Aresty Institute of Executive Education. ”Enrollment is up 25 percent this year.”

By D.C. Denison, Boston Globe Staff

Co-author Mukul Pandya, the editor of Wharton’s online business journal, Knowledge@Wharton, added that the ”custom” approach is working on the publishing side as well.

Turns out that ”customizing” is building revenue for many business schools as an extension of already-lucrative ”executive” programs. The latter are short-term sessions (from a few days to a few weeks) that are aimed at midcareer managers interested in polishing their skills and synching up with the latest advances in management thinking.

Custom programs bump that concept up a notch: Instead of simply enrolling managers in an existing executive program at a business school, a company works with the school to create a course that combines general business principles with company-specific data and challenges.

”The company says, `Develop a course for us, and we’ll put 500 of our people through it,’ ” Mittelstaedt explained.

The most popular topics, Mittelstaedt said, are the fundamentals: strategy, marketing, and finance.

”We’re really seeing a back-to-basics movement now,” Mittelstaedt said. ”Companies want to re-connect with basic principles now that we’re on the other side of the dot-com craziness.”

Faculty research and proprietary company information are often part of the package, letting the business school reach into an area traditionally occupied by consulting groups.

Custom programs now make up 65 percent of Wharton’s executive education business. The school runs about 130 custom courses a year, for such clients as Textron Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc, Morgan Stanley, Coca-Cola Co., and Microsoft Corp.

Mittelstaedt said that Wharton’s major US competitors in the ”custom program space” are Columbia University’s business school, the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and the Darden School at the University of Virginia. Overseas, Insead in France, IMD in Switzerland, and the London Business School all offer ”tailor-made programs,” as Insead prefers to call them. Although such local players as Harvard, Tuck School at Dartmouth, MIT’s Sloan School, and Babson all offer custom programs, Mittelstaedt said that none of them are ”big players” in the custom space.

At Wharton a custom program costs ”between $25,000 and $35,000 a day,” Mittelstaedt said. If the course includes a detailed case study, the cost could be higher. Between 25 and 50 employees attend a typical session, although many companies sign up for multiple sessions.

So a custom two-day course at Wharton would probably cost a company about $100,000 after adding costs of room and board, Mittelstaedt said.

On the publishing side, Wharton is also customizing. In 1999, at the peak of the dot-com boom, Wharton launched Knowledge@Wharton, which was designed to electronically chronicle the fast-moving new economy. Editors there have also been exploring customized options. For example, when GE Capital’s customer research discovered that its target audience was worried about the financial risks of mergers, it commissioned an article on the topic from Knowledge@Wharton. Microsoft has also sponsored articles.

”These articles may not even mention GE Capital or Microsoft,” said Knowledge@Wharton’s editor Pandya. ”We customize the content, but we do not create promotional copy.”

Pandya said the cost of sponsored content ranges from $25,000 to $35,000 at the low end, to $250,000 for research-intensive work.

Are these customized programs and publications part of a drift by business schools toward the service-oriented territory where management consulting groups roam?

Wharton’s Mittelstaedt did not object to the characterization.

”We pride ourselves on our academic research,” Mittelstaedt said, ”but we can get real applied, too.”

D.C. Denison can be reached at [email protected].

This story ran on page C2 of the Boston Globe on 3/23/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

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