INSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
they serve. Instead, schools must ask themselves harder questions: Are learners better equipped to navigate transitions and not just secure an initial role? Are alumni returning at meaningful points for renewal, reinvention and capability development, rather than for networking alone? Are graduates more prepared for careers that may span multiple roles, organisations and phases of change? And are employers finding that your business school is producing talent that is suited to a more fluid world of work? These questions point to something larger than curriculum adjustment. They point to the need for a more integrated model. Career services, faculty, programme leadership, alumni relations, executive education and learner-support teams cannot continue to operate from assumptions about what a successful career looks like. If they do, learners will experience fragmentation where coherence is needed. This is why the real challenge is not simply to modernise content. It is about rethinking how value is created across the full relationship between a school and its stakeholders. The institutions that respond well will do more than refresh programmes. They will build a more durable model that connects degree education, alumni engagement, executive education and career support into a coherent system for a world in which leadership careers are becoming more plural, iterative and complex. This opportunity is larger than pedagogy alone. The population that many schools are only beginning to recognise may also represent one of the most underappreciated growth prospects in business education.
organisations at roughly the same time, though for very different reasons. A few years later, both had become independent portfolio professionals. From the outside, their situations looked similar: multiple roles, more flexibility, more autonomy. But the realities were very different. One had built a strong flow of meaningful roles across organisations, supported by a broad network and an ability to manage visibility, relationships and timing. The other was working just as hard, but with far more friction: spending significant time searching for the next opportunity, relying on a narrower network and feeling the strain whenever work slowed down. The contrast was revealing. Success in a multi-role career is not simply about having more work. It is also about how that work is structured, how relationships are built and how well a person has been prepared to navigate a more complex professional model. These are exactly the kinds of professionals who often return to executive education. They do so not because they need a traditional credential reset, but because they are trying to make sense of a more demanding career reality for which most formal business education still offers only partial guidance. In my work at Harvard, Hult and Hanken alike, I have seen that learners increasingly imagine futures that may combine operating, advisory, teaching, governance, entrepreneurial and ecosystem roles over time. Meanwhile, my assessment work for AMBA & BGA across MBA programmes, master’s in management degrees and BGA accreditations has brought me into contact with real progress in innovation, internationalisation and curriculum development. Yet one pattern remains striking: schools are often updating content faster than the career assumptions around which their value proposition still rests. Indeed, one reason why assessment teams pay close attention to programme- level missions is because this is where a school should make clear its aspirations, audience and the future it seeks to prepare learners for. A more integrated model If priorities change, measures of success must change with them. Too often, business schools find it easier to track activity than value across employer contacts, alumni touchpoints, events held or courses launched, for example. While those indicators matter, they say little about whether schools are becoming more relevant in the lives and careers of the people
Henrik Totterman is professor of entrepreneurial management at Hult International Business School and a member of the teaching faculty at Harvard University. He previously served as dean and executive director at Hult and as director of the executive MBA at Hanken School of Economics, Finland. Totterman is also CEO of the executive advisory firm, Leadx3m
Business Impact • ISSUE 3 • 2026
15
Made with FlippingBook - Share PDF online