Exec-Ed Strategy — Set the Portfolio at Liffey Business School

A four-round, advanced executive-education strategy simulation set inside Liffey Business School — Executive Development (LBS-ED), the exec-ed arm of a leading Irish university business school in Dublin (€22M revenue, 24% operating margin, 35 staff plus a faculty pool of 55). On 19 January 2026 three pressures converge on the annual strategy review: the Financial Times custom ranking has dropped 6 places (from #28 to #34, with a board-signalled strategic review if it falls below the top 40), the university finance office has raised the annual surplus target by €1.5M to fund a new campus building, and two anchor corporate clients worth a combined €3.1M/year are being courted by INSEAD and a fast-growing online provider while custom repeat business has slipped from 78% to 69%. Faculty utilization sits at 88%, near the ceiling, and a fixed €4.0M faculty-investment budget must cover delivery, research time (an FT ranking input that is non-billable this year), new-programme development and practitioner recruitment. Playing the Director of Executive Development, the team (1) reads the position — separating the lines that fund the unit from the lines that position it; (2) sets the portfolio mix and capacity allocation across open, custom and qualifications against the 88% utilization ceiling, deciding what to grow, hold or prune; (3) allocates the €4.0M faculty budget between billable delivery and the research/development that sustains ranking and pipeline, and sets a pricing posture under the market-positioning constraint; and (4) commits the strategy and defends the surplus-vs-ranking trade-off, an anchor-client retention play, and an explicit strategic sacrifice to the executive board and FT-conscious dean. The math rewards a custom-led, research-funding, premium-where-earned, anchor-protecting strategy and punishes the five classic errors — surplus over position, blind across-the-board price rises, growing every line past the ceiling, ignoring the €3.1M anchors, and spending the whole budget on delivery with no pipeline. Final KPIs track FT Ranking trajectory, Surplus vs the +€1.5M target, Client Retention %, and Faculty Utilization against the 88% ceiling.