Stephen Bailey
A Conversation With EY Entrepreneur Of The Year,
01
Rita McGrath / Thought Sparks
It isn’t just anyone who can run an organization that has an impact on tens of thousands of leaders in over 100 countries, but ExecOnLine co-founder Stephen Bailey is that person. Prompted by a sense that access to high-quality online education could unleash career breakthroughs for diverse talents, the fastgrowing company is a leader in its category.
The online executive education revolution
It was about 10 years ago that I was invited to participate in a partnership between Columbia Executive Education and ExecOnline. Though the idea of online education wasn’t new, the people at ExecOnLine seemed to have cracked many of its traditional problems. These include lack of engagement, boring course design, the inability to do the rich networking that takes place in traditional executive education programs and lack of choice and flexibility in the selection of faculty. These are all reasons why the promise of MOOC’s have proven so disappointing.
Stephen Bailey was born and raised in New Orleans, to Black professional parents who deeply understood the value of education. His mother was a psychiatrist and his dad a dentist. As he waggishly likes to say, “I’m good from the neck up.”
So who is this guy?
Founding, growing and scaling bespoke Executive Education
Bailey built an ecosystem of relationships that allowed ExecOnline to create a platform for its future growth. He knew that he would have to differentiate his company from MOOC’s, and even more from the for-profit business programs that had acquired a well-deserved reputation for poor quality. Instead, his programs would be designed in partnership with 7 top schools: Yale School of Management; Haas School at the University of California at Berkeley; Columbia University; Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania; the University of Chicago Booth School; and the International Institute for Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland.
The diversity agenda, reinforced
10
ExecOnLine also supports organizations in their efforts to promote more diverse and inclusive workplaces through its Development Equity Council. It promises to put real teeth behind such efforts through removing bias from selection processes, optimizing development opportunity design, and using data to track and benchmark progress. Without tools such as these, real progress in promoting more diverse and equitable leadership ranks is going to be slow and incredibly frustrating.
With a consistent track record of successful growth, and recognition as one of the EY Entrepreneurs of the Year for 2022, Bailey’s company would seem to be well on its way to having the impact he dreamed of a decade ago. Yet, like all of us, the pandemic and other major inflection points have thrown all of our best-laid plans into disarray.
Challenges moving forward
03
We’re launching our own Discovery Driven Growth / Customer insight course next month! Designed to be taken while you’re working, it features 6 mini-courses that are on-line plus 6 hours of live online office hours with me, downloads, templates, tools and now continuing education credits!
Meanwhile, at Valize
14
https://thoughtsparks.substack.com/
