ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the preparation of executives to lead today's organisations. There are some real differences for crafting a strategy for this level of any organisation. The fundamental premise of the chapter is that there are significant differences in crafting an executive development strategy because the work of executives is vitally different from the work of managers. The majority of larger organisations with international operations accept the desirability of developing executives to run global operations by having some international exposure. A pharmaceutical company, for example, might decide that all senior executives irrespective of functional background need to gain real exposure either in drug development or in sales and marketing. Action learning has the advantage of being run in real time on problems that are relevant to the business and organisational change. Integrating these practices themselves into the heart of company processes ensures that they will have some degree of permanence and contribute to the organisations performance.
