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SHAKING UP THE ORGANIZATION Kai Peters Chief Executive Ashridge Business School Berkhamsted, United Kingdom O ur corporate clients' executive education needs used to be straightforward. Clients wanted five-day mini-management programs or simple courses on strategy. But now they want training paired with team building paired with online delivery paired with coaching. Until recently, Ashridge wasn't set up to provide such "onestop shopping" easily. Before 2013, Ashridge was divided into a management development department (for course delivery) and an organizational development (OD) department (for consulting). These two areas should have complemented each other, but they had different philosophies, paths to market, and pricing mechanisms. They were competing with one another— which meant we were competing with ourselves. I spent the first half of 2013 tackling this wicked problem. We organized a Future Search summit facilitated by Marv Weisbord, an external OD expert. At the summit, faculty agreed that we needed to overcome our differences to focus on client needs, but they were reluctant to think about what that really meant—a complete shake-up of our organization. To create a more integrated structure, we dismantled our two departments, replacing them with three integrated functional teams—strategy and innovation, people and leadership, and OD and change. We integrated our business development func26 January/February 2014 BizEd tion to serve Ashridge more holistically. We first appointed team leaders, who then appointed their team members. We invited people to openly apply for the new positions, hiring the best person for each position regardless of his or r her previous role. For instance, our s new head of faculty previously was our director of research; our new director of business development had been in OD. Some who had t held senior roles before did not get p new positions—many in this group retired or returned to the faculty. I found that balancing the needs of the organization with the needs of our people was especially challenging. On the one hand, the institution was clamoring for clarity as quickly as possible. On the other hand, the appointment process needed to be deliberate, fair, transparent, and respectful. I wanted to make sure that faculty had time to learn about the new teams and interview for positions that best suited their skills. Last June, we officially began operating under our new organizational structure. Since then, we've been working with clients at an b k ki ith ith li t t unprecedented rate. We've also been handling increasingly large requests—we recently started a US$5 million project for a single client. We are lucky that we chose to restructure now, just as the economy is picking up. As business schools, we teach organizational change, but when it comes to undergoing change ourselves, it can be like the shoemaker's wife who goes barefoot. We don't want to tell our clients, "Do as we say, not as we do." At Ashridge, we now practice what we teach. Clients have told us how much they appreciate that we provide the services they want; they don't have to seek out multiple providers. With that success, I can show faculty that this huge change wasn't just because I thought it was a good idea. It was because it was what the market wanted. Peters' next challenge is to make Ashridge less susceptible to the ebb and flow of the executive education market. "Like consulting, executive education is unpredictable," he says. "You don't know what projects you're going to win or what faculty you'll need for it. This makes managing an institution such as ours a roller coaster ride." To create a more predictable revenue stream, Peters plans to grow Ashridge's degree program portfolio, online offerings, and online library services.