As digital competition continues to force established companies to re-think their business models and how they operate, they will have to treat executive learning as a necessity, not a luxury. Doing so will increase their ability to win at the now-perpetual game of getting smarter, faster, and lighter.

1. Copyright © 2017 Tata Consultancy Services LimitedJanuary 2017
Students For Life: Why Executives
Must Continually Update Their Wisdom
Krishnan Ramanujam
Vice President and Global Head, Consulting & Enterprise Solutions
PERSPECTIVES VOLUME 8

2. The Half-life of Existing Business
Knowledge
Companies need to get
smarter, faster, and lighter at
ever-increasing speed
Executives need to quickly
learn new business models
and strategies, and new
ways of thinking
GE spends $1 billion every
year on education and
training

3. Executive Learning Needs to Change
Companies are prioritizing
updating the mindsets of
their top people
Executive learning needs to
go beyond developing the
skills that are relatively
timeless
Have a clear understanding
of the current shape of the
business, the future trends
that will reshape it

4. What Businesses Need to Know
If senior executives operate under obsolete notions of how to achieve
business goals, their initiatives will fall short or fail altogether
Consider the world of consumer products marketing:
• Given that an aggregated 4.4 billion consumers use
social media and smartphones, marketing strategies and
tactics have undergone a sea change
• P&G, Nestle, and Unilever have altered the ways they
create awareness and demand
Other business functions could tell a similar story of rampant
alterations in the ways they work

5. Three Major Signs of Digital Disruption
Shrinking fortunes of big companies
caused by rapid technological change
An explosion of better ideas based on
academic research about how to
optimize a business
Online advertising has brought in
rampant alterations in the field of
IT, manufacturing, R&D and
customer service

6. Keep Executive Worldviews Current
Many companies have
built their own places of
higher education to
keep updating
executives’ knowledge
4,000 companies
around the globe have
their own formal
universities
Companies that are not
building college
campus-type buildings
are sending their
executives off to
business school in large
numbers

7. Five Best Practices for Executive Education
1.Get the best educators
from the best sources
2.Ensure the learning is
immediately applicable,
not just theoretical
3.Create education that
is irresistible
4. Make learning
illuminating, not dreary
5. Make it highly
accessible

8. Copyright © 2016 Tata Consultancy Services
Limited
Students For Life: Why
Executives Must Continually
Update Their Wisdom
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