The triple bottomline in the classroom

Imagine a bunch of CEOs and senior executives attending drama classes or messing around with paints and scissors and coloured paper.

Actually, that's exactly what they're asked to do as part of the recently revamped four-week Oxford Advanced Management Programme (AMP) of Oxford University.

Drama classes that teach executives how to modulate their voices and project themselves and art and craft classes designed to stimulate creative thinking are all part of an exhaustive programme redesign that is aimed at addressing the new challenges of management that the C-suite faces in a globalising world.

But this is only part of a wider agenda. "It is becoming increasingly clear that for a CEO, a strategic focus on the bottom-line is no longer enough "" leaders need to take a much broader view of their role in the context of society as a whole," said Lalit Johri, programme director of the AMP and fellow in international studies at Oxford's Said Business School, and the architect of the redesigned AMP.

Now into its second year, the revamped AMP of the 800-year-old university is regarded as a trend-setter in the competitive world of business education where the "triple bottom-line" approach to business is being applied in the classroom.

Unlike traditional AMPs that tend to focus on the "hard" issues of management, the Oxford AMP has broadened its mandate to accommodate more of the "soft" side of management such as social and environmental issues and the corporation's role in society.

The idea of the redesign is to offer participants a more rounded idea of leadership that Johri, a former founder-director of the executive MBA programme at the Asian Institute of Technology, said is becoming imperative for the 21st century corporate leader.

To this end, the GBP 20,000-course has been reoriented so that at least two weeks of the four-week course focuses on various aspects of leadership.

The first week, for instance, is devoted to understanding global challenges and how they impact the organisation and the life of the manager.

The second week looks at organisational challenges that confront the leader and covers the classic managerial issues such as customer retention, customer value creation and so on.

The third week entitled "The Leader in You" is designed to help CEOs develop leadership competencies and confront the challenges of leading within their organisations. It covers such issues as "The leader as a performer" and "Inspirational Leadership" that examine new concepts in leadership such as "" as one participant put it "" the idea of the "servant leader."

The fourth, titled "Creating your Future" is devoted to developing the leadership agenda drawn from insights gained during the preceding week and addressing what participants are going to initiate once they return to work.

Overall, the effort is to deliver a more multi-dimensional view of leadership and of strategy that is more inclusive in nature. To this end, the curriculum includes case studies on social entrepreneurship "" Hindustan Unilever's Shaktiamma programme to empower rural women is one of them "" and Johri said more will be added.

Participants also get to meet people like Pete Goss, a British sailor who risked his life and sacrificed a winning lead in a prestigious round-the-world yatching race to save a French sailor for which he was later awarded France's highest civilian honour, the Legion d'Honneur.

Oxford University's AMP is held in June-July and October-November and attracts participants from 16 countries.