This program explores a set of proven, practical, and innovative strategies for maximizing the contribution of an organization’s technical resources. It provides key insights on how to retain technical staff, integrate technical professionals into the organization, build more successful project teams, and keep teams high-performing over time.

Technical professionals' goals and incentives are often different from those of other employees, and so are the management challenges that arise. Drawing on the wealth of research and industry experience of faculty and leading practitioners, Managing Technical Professionals and Organizations explores proven, practical, and innovative strategies for maximizing the contribution of technical professionals. This intensive program focuses on the management and motivation of technical professionals in the innovative organization, and in particular:

• How creative individual contributors work together on risky projects, processing information under conditions of uncertainty;
• How to address critical problems and issues dealing with staff professionals and members of project teams, including cross-functional teams;
• How to work effectively with prima donnas and independent spirits.

The Learning Experience
Organizations that are designed and managed for doing the same things well repetitively, as in manufacturing and operations, are not particularly appropriate for doing something well once, as in R&D. Running a technical organization presents a unique set of management problems. How do you motivate and reward technical professionals to maximize their performance and creativity? How do you create an organizational structure that will contribute to success, not inhibit it? How do you deal with creative individual contributors, project teams, and innovative professionals? How do you build and sustain high motivation and vitality while preventing complacency? How do you utilize "marshaling" events for building more collaborative, innovative activities? And how do you move information and technology effectively across organizational structures?

This unique two-day program focuses on issues critical to the effective management of technical professionals and cross-functional teams. Its principles and strategies can be applied in any organization where research, development, engineering, or computer-related technology developments need to take place in a timely, effective, and successful manner.

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As organizations move away from a “command and control” model to a more “cultivate and coordinate” model, executives can no longer rely on old ways of thinking about leadership strategies. This course introduces participants to a powerful framework developed at MIT to help leaders at every level drive innovation, maximize team performance, and succeed in today’s complex world of fast-paced, dramatic change.

This program is built around MIT's unique Distributed Leadership Model―an innovative and impactful approach to executive leadership that lies at the core of leadership development at MIT, and the result of an intensive, four-year research project at the MIT Leadership Center to identify more effective strategies for leading in a networked economy. Tested in diverse, real-world settings, the model allows managers to succeed as leaders by being flexible and adaptive in new and unexpected ways through the application of the 4-Cap+ Leadership Framework. This framework makes it possible to harness, align, and leverage the leadership capabilities that exist throughout an organization.

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Digitization is revolutionizing marketing strategy. From tablets and big data to new customer monitoring tools and the global emergence of social networking, recent technology has revolutionized the modes of communication through which businesses and brands engage with consumers. This course is designed to help executives understand the new rules of marketing in the digital age, covering a range of topics that include search marketing, social network marketing and analytics, predictive modeling, mobile advertising and commerce, CRM strategy, and digital advertising.

New digital technologies have fundamentally reshaped marketing theory and practice the last decade alone. Technology has changed the modes of communication through which firms engage with consumers. Moore's law has made the storage and analysis of consumer data scalable, creating opportunities for fine-grained behavioral analytics. New monitoring tools have fostered precise and personalized customer relationship management practices. The rise of mobile phones and tablets has enabled location based messaging and reciprocal communication. The ubiquity of video content has promulgated rich, native advertising programs. The global emergence of social networking has enabled networked based predictive modeling and new forms of targeting and referral strategies based on the preferences of consumers' peers. And finally, new social media have brought all of this onto the public stage, with word-of-mouth conversations driving brand awareness and brand loyalty, and user-generated content on review and ratings sites making or breaking demand for products or services.

This two-day course provides a detailed, applied perspective on the theory and practice of digital marketing and social media analytics in the 21st century. We will cover concepts such as the difference between earned and paid media, predictive modeling for ad targeting and customer relationship management, measuring and managing product virality, viral product design, native advertising, and engaging the multichannel experience. Throughout the course we will specifically stress the theory and practice of randomized experimentation, AB testing and the importance of causal inference for marketing strategy.

Topics covered in this course include:

• Search marketing
• Social network marketing
• Social media analytics
• User generated content management and marketing
• Mobile advertising and commerce
• CRM strategy in the age of big data and digital advertising
• Earned vs paid media
• Predictive modeling for ad targeting
• Viral product design
• The multichannel experience
• Randomized experimentation
• A/B testing

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Disruptive technologies are fueling digital transformation at unprecedented levels, demanding us to rethink our roles and tasks, adopt new responsibilities, and manage the range of emotions that result from all the above. Navigating the transitions sparked by digitally-driven change requires deep awareness—of ourselves and others. This new program leverages leadership assessments and group coaching to provide leaders with insights, tools, and frameworks for navigating the human side of these transitions.

Please note: The application deadline for this course is 7 days prior to course start.

Digitally driven change is upending the way we live and work and posing an increasing number of challenges for business leaders, who must manage a waterfall of decisions around hiring, training, resource allocation, and investments in technologies while continuing to lead their companies to success. Entire teams may be asked to transform their skills and ways of working as a result. How can we help ourselves and others to respond nimbly to change and be better prepared for the next disruption? And what is required to shift successfully from fragility to agility and thrive in this new world of work?

Led by Hal Gregersen and Roger Lehman and conducted live online, this innovative new program emphasizes the creative intelligence and soft skills required of leaders when change happens. The course provides a transition toolkit to draw on as well as a structured process for containing, metabolizing, and addressing disruptive transitions, tackling the question, how do we recognize and successfully navigate transitions when change happens?

Course faculty also include Vivienne Ming, founder and executive chair at Socos Labs, and Rana el Kaliouby, co-founder and CEO of Affectiva, who will explore in depth the human side of digital transitions.

Participants will be asked to complete leadership assessments (for use in a group coaching day) and submit a summary of the key transition challenges they are facing as a result of digital disruption and transformation prior to the start of the program.

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If you are seeking deeper self-awareness and a clearer understanding of your leadership capabilities, we invite you to consider Extended Executive Coaching at MIT Sloan Executive Education.

The face of management is changing. Organizations are becoming less hierarchical in favor of collaborative and distributed leadership cultures. The old model of “command and control” no longer fits. Today’s leaders must be agile, innovative, and able to adopt ideas from all levels of the organization. They must also know their strengths and understand their weaknesses; only leaders who accept themselves as incomplete are able to compensate for their missing skills by relying on others. Capable of cultivating and coordinating across their organization, these self-aware leaders are committed to continuous improvement—of themselves and of others.

True to MIT’s “Mind and Hand” motto, our approach to individualized development combines executive coaching sessions with a leadership assessment tool based on MIT research and frameworks. You have four to five months to take the assessment and schedule the coaching sessions. The coaching package includes:

• The x360 Leadership Development Survey, which includes observer feedback and a personal assessment of leadership capabilities to help you understand your current impact
• Three private 90-minute coaching sessions with world-class MIT Sloan executive coaches
• Supplemental digital content that explains MIT’s 4-CAPS+ Leadership Framework, which defines the key capabilities of effective leaders

In your first private coaching session, you’ll understand and process your x360 with your coach (90 minutes) and set leadership development goals. In the following session, you’ll work with your coach to explore experiments for taking action and practicing new approaches (90 minutes). In your final session, you will report back on your experiments and process what you have learned (90minutes). These coaching sessions will help you make a greater impact by deepening your understanding of your unique leadership strengths as well as equipping you with the tools to empower and coach others.

Space will be limited in this new offering.  Email us if you have any questions.

When you add to cart it will display available dates for Executive Coaching.

Note: We also offer Executive Coaching that includes a x360 Leadership Development Survey, assessment, and a single 90-minute one-on-one coaching session. This option is also offered as a complement to the short course Transforming Your Leadership Strategy, taught by MIT Sloan Professor Deborah Ancona.

If you are seeking deeper self-awareness and a clearer understanding of your leadership capabilities, we invite you to consider Executive Coaching at MIT Sloan Executive Education.

The face of management is changing. Organizations are becoming less hierarchical in favor of collaborative and distributed leadership cultures. The old model of “command and control” no longer fits. Today’s leaders must be agile, innovative, and able to adopt ideas from all levels of the organization. They must also know their strengths and understand their weaknesses; only leaders who accept themselves as incomplete are able to compensate for their missing skills by relying on others. Capable of cultivating and coordinating across their organization, these self-aware leaders are committed to continuous improvement—of themselves and of others.

True to MIT’s “Mind and Hand” motto, our approach to individualized development combines an executive coaching session with a leadership assessment tool based on MIT research and frameworks. You have up to three months to take the assessment and schedule the coaching session. This coaching package includes:

• The x360 Leadership Development Survey, which includes observer feedback and a personal assessment of leadership capabilities to help you understand your current impact
• One 90-minute private coaching session with a world-class MIT Sloan executive coach to review your x360 with your coach and set leadership development goals
• Supplemental digital content that explains MIT’s 4-CAPS+ Leadership Framework, which defines the key capabilities of effective leaders

Space will be limited in this new offering.  Email us if you have any questions.

When you add to cart it will display available dates for Executive Coaching.

Note: If you would like additional coaching sessions, you may be intersted in Extended Executive Coaching.

This course presents innovative strategies and best practices for improving supply chain performance. It introduces a unique MIT framework, using the concept of technology clockspeed, for strategically managing and optimizing supply chains. Participants gain a deeper understanding of supply chain integration, technology sourcing, make-buy decisions, strategic partnering and outsourcing, and IT and decision-support systems.

Led by world experts, this practice-oriented supply chain management course investigates a robust MIT framework for better managing supply chains in today's rapidly changing markets. Participants will explore:

• The next big trend in supply chain strategy, and the key skills required to be successful
• How to better structure a company's supply-chain strategy
• Guidelines for making strategic sourcing and make-buy decisions
• How to integrate e-business thinking into supply chain strategy and management
• How to blend recent developments in information systems and communication technology with sophisticated decision support systems and create a comprehensive strategy for manufacturing and logistics
• "Clockspeed benchmarking,” a tool for deriving critical business insights and management lessons from industries with the highest obsolescence rates of products, process technologies, and organizational structures (industrial "fruit flies")
• How to assimilate sustainability into your supply chain strategy
• Why all advantages in fast clockspeed environments are temporary

Many participants attend this program along with Developing a Leading Edge Operations Strategy.

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The term "Industry 4.0" refers to the combination of several major innovations in digital technology that are poised to transform the energy and manufacturing sectors. From advanced robotics and machine learning to software-as-a-service and the Industrial Internet of Things, these changes enable a powerful new way of organizing global operations. But how should executives lead this change within their own organizations so as to not negatively impact production, customer satisfaction, and corporate culture?

Implementing Industry 4.0: Leading Change in Manufacturing & Operations is a new program designed to help executives implement large scale technological change. Topics discussed include:

• New business models and forms of operations that are currently being enabled by technological innovations such as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)
• The "hidden factory" that results from a counterproductive and unpredictable mix of old and new technologies. Over time, this results in an unknown "process" that delivers defect-laden products behind schedule.
• The importance of decoding cultural and workforce factors prior to making an investment in new technologies
• The overemphasis on visioning at the expense of fully understanding existing systems, the context in which those systems are operating, and the people who must use the technology
• Ways to increase a factory’s "IQ," leading to more productive and safer operations
• The role of the front-line leader in the adoption and successful execution of the new technology

* This course is not focused on the features or selection of specific Industrial Internet of Things/IIoT technology products or services. Instead, it is intended to help senior leaders in manufacturing and operations who are deploying Industrial Internet of Things technologies to obtain greater value from their businesses by diagnosing the states of their systems, measuring activities appropriately, and overcoming cultural obstacles to deployment of productive technologies.

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The landscape for leadership has changed. Increasingly, leaders are accountable for the economic and social welfare of the entire enterprise while simultaneously running a business, project, function, or geography. We refer to this role as an enterprise leader. If you are such a leader and/or if you oversee a team of such leaders, this executive training course is intended to help you sharpen mindsets, and skillsets required to shepherd your entire organization toward greater agility and growth. It is also designed to help you create a culture in which leaders are held accountable for having an enterprise perspective.

For the past couple of decades, companies have focused on creating strong leaders of business units and influential heads of functions who are responsible for achieving results in one corner of an organization. But many of these same companies have underemphasized a more important challenge: developing leaders who see the enterprise as a whole and act for its greater good. That perspective has become increasingly necessary as companies seek to provide not just products, but the broad-based, integrated solutions customers now demand.

Led by and based on the research of MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer Douglas Ready, an expert on organizational transformation and the role of senior executive teams in driving change, Leading Enterprise Teams is designed to help senior executives think differently about what constitutes effective leadership in this ever-evolving environment. If you serve on or oversee an enterprise-level team, or if you are responsible for hiring and developing such teams, this executive training course is for you.

Through lectures, case studies, and highly interactive discussions, you will be presented with the key mindsets and skill sets necessary to lead with an enterprise perspective. Course content will address many of the leadership challenges you face including:

• How to lead collectively at an enterprise level while also leading your own teams at a functional level
• Straddling functional and geographic responsibilities in the context of a team that includes other executives with similar paradoxes
• Identifying when suboptimal systems are actually beneficial to the enterprise
• Understanding when functional orientation a benefit to the organization and when does it becomes a cost

The program will also feature an Executive Perspective to embed the enterprise leadership concepts in a real-life context. 

Greg Hill is President and Chief Operating Officer of Hess Corporation, a global independent energy company engaged in the exploration and production of crude oil and natural gas. He will share his personal journey from unit to enterprise leader, and an executive’s perspective on the importance of creating an organization where the culture, values and goals of various units are aligned to work towards the greater good of the enterprise.

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Over the past two decades, some of the most profitable and successful firms are those that have adopted a digital platform model—a strategy whereby the company allows two or more disparate groups to interact over a platform to co-create value; for example, website developers and users on Akamai, recruiters and employees on LinkedIn, and drivers and customers on Uber. In this two-day program, participants eager to develop or launch a digital platform approach will learn why and how their business strategies may need to be revised to be successful.

In 2018, eight of the top ten global brands (according to Brandz) were platform-orientated companies —companies that created and now dominate arenas in which buyers, sellers, and a variety of third parties are connected in real time. In today’s networked age, the cloud, social media, and mobile devices are fueling this platform competition, and more and more companies want in. However, many companies do not succeed in becoming platform leaders because their technology and/or business strategies fall short.

While many platform strategies are well known (e.g. Apple’s iTunes), there are other less-heralded platforms that are exploring new ways to create and capture value. These include: dynamic pricing, usage fees, highly targeted product and service offerings, inbound marketing, and network effects.

Key questions the faculty explores include:

• Is a customer segment with the highest “willingness to pay” the most valuable segment?
• When is tying a customer to a platform (sometimes called “lock in”) counter-productive?
• Which pricing formats seem to boost revenues but actually slow platform adoption?
• How can companies get in front of the common evolution patterns of platforms?
• When should leaders be wary of “platform envy?”

Through case studies and Q&A, experienced managers will emerge with insights into how they can refresh their company’s strategic approach and participate profitably in the multi-sided marketplaces of the future.

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Why has implementing enterprise-wide transformation proven to be troubling? When challenges persist, it is often because there are embedded tensions or paradoxes that surface and seem unresolvable. This research-driven and practitioner-led program is designed to help senior executives avert failure, create cultures of agility and resiliency, and develop a customized blueprint for large-scale transformation in their organization.

We know through research and practice that two thirds of enterprise-wide transformation efforts fail to meet their intended objectives. Why? In today’s world, disruption can emerge from any place, any time and in ways unexpected. Leaders often ignore or miss the early warning signals, due to a variety of factors, including cultural inertia, lack of disciplined scanning and decision making processes, and siloed behavior that tends to discount troubling signs that impact other parts of the organization. When unit leaders turn inward to protect their entities, organizational agility becomes that much harder to achieve.

But effective leaders and their teams can beat the odds that their organizations’ transformation efforts will fail. How? They set proactive agendas that create an inspiring future for employees. They build trust-based cultures of openness and transparency, combined with the discipline to spot and solve significant problems collectively as a team. They align the “messaging” of their agendas with the metrics, milestones, and rewards that provide a clear line-of-sight for employees to understand how they can contribute and what behaviors are valued in their organizations.

During this two-day program, you will learn to spot potential derailers that prevent successful transformations; more importantly, you’ll learn how to become a successful transformation leader in your organization. Research based and practitioner led, the program environment is designed to help executives create a blueprint for their organization’s near- and longer-term transformation. Guest speakers will help to further demonstrate important conceptual examples, and significant time will be designated for peer collaboration and plan development.

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Communicating and persuading effectively with data is a crucial skill for anyone who wants to lead in a modern organization. If presenting and explaining data to a non-technical audience is part of your job, this data storytelling course is for you. Highly practical and collaborative, this course combines visualization and strategic communication best practices to help you communicate data more effectively and influence others to take action based on data through data storytelling. 

This interactive course will give you the opportunity to improve your communication skills through practice and detailed feedback from the instructor and your classmates. You will have the opportunity to use that feedback to improve a current slide or presentation you are working on. 

By the end of this class, you will emerge with impactful materials, useful frameworks, and an improved ability to persuade others with data through data storytelling.

No matter how good machines and algorithms get, leaders will still need the ability to influence and persuade others to make the best possible decisions based on the technology and data at hand. Whether your job requires you to communicate with leaders, colleagues, clients, or customers, you need to simplify and clarify your findings for your audience in order to persuade with data.

This course is taught by Miro Kazakoff, a Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan, entrepreneur, and consultant focused on how individuals use data to persuade others. As a participant in this interactive course, you will learn professional and practical skills required to develop, design, and deliver high-quality, logical communications grounded in quantitative data. You will learn how to craft clear and powerful narratives to guide audiences through your data and understand why the insights are important. You will also explore ways in which visual tools such as graphs, charts, and diagrams can be used in data storytelling to highlight your insights in a way that spreadsheets and dashboards cannot. You will leave this course a better data storyteller than you came.

This is not a course about analytics tools; it is focused on communication skills. You will need access to a form of slide presentation software (e.g., PowerPoint, KeyNote, or Google) and a tool for visualizing data (Excel, Tableau, etc.). Come with a graph you can edit and improve.