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When knowledge and practicing this knowledge is a cornerstone of your professional career, then lifelong learning is a major success factor for making your career futureproof. This comes even more true, when we bring to mind that due to new technologies and digitization, the life cycle of skills is shorter than ever before (The skills revolution 2017). The constant change in business is going to create new jobs and opportunities, but also demands new qualifications like fostering emotional intelligence, creativity and flexible thinking. The Lifelong Learning framework in the Executive MBA of Frankfurt School gives graduates like me the opportunity to join one module once a year – free of charge.
After graduating with my Executive MBA in 2015, I focused on starting my own business as the next career step. Today, I’m working as an independent consultant, helping organizations (primarily German Mittelstand but also NPO) executing their strategies in the daily business – a major challenge for leaders and organizations. Therefore, I combine strategy execution methods, coaching and software to manage the execution process throughout the organization.
With a strong corporate background, leadership experience and an Executive MBA I felt pretty well prepared entering the shark tank of the consultancy market in Germany (there are more than 15.500 companies acting in this market). From the beginning, I knew that constantly honing my craft is a necessity for delivering high value to my customers and the only chance to find an access into the market. Therefore, I have to invest in myself and my business to stay at the top of the game.
So attending the strategy implementation module as part of Lifelong Learning at Frankfurt School’s Executive MBA was a perfect fit for me and it was no question to take a week off and go back to Campus (as a nice side effect, with that I got the chance to study on the new Frankfurt School campus 🙂 ).
Strategy implementation is an emerging field in Academia but as most curriculums focus on strategy development and planning, it’s underrepresented in business studies. Within the module we discovered current insights from international research on topics like alignment, goal setting, incentive systems, performance management and performance culture.
An absolute highlight was, when both, the CEO and CSO from Mustang Jeans visited the class and presented their solution to the Mustang Jeans case study we were dealing with during the lecture. Discussing real life challenges of implementing a strategy that changes a company as a whole was an amazing experience. Beside research insights, working on case studies with a class of 40 people, all with different business and cultural backgrounds, made this week a very intense and challenging experience.
Studying and knowing what to do is a prerequisite for a consultant – but it’s not enough. Implementing the knowledge by taking the right actions and generating results with customers is key to success. So the week at Frankfurt School’s Executive MBA with its Lifelong Learning approach helped me to deepen applicable knowledge in Strategy execution. Based on that, I’m able to ask better questions in order to discover more aspects of strategy execution with my customers. That helps me a lot, guiding my customers in their strategy execution efforts.
Frankfurt School gGmbH
Adickesallee 32-34
60322 Frankfurt am Main
08 August, 2018