For corporations, there is just one message to come out of the recession about business school executive development programmes: it is a buyers’ market where the customer is king. And for most business schools, there is also only a single message: rethink your business model if you want to survive.

Customer responsiveness, total quality management and global sensitivity – all topics on which business professors can expound at length – now have to be part of what business schools practise as well as what they preach. Gone are the days when a business school could run a course because it had a professor who understood the subject; customer need has now become paramount.

With both training companies and management consultancies encroaching on the patch of the traditional business education providers, schools have seen 2-3 years of painful decline in revenues from executive education programmes. Now they hope that business is returning. But getting back to the glory days of 2006 will take time, says Steve Burnett, associate dean of executive education at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, Illinois. Executive education “tends to tank fast, then take a few years to recover”, he says. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, “it took us 4-5 years to dig ourselves out of the hole”, he adds.