Then, three years later when Hamilton was back at Institute and the week had almost ended, the former Indiana representative approached Pinkham again, this time during lunch. “I got a call from Jim Baker,” he said, “and they want to create something called the Iraq Study Group and make me a co-chair, which means I really need to get back to Washington immediately.” Pinkham, figuring Hamilton was about to cancel his last class, started to say that everyone would understand, but Hamilton interrupted. “Anyway, I don’t want to miss my final class. Do you think the students would be OK if we did it over lunch?”

This is the kind of thing that can and does happen at Council executive education programs, where the participants are enthusiastic and the speakers are dedicated. Institute is the most senior offering in the Council’s education lineup, with just 35 individuals selected to be in a class that returns over a course of three years for four days of immersive study.

What is equally impressive, however, is that the experts at Council Institutes, conferences, workshops and webinars are often Council members themselves, sharing their experience and insights with each other. They do this as speakers, of course, but also as participants during breakout sessions and at meals, receptions and other informal settings. The networking opportunities are unsurpassed.

“That has been intentional since we began to expand the Council’s professional development offerings in the late 1990s,” Pinkham says. “We always look for the best speakers, and we try to find leading thinkers who welcome discussion with our members.” Besides Hamilton, Institute participants have learned from people such as former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge; Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich; President of the German Marshall Fund Heather Conley; the late Julian Bond, former chair of the NAACP; and NPR National Political Correspondent Mara Liasson. But what is always impressive is that public affairs professionals who attend these events produce some of the most valuable insights.

“We conclude the Institute with a capstone session in which we fill a flip chart with all the unique, surprising and practical things we learned over the past week – and then we type up that list and send it to everyone. It’s not only a great summary, it’s a collection of important observations and creative ideas.”

“In high-end programs like Institute, we realized early on that we were competing in some respects with the most prestigious business school executive ed programs,” Pinkham says. “In terms of curriculum, faculty and participants, we wanted our programs to be every bit as substantial as those offered by Stanford, Harvard, MIT or Wharton. As you can tell, we take this stuff seriously.”

And because Institute is spaced out over three years, classmates often become friends, colleagues and allies, sharing their experience and insights with each other not only during their time together but afterward as well, sometimes throughout their careers.

‘Complete Professional Development Curriculum’

When Pinkham assumed the presidency in 1997, the Council hosted some 30 conferences and workshops each year, with a total of about 1,000 people in attendance at those events. Annual participation has risen dramatically since then to more than 8,000 attendees taking part in nearly 100 conferences, workshops, webinars, study tours and roundtable discussions. The Council now provides a complete professional development curriculum for public affairs professionals, serving members and nonmembers alike.

“In just the first six months of this year, our European office alone conducted webinars and workshops for 1,200 people,” Pinkham says. “That’s more participants than at all Council events in 1997. There was a time when we used to get 25 people attending a strategic planning workshop in the U.S.; but last year we had more than 200 sign up for a remote workshop on strategic planning! The numbers say a lot, but we believe the quantity — impressive as it is — is just a reflection of the quality of the programs we offer.”

While the Public Affairs Institute might be regarded as the Council’s flagship executive offering, other programs continue to meet the demand for a broad array of training and education for professionals in fields such as political involvement, digital advocacy, policy communications, and social impact.

The annual National PAC Conference and The Advocacy Conference (the latter rebranded from the Grassroots Conference in 2017) have more than doubled in size, while newer signature events including the Digital Media & Advocacy Summit, Government Relations & Policy Conference (formerly the State & Local Government Relations Conference) and STRIDE: A Social Impact Summit, continue to grow in popularity.

In addition, the Council now offers three certification programs, in which participants can earn certificates in Public Affairs Management, PAC and Grassroots Management and Government Relations and Lobbying. The groundbreaking member benefit program Membership Plus, which launched in 2022, offers unlimited participation in more than 40 workshops a year, increasing attendance by over 150% since its first year.

Although some programs associated with prestigious business schools have been in existence for more than 100 years (Wharton was established in 1881), the Council’s offerings have, in their own way, remained ahead of the curve. They have been innovative at a time of great change in both business and education.

An honors graduate of the College of Wooster, Pinkham first became aware of a growing need for more sophisticated approaches to executive education when he helped organize conferences for the American Gas Association, where the Cleveland native served as vice president of communications before coming to the Council.

“The world in which public affairs professionals must operate has gotten increasingly complex in recent years,” Pinkham says. “We are operating in political and economic systems that are vastly different from what they were even 10 years ago. Globalization, geopolitics, the rise of the Internet, climate change, the pandemic, have brought all kinds of challenges. That’s why the topics we explore through our conferences, webinars and workshops, and especially at the Public Affairs Institute, are as sophisticated as the people who practice public affairs. They not only need to understand government relations; they need to understand risk management, global strategy, economic trends and strategic communications.”

No Longer ‘Transactional’

Public affairs, he explains, is now more complicated than even its own most accomplished leaders could have imagined 50 years ago. “Public affairs these days is not as transactional as it was once believed to be — trying to get a bill sponsored or killed, for example — it’s multidisciplinary,” Pinkham explains. “It requires broad experience, knowledge of public policy and business issues, specialized expertise and high emotional intelligence.”

“Success at public affairs often depends on good judgment. There might be only one way to meet a challenge in a field like accounting, but public affairs is not like that. There may be a wide variety of ways to approach a public affairs challenge and achieve a desired outcome. And that outcome itself, in many cases, may be a moving target. It might require launching a coalition, for example, that plays out over years and changes over time, influencing the way a global problem is understood and addressed.”

To that end, the Council — just like major business schools — uses real-life case studies, involving member companies and associations.

Attendees at Council events, for example, have learned how, for more than 10 years, Novo Nordisk has been working in Houston and other cities around the world to improve the diets of local citizens and combat diabetes and other chronic diseases. Attendees have also gotten the benefit of presentations on how Walmart, as part of its corporate communications strategy, now manages eight global corporate websites to further its brand storytelling through consistent messaging.

Beyond Zoom Calls

The Council has prioritized keeping in step with the pace of change in the profession. “We’re prepared for the future because we have made it a priority, hiring people who share this vision for our growth as individual public affairs professionals and as an organization. We were developing ‘virtual’ programs six years before the pandemic,” he says. “We weren’t just doing Skype calls. We were using an outside production company, figuring out this new world when others were just waking up to it.”

Having a strong virtual program already in place meant attendance immediately surged during the pandemic. It still remains strong and with nearly 50% of attendees tuning in from outside the D.C. area, Council executive education is even more far reaching.

Demand for executive education has continued to grow well after the post-pandemic recovery. Tom O’Toole, associate dean for executive education at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern and a senior advisor at McKinsey, expects the sector to grow at an 11% rate globally, reaching $110 billion by 2031, “driven by factors that are separate from and will endure after the pandemic.”

The accelerating pace of change, O’Toole writes in Forbes, “challenges even the most progressive” organizations and individuals to keep pace, though the “largely unheralded driver of the growing popularity of executive education is the great expansion of accessibility [through emerging platforms].”

But the major business schools “do not, for the most part, have the cutting-edge skills in digital technologies and learning management systems that are vital in the emerging online market,” according to Ram Shivakumar of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.

Here too the Council seems well positioned for the future. Its people — leadership, staff and members — will of course remain its greatest competitive advantage.

When Pinkham first approached Tom Nichols, a professor emeritus of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval College, instructor at the Harvard Extension School and Atlantic staff writer, to convince him to join the 2024 Institute faculty, the Council president made exactly this point.

“You’ll love the audience,” Pinkham told Nichols. “They are a bunch of liberal arts graduates who read books, have strong opinions — and they have a sense of humor.”

“They sound like my people,” replied Nichols — a smart, five-time undefeated “Jeopardy” champion who is one of those guys who knows something about everything.

“They’re my people, too,” Pinkham said.

And?

Nichols accepted the invitation.