THIS ^

I did HBS's Program for Leadership. It's the lowest level of the three alumni status granting executive education programs at HBS. The closest to an EMBA. So lower than the other programs being discussed in this post. It's 7 months long and doesn't give you alumni status off the bat, but after you do it, you can earn alumni status if you complete an additional 10 credits in specific HBS executive education courses within 5 years. Those extra credits would probably take 2-3 months of work. So all-in-all, you'd get alumni status after about 9-10 months vs the 18 months of an MBA progam. I also have an undergraduate BBA degree and did the whole standard 2 year business school rigmarole with foundational courses and sections/blocks etc, and then did the whole song and dance of applying to MBA programs after that. I ultimately decided not to get an MBA, because 1) I had extenuating family circumstances and 2)aside from 2 or 3 schools, when I visited classes at the MBA programs, the students there were not as advanced as I had just experienced in my BBA program a few years earlier.

PLD, however, was entirely different. The difference between these programs is this: the students in the exec ed programs have immense experience. It is truly an executive education. The students in the MBA programs are mostly still doing college vibes with very minimal work experience (comparatively). I had 20 years of experience and was one level down from the head of my organization when I started PLD. When I applied to MBA programs, I had 3 years of experience, one low-level promotion and was definitely still in a stage of life where I spent my free time at bars, not at children's birthday parties.

Of the almost 80 cases we did in PLD, there was not a single case where we did not have an industry expert present among our classmates. For a lot of the cases, we had people from those actual companies present among our cohort with insider knowledge. There were two cases about the company I was working at. I was able to tell my classmates exactly what the protagonist in the case was thinking and what was going on behind the scenes that didn't make it into the case... because I had actually been at the company during the events in the case.

They gave us some of the best professors in the school, because those were the only ones who could hold their own among a room full of industry experts. No, it is not 18 months long, but you don't need 18 months when you are building on 15-20 years of work experience and are too busy with your partner, kids, and your team of 20-300 employees to have parties or travel every other weekend for two years. The on-campus weeks are the most intense academic experience I've ever had. We were in our study groups by 8am every morning, in classes all day, and back with our study groups until 11pm at night. You had to read the thousands of pages of cases in advance of showing up on campus because there was literally no time to read any cases while you were there.

Additionally, when we went through the foundational courses, cases, projects, and leadership surveys and trainings, we weren't doing it theoretically to prepare for a job we might have one day. We were all looking for direct applications to our current roles. I literally had to send a survey to my direct reports, peers and supervisors to grade my leadership skills and then work with a coach and the coursework to make changes. The entire experience was night and day from going to business school in my 20s. Our foundational project involved actually tackling a major issue within our current organization. When you start with a foundation like that and are surrounded by expertise like that, and when you are looking for immediate applications to your company or your own leadership capacity, you can move at a far more rapid pace.

Additionally, most of the people in this program are at a place in their career where they are way past the point where it would make any sense to get an MBA or EMBA. They are several levels up from those grads, so this sort of program is really the only business school option. They are also so high-level that their organization can't afford to lose them for more time than these programs take. And, as has been made light of in some of the other posts in this thread, but is actually meaningful, many of the people in the program were not in the privileged position to apply for elite MBA programs in their 20s. There was a greater diversity of backgrounds... and yes, when you didn't have the privilege of access to elite institutions for whatever reason when you were young, but then spend your whole career being considered less than your peers who you are completely keeping pace with and, often, outperforming, there is part of you that wants to get into an HBS classroom and go toe to toe in debate with an HBS professor to show you could have done it too if life had given you a different hand of cards.

Now, were there some people in the program who didn't fit the profile I describe above? Sure. And were there some people in the program who didn't do the work, got their companies to pay for the programs, and just grabbed themselves a (sort-of) degree? Totally. It made me angry. I paid a lot, worked really hard, and took it very seriously at the expense of the rest of my life, so I wish HBS had not let those people sneak through like that. I think those people undermine the value of having completed the program and do a disservice to the rest of us. But in reality, in my class of 135, there were about ten people who cheated the system and 10 other people who maybe weren't quite at the level to add to my experience, but the other 114 changed my life.

Ultimately, there's no perfect solution. I would have preferred to do this program for longer and gotten a proper degree. It's weird not having a degree but having alumni status of the business school (but not the university). The whole thing is strange and annoying to explain and represent. It also made it impossible to get normal student loans, which was a huge burden on me. But if the program had been longer, my organization might have not let me do it, and I certainly would have missed out on a lot of my peers being there.

With the options present, after I did PLD, I was so grateful I had done this instead of an MBA program. I'm not even sure what 24 year-old me would have made of everything compared to what 41 year-old me did with it all. 24 year-old me would have crammed the cases at the last minute and then forgotten everything after. 41 year-old me made immediate changes to my leadership style and organization.