About Author/s:

Solomon Akrofi is a the Director and Founder of Leapmax Consulting, a management consultancy, focusing on designing and embedding leadership capabilities to drive organizational success.

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Context

Establishing the RoI for executive development is one of the exasperations every leadership development manager has to wrestle with. Ultimately it boils down to the far from scientific assessment best summed up in the well-known cartoon: Finance Director enters CEOs office and says, “what if we spend all this money on developing executives and they leave the company?” To which the enlightened CEO responds, “what if we don’t spend the money and they stay?”. We implicitly understand that training people in management best practice has to be good, but identifying the exact returns it brings is a fuzzy endeavour.

 

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Core Idea

Without question some executive development programs are better than others; without question much exec dev investment is misspent; without question the sector and the technology that underpins it is evolving and reshaping continuously. Also without question is that many programs today try to include experiential action-learning projects that when implemented can often recoup the cost of the program, though the total program benefit ought to be much larger than this. This book champions these approaches and believes that ‘internal and external threats to organisational growth and survival provide a compelling case for executives to embrace an agile and continuous learning mentality…’

Where this book differs from most leadership development books is not in any ground-breaking new insights or developments, but in its breadth in drawing together the development of executive development and its careful explanations around the foundation principles upon which successful programs can be built. In response to the fact that many executive development programs frequently do not deliver what they should, and so do not create the value they could, the steps Akrofi describes here are the basis for a good route-map to more robust program design and delivery. 
 

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Conclusion

This book is more a sophisticated text book than an enlightening read, but the author clearly knows his territory and provides extensive references and diagrams to support his approach. If you are tasked with creating an executive development program and are new to the role, this is a solid and valuable aide to arm yourself with.

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BUY THIS BOOK

• Title: Value Creation Through Executive Development

  Author/s Name/s: Solomon Akrofi

  Publisher: Routledge

  ISBN: 978-1-138-575-578

  Publishing Date: March, 2019

  Number of Pages: 176