Grow as a Leader with Emerging Leaders Program

Are you a team leader? Are you responsible for managing people or financial resources? Are you preparing for an expanded leadership role or wishing to strengthen you leadership capabilities? If you answered yes to any of these questions, our Emerging Leaders Program is right for you.

Emerging Leaders is a nine-day program consisting of three three-day sessions. Each session is approximately four weeks apart, allowing time for project development and one-on-one coaching. It is designed to enhance the leadership skills of professionals by focusing on clarity as the essence of leadership. Our program utilizes an introspective and experiential approach to examine the leadership capacities of individual attendees, increase their ability to develop robust leadership skills and demonstrate greater organizational understanding.

Throughout the program, attendees are facilitated in developing their own internal capacities for clarifying strategic organizational issues by participating in team projects, individual assignments, action learning, benchmarking, and personal coaching.

Registration is now open for our Spring 2010 cohort. Sign up today!

Communication is Key

One of the goals of our Emerging Leaders Program is to help participants foster effective communication with their co-workers. We'd like to foster that very skill with our clients--you.

For almost a year now, you've been able to follow us on Twitter, become our fan on Facebook, and read this blog. Now, you can also live chat with us on our web page. Give it a try! We'd love to hear from you.

Go Green with Executive Education

Sustainable business practices continue to grow in importance to organizations across the country. Executive Education recognizes this and has partnered with the University of Arkansas Applied Sustainability Center to offer many new courses in this emerging field.

The mission of the Applied Sustainability Center is to lead organizations in the retail and consumer goods industries toward sustainable practices that support an economy built around people, planet, and profit. This is accomplished by solving complex problems, providing expert guidance, brokering problems and solutions, and by sponsoring research.

On September 30, we held our first sustainability course, the Wal-Mart Supplier Sustainability Assessment. This 90-minute program was available both in-person and online.

November will be a very green month at the Reynolds Center, with two sustainability courses on the schedule. They are the following:

Corporate Greenhouse Gas Inventory
This course is available in-person and online.
Stakeholders are beginning to expect companies to report their corporate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and to publicly set reduction goals. This one-day course will give participants the knowledge and tools needed to compile their GHG inventory in accordance with generally accepted protocols and to publish information to the Carbon Disclosure Project. Participants will learn the basics of greenhouse-gas science, understand the GHG Protocol and Scope 1, Scope 2 and Scope 3 emissions, and review the Carbon Disclosure Project and other major sustainability reporting outlets. Students will also be trained on simple tools to help them collect data, calculate their footprint, and set achievable reduction targets.
Date and Time: November 12, 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM
Cost: $145
This course is limited to 60 in-person participants.

Life Cycle Assessment for Managers and Executives
This course is available in-person only.
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a powerful tool for understanding the impacts of a product or service across its entire life, from the extraction of a raw material to use and disposal. As LCA and product sustainability reporting become more mainstream, managers and executives across functional areas need to understand LCA so they can incorporate it in their decision making processes. This one-day course gives participants the ability to do just that. Participants will review LCA theory and work through LCA case studies to gain experience in interpreting and making decisions based on product sustainability information.
Date and Time: November 17, 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Cost: $695

For more information on these and other sustainability programs, please visit our website.

Forecasting is About More than the Weather

Executive Education is excited to offer three new courses in November. Dr. Matthew Waller, the Garrison Endowed Chair in Supply Chain Management at the Sam M. Walton College of Business, will be teaching these classes focused on Retail Forecasting.

Each of these one-day courses will be taught in a computer lab with sample data sets to analyze. Participants will be given three-ring binders and copies of slides with areas for capturing notes.

Below are the highlights and dates of the programs.

Order Forecasting

November 6

In this course participants will learn how to use good information in shipment and order data and combine it with the information in POS. Each participant will be capable of explaining which forecast measure should be used and will be able to interpret the measure.

Forecasting New Items or New Promotional Interventions

November 13

Sometimes there is insufficient data or unusually large changes are expected. In those cases, the traditional approaches to forecasting are inappropriate. This is often true with new items. It is also true when new promotional interventions are used. In those cases, very uncommon forecasting techniques are required.

POS and Demand Forecasting

November 20

Upon completion of this course, participants will be able to determine the appropriate forecasting method and how to apply it. They will also be able to identify errors in existing forecasting approaches. The focus will be on replenished items and will include items with or without trend and seasonality, but we will also consider methods to incorporate promotional activity. Each participant will be capable of explaining which forecast error measure should be used and will be able to interpret the measure. They will also learn to compare forecast accuracies.

For more information, contact our office at (479) 575-2856 or visit our website.

No Wedding-Bell Blues at the Reynolds Center

Our Wedding Planner Showcase was a great success, and we'd like to thank the participating local vendors for their involvement. We'd also like to thank the representatives from the University's Panhellenic sororities who modeled for our She Said Yes! Bridal Fashion Show. We had a great turn out!

To see more pictures from the Wedding Planner Showcase, visit our Facebook page.

Brides! Come One, Come All to the Reynolds Center!

On Tuesday, October 20, the Donald W. Reynolds Center will be host to a variety of local wedding and event planning services for a Wedding Planner Showcase! Cakes, flowers, dresses, and more! There will even be a fashion show featuring models from each Greek sorority on campus.

When: Tuesday, October 20 from 1:00 to 5:00 pm

Where: Donald W. Reynolds Center for Enterprise Development, University of Arkansas

The event will feature door-prizes and free samples. Admission is free! Whether your wedding is in ten weeks or ten years, you won't want to miss this bridal extravaganza.

Help Us Help You

Executive Education is here to serve you. We want to offer the kind of professional development programs and training that will benefit you, your employees, and your organization. To serve you better, we'd like to know what you need. What kind of training would best help your organization? What professional development issues have you noticed in your workplace?

Help us create the programs and courses that will make your organization more successful. Tell us what you want by leaving a comment on this blog or on our Facebook page, or you can email our office.