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Reviews the role of non‐degree executive education in business schools. Suggests a focus on providing value to the external customer in executive education as a proactive way to force relevancy in teaching and research within business schools. Reviews strategies and policies associated with implementing such a focus on customer value. Discusses an executive education customer value‐determination system, which operationalizes some of these themes.

University‐based executive education is big business, attracting the attention and resources of senior management in organisations. Surprisingly, a limited amount of research has been directed at the attendees themselves and even less research uses theory to understand the activity. This study targets executive attendees (n=245) and applies an action frame of reference to more deeply understand the issues surrounding their attendance at these programmes. Without that clear understanding, it is impossible to know if the time and money for this activity is being properly allocated.

This study aims to examine the day‐to‐day problems that managers face in trying to be effective and the resources and solutions that they access as a means of dealing with these challenges.

This research summarizes the results of 185 interviews with managers employed at a broad range of levels and employers.

The managers were concerned with managing employee conflict, addressing employee performance and attitude issues, and finding employees who do not present these problems. Helpful advice came from the people around them rather than from print sources. The managers were unlikely to view consultants as sources of help.

In identifying relevant teaching from a managerial perspective, this study suggests that curriculum designers pay more attention to teamwork and generic skill sets. Future research should examine the implications of pedagogical approaches on the practice of management, employ a random sample of a larger group of managers in order to cross‐validate this study's results, and, given that there may be a disparity between managers' perceptions and practice, a follow‐up study is needed that examines day‐to‐day managerial practice.

This study proposes that management researchers and teachers may need to do a “Mintzbergian turn” and examine how much time they spend directly addressing the issues that are important to managers on a day‐to‐day basis. This study suggests that management educators may need to move beyond presenting managerial issues as a series of “topics” to be recalled by students at a later date. Rather, there is a need to consider what issues real managers grapple with and how they go about doing so.

This study's open‐ended research approach permitted the examination of what was most important to managers from their perspective.

This article reports on the development and assessment of a customized executive education experience, designed for the managers of a large financial services organization. It was designed to incorporate many of the desirable outcomes of “action learning” such as organizational impact and sustainability, while being more parsimonious in the involvement of senior executives and, in a single‐period design, in the time intensity of participant involvement. A total of 542 managers who participated in the program, over a four year period, were surveyed concerning the effectiveness of the program. Hypotheses are developed and the results examined to determine whether participants believed that the value of their learning diminished over time, the effects of demographic characteristics, and the extent to which the sharing of the learning and support of organizational colleagues affected participants’ perception of the program’s effectiveness. Results reveal less degradation over time than anticipated, and more powerful influence by subordinates, in sustaining learning.