The Corporate University Workbook: Launching the 21st Century Learning Organization

Introduction

Getting the Most from This Resource

THE CORPORATE UNIVERSITY WORKBOOK will help you design, develop, and implement a corporate university in your organization quickly and effectively. It is the result of many years of work building corporate universities and working with clients to help them put corporate universities into action. Because of its straightforward, practical methodology, it should eliminate or reduce the need for expensive consultants. You will find this book useful whether you work in a small company or a large one, and whether you work in the nonprofit or for-profit sector.

Audience

This workbook is written for anyone who is faced with creating, developing, or improving the learning capacity of his or her organization. Whether you are a CEO or COO, a vice president of human resources, a training or development director or manager, or just someone who has been chartered with creating a better learning function for your organization, you will find this book useful. Regardless of your previous experience, you will be able to adapt the explanations, questionnaires, and templates to your organization.

How This Book Is Organized

Within the eleven chapters of this book, you will find a combination of best practices from the experiences of others and step-by-step processes that take you from the initial vision for your corporate university through to its implementation and assessment. Each chapter is designed to educate and inform you about a particular step in the design and implementation of the corporate university, and also to provide you with tools, templates, and activities that will help you, and those working with you, to think through the issues and create action plans. Most chapters offer brief case studies of successful and not so successful practices that existing corporate universities have gone through.

How to Use This Book

This is a hands-on book, put together so that you and a small team of associates can work through the creation and launch of your corporate university. We have tried to organize the chapters in the same order as that used by successful corporate universities. Therefore, we recommend that you start with Chapter One and take whatever time is needed to gather data or information, complete the activities, and flesh out the provided template. Then move on to Chapter Two and so forth. Each chapter is the springboard to the next one.

The Corporate Education Survey that is included in Chapter One is designed as a tool to help you calibrate the quality and characteristics of your current education efforts. Your score on this survey will provide some idea of how much effort will be required to move your education function to higher levels of usefulness and effectiveness. Take the survey yourself, give copies to all the people helping you design the corporate university, and distribute it to as many other people as you can. This composite view will give you two benefits: (1) it will establish a baseline view of your current activities (even if the view turns out to be painful to hear) and (2) it will give you an idea of which aspects of your education function need improvement. You can give this survey again after the corporate university has been in place for a while and track your progress.

What’s on the CD-ROM?

The enclosed CD-ROM contains all the templates that are found in this book in a format suitable for printing, along with detailed explanations of how best to use the templates. Also included on the CD-ROM is the Corporate Education Survey for you to use in assessing organizational readiness.

A Website

We have also created a website to provide additional information and assistance as you design and build your corporate university. The website can be accessed at www.corpuworkbook.com.

Key Terms

To ensure that all readers have a common understanding of some key terms used in this workbook, we offer the following definitions of three frequently misunderstood terms:

Human Capital

There are three types of capital in organizations: financial, physical, and human. Financial and physical assets are well understood and are the basis of valuing organizations for the stock market. However, the employees and other stakeholders of any organization contribute their time, ideas, thoughts, and energy to the success of the organization. It is increasingly believed by experts, such as Peter Senge (1990) of MIT, who wrote The Fifth Discipline, and Thomas Davenport (1999), author of Human Capital, that this human contribution is the most significant to the success of any organization.

Learning Organization

A learning organization is an organization capable of profitably adapting to change, of engaging people in group problem solving, and of challenging the status quo to remain creative and competitive.

Stakeholders

Your stakeholders include everyone who learns from, contributes to, or has a financial stake in your organization’s knowledge. Stakeholders include management, employees, customers, and suppliers.

Chapter 1

The Value of a Corporate University

A LOT OF TRAINING organizations have changed their name to corporate university, but they really aren’t doing things differently. A true corporate university (CU) has moved beyond training and education and into the daily challenge of getting results. It provides leadership in supporting people and processes to achieve bottom-line success for the organization.

Company A has received accolades as a learning organization for years. Its corporate university has committees, an annually reviewed curriculum, and a rotating plan for employees to take a set number of courses each year. Unfortunately, when you talk to the employees, they see learning as a time-consuming outtake from their daily work. The courses may have individual appeal but have little to do with their jobs. Their managers allow them to go, and give lip service to learning, but in reality they do not see the value. The days of this corporate university are numbered.

The value of QVC University is evident from the improved performance of QVC employees. The company’s top executives conceived the university and implemented with a clear mission. As manager of human resources development, Susan Osciak defines the mission of QVC in terms of two goals: to provide employees with a venue to acquire business knowledge and to share best practices to foster continuous individual and organizational effectiveness.

Courses are defined by the question: What do QVC people need to know about the business to increase their performance and role, jobs, and functions? That question is asked and answered by a network of people in strategic positions across the organization. The value is clear from performance.

In this chapter, we will equip you with some background on how effective learning has added measurable value to all facets of organizations. You will learn how to build support for the corporate university, and how to prepare an effective business case for the creation of a corporate university. A survey at the end of this chapter will help you assess how your current educational activities are perceived, and will set the stage for preparing a solid business case for the corporate university.

What Is the Value of a Corporate University to Your Organization?

The corporate university is not primarily about how to deliver learning or how to carry forth the organization’s culture. Rather it is about an emerging multidisciplinary view of learning as a key factor in organizational success. Most executives agree about the value of having a learning organization, and statistics demonstrate that the best talent, innovation, and productivity are centered in organizations that grasp the meaning of learning at a deep level. Laurie Bassi and Daniel McMurrer, the chairwoman and chief research officer, respectively, at Knowledge Asset Management, a money management firm in Bethesda, Maryland, tracked for three years the performance of companies that spent at least twice as much as other firms on employee development. Their findings are clear: firms with the largest investments in people performed 17 to 35 percent better on the Standard & Poor’s (S&P) index over that period. In addition, their research shows that companies that invest more money in training perform better on the stock market than companies that invest less (Bassi & McMurrer, 2002). Unfortunately, many organizations only understand learning on a surface level and make only cosmetic changes to old training and development departments.

A corporate university should:

Have a direct and acknowledged impact on the business performance of the organization.

Have a direct and acknowledged impact on individuals at the targeted level.

Act as a hub for knowledge collection and dissemination.

Integrate organization development, change management, training, career and leadership development, and knowledge management.

Push individuals and the organization into thinking and acting outside of established or familiar patterns of learning—whether in what they learn or in how they learn it.

The corporate university is far more comprehensive than a training and development function and provides, in its ideal incarnation, a talent development process that supplies the organization the talent it needs to meet competitive challenges. Table 1.1 gives you some idea of how a corporate university differs from the traditional training and development function in its orientation and impact on profitability and perceived value.

TABLE 1.1 Corporate University Focus and Perceived Value

The points above compose an ideal definition, and we do not know of any corporate university that has achieved all its elements. General Electric’s John F. Welch Leadership Institute at Crotonville has probably come the closest. It has provided GE with the leadership it has needed to remain more than competitive in a time when its major competitors (Westinghouse, Raytheon, and others) have suffered. It pioneered work out, a challenging leadership development process, and it has been the center of the development of future scenarios for strategic thinking.

Throughout this book, we will be working with you to help you define and position your corporate university. It will be essential for you to understand and continually prove that there is bottom-line value from the kind of learning you will offer through your corporate university.

Take a few minutes and complete Exercise 1.1 on page 8. This may seem like a trivial activity—after all, you simply may have been asked to create the corporate university with no obvious, compelling reason. However, by completing this activity you will force yourself, and we hope the others you include in writing this statement, to put into words the thoughts and ideas of all those who have had a hand in getting you to this point. You may need to interview a few of the executives in your organization or get a cross-section of interested employees to help you.

EXERCISE 1.1

The Value of Your Corporate University

Before continuing, please take a few moments to write what you believe will be the greatest value of a corporate university to your organization. In other words, why are you trying to create one at all?

The Value of Learning

As Shoshana Zuboff (1988) says in her book, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power, Learning is the new form of labor (p. 395). Indeed, more than 2.5 million manufacturing jobs have gone away since the start of the economic slowdown in the United States in the year 2000. Most of those jobs will not return. The western world is moving from manual-labor intensive, manufacturing-based economies to those based on the use of human intellect and thought.

Labor is now thought of as talent. Employees are moving from being regarded as a pair-of-hands that execute whatever a manager tells them to execute to being thought of as partners and contributors to the organization’s success. In her book, The Company of the Future, Frances Cairncross (2002) of The Economist magazine says, "The value of the business increasingly lies not in factories or fleets of trucks, the sort of assets that appear on the balance