The Leadership Challenge, a series of executive seminars at The University of Texas at Dallas, meets again in May to hear and learn from Jim Keyes, former CEO of Blockbuster. The topic: Leading When the Fuse Is Already Lit: Can You Find a Winning Strategy and Prevent Failure?
Leadership Challenge presents experiential case studies for executive management. Participants hear a firsthand account of an actual crisis, develop and present their own actions plans, then hear the insider’s view of what really happened, directly from the leaders who lived and managed through the crisis.
“It is very difficult to teach leadership in the classroom and have much of it stick,” says Jerry Hoag, associate dean for Naveen Jindal School of Management Executive Education. He also is executive director of The Leadership Center, the Jindal School center that sponsors Leadership Challenge. “The actual CEO frames up the significant challenge that he/she faced and how they dealt with it. The emotion, passion, agony perhaps, is evident in the direct stories from the person who experienced it. It’s like a case study, but with the real person.”
Hoag says attendance to the sessions is deliberately kept small. A handful of seats remain in the Keyes event, which runs 8 a.m. to noon, Friday, May 15, at the Jindal School. Also speaking is Jackie Kimzey, executive director of the UT Dallas Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Additional information is available from Dr. Jeffrey Hicks, the center’s academic director, Jeff.Hicks@utdallas.edu; registration is online.
