Shape Corporation: A Liberal Arts Perspective For Engaged Executive Education

The Shape Corporation, founded by five individuals in 1974 in the Midwest, now has four sister companies and more than 2,100 employees globally. In 2013, global sales exceeded $500 million, with projections that sales would reach $1 billion by 2020. When they realized many executives will retire when the company hits $1 billion in sales, and high potential leaders would take over, and that the qualities that brought them success may not take them effectively into the expanding global market, the founders decided they needed help preparing the next generation of leaders to support this new pace of growth. Traditional training and development processes were not enough to address the company’s needs, so the company looked for other solutions.

Rather than utilizing an executive education program from a top business school, Shape leaders engaged a group of liberal-arts college faculty from the Upper Midwest, the executive education arm of the Michigan Colleges Alliance (MCA), a collective of 14 independent colleges and universities in the state, to create the Global Leadership Development Program for the Shape Corporation. A major driver in this decision was innovation. While business schools focus on scientific research, professors often lack real-world experience. Liberal-arts colleges are very good at connecting learning goals, curricular innovations, and outcomes, which are the values Shape wants to instill in their next generation of executive leaders.

The MCA has found that students learn about business practice most effectively when moving back and forth between theory and real-world problems. This resembles the “new professional model” advocated by leadership scholars Warren Bennis and James O’Toole in a Harvard Business Review 2005 article, in which liberal-arts institutions can provide a “new balance between scientific rigor and practical relevance.” According to the MCA, “A business education that maintains proximity to a traditional liberal-arts curricular structure provides space for innovation and disciplinary freedom that are hard to come by in the typical business school model. Triangulation across disciplines in the liberal arts can enliven problems that extend outside typical content areas of business education.”

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