New director: Expansion plans on the horizon for IU Executive Education

As the new director of IU Executive Education, John Courtney understands the bullet points on his resume may prompt questions.

He doesn’t come from a traditional leadership, academic, or training background. Instead, he spent more than three decades working in technology sales and sales leadership for companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and HP. But after a year of semi-retirement, he wanted to do more.

“I realized retirement wasn’t in my vocabulary,” Courtney laughs.

He had experienced a lot of organizational change over the years and came away with an important lesson about leadership.

“New leaders often make changes based on their ego rather than data,” he explains. “A good leader is humble enough to come into a leadership role and know they don’t know everything. We need humble, data-driven leadership.”

That’s been Courtney’s approach since arriving at Executive Education. He knew he wanted to serve in a positive way and felt he had valuable knowledge and experience to share. Leaders at the O’Neill School agreed. He says they appreciated that he brought something different to the table, like each of the directors before him.

“I have an entrepreneurial approach to how we might grow audiences for Executive Education and the O’Neill School,” he explains. “The search committee saw value in that and believed I could help expand in areas they hadn’t thought about before.”

Courtney’s vision for the future includes building on the organization’s established offerings in the international leadership space by developing new opportunities in Europe and additional options in Asia and Africa.

He also says Executive Education’s expertise in strategic planning will play a big role in the future expansion of the organization’s consulting projects.

“Strategic planning is the bailiwick of our consulting arm,” he says. “It’s highly valuable because it’s a different skill set. It’s a learned behavior and there’s a science to it. Leaders either need to develop that skill themselves or identify and support those in their organization who already have a talent for it. We can help them do both.”

While he remains committed to strengthening foundational training for high-quality leaders, he also plans to adapt to the realities of the modern workforce by offering more online and on-demand courses, tackling trending topics today’s leaders are wrestling with, like artificial intelligence.

“We intend to offer a new program centered on AI policy management to help leaders think about how to manage the use of AI within their organizations,” he says. “What guardrails do we need to put up? What’s ethical and what’s not ethical when using AI?”

For Courtney, this approach will not only grow Executive Education’s work, it also will expand the impact of its leadership lessons beyond a single generation.

“Our leadership programs have a ripple effect,” he says.

When Exec Ed students return to their places of work, they model their newly learned leadership skills for others within their organization.

“They can teach others how to be leaders who are humble, ethical, good listeners, and who think more about how they can best serve their organization rather than how they can glorify their own image,” Courtney stresses. “Then, when those people become leaders themselves, they can carry forth that legacy of servant leadership—which is critical to the future.”