While most participants are housed and taught on the Stanford campus, two courses are currently held in London and Singapore. Driving the growth of executive education internationally is corporate recognition that management education is good for business. John Barton, MBA '74, a partner with human resource consulting firm William M. Mercer Inc. in San Francisco, recently made time for an executive course in negotiation at the Business School. If you're trying to get the culture to coalesce around team progress, the old hierarchical processes won't work. You need to keep learning or you get very rusty, very quickly.
Companies are also much more selective about what their managers study than they used to be.
There was a time when an executive training program in California was considered a perquisite for loyal managers. Com-panies no longer think of it that way. They want to make sure they get value for their money. In the face of growing competition, Stanford's strategy has been to bring together the best in faculty and participants in its executive programs. The School has purposely kept its programs small.