Book review
The Corporate University Workbook
By Kevin Wheeler
Published 2005
Pfeiffer
Review by Donald Clark, Epic
Corporate University in a box
Want to design, develop and deliver a corporate university?
Then this book promises to deliver. You also get a CD tucked in
the back full of templates and a website www.corpuworkbook.com.
This is a sort of Corporate University Plan in a box, with tools,
templates and a walk through process.
Wheeler was responsible for the Schwab University and is President
of Global Learning Resources. His view of a corporate university
is pretty demanding as it includes the whole gamut of training,
personal development, certification, knowledge management, change
management, research and development. WOW is that all! Of course,
there is no corporate university that does all of this.
Learning is the new form of labour
It starts with some interesting research from Laurie Vessi and
Daniel McMurrer, who looked at the correlation between employee
development spend and stock market performance. No cigar for guessing
that it resulted in a 17-35% improvement in performance. Zuboff
in her ‘In the Age of the Smart Machine: The future of Work
and Power’ is also quoted ‘Learning is the new form
of labour’. Similarly in The Company of the Future by Frances
Cairncross, who made the now familiar claim about skills, expertise
and creativity being more important than muscles.
The advantage of the ‘Corporate University’ tag is
that it is a useful conceptual peg upon which you can hang the learning
hat. Their three-step solution is:
Step 1: Develop a business case
Step 2: Do a survey to see how you are perceived
Step 2: Build your design team
Their initial, simple template for determining the business case
is quite useful with practical advice on how to do an education
survey.
Strategic direction and vision
Chapter 2 is about selecting a strategic direction and vision. It
outlines most of the major strategic drivers such as:
- Skills and development
- Customer focus
- Change management
- Strategic business focus
- Initiative driven
- Research/academic drivers
Scope and stakeholders
Chapter 3 recommends an approach to determining the scope, stakeholders
and operating principles with governance quick on its heels. The
problem with governance is that too many are a problem, they tend
to do too much theorising and tend to be packed with HR and training
people. All of these are mistakes, according the Wheeler. The right
balance for him is seven at the most, drawn from key areas of the
business. The template is again very useful, asking all the right
questions.
Then we get down to organisational structure. He has four models:
1. Centralised
2. Decentralised
3. Federal
4. Hybrid
For each he identifies the sort of organisation to which it is
most suited. This is a little crude. There are many more factors
in this decision than his theory suggests. The culture of an organisation
will often determine the model, not a matching of actual needs.
Staffing a corporate university is interesting. It falls apart
here as the outsourcing versus in-sourcing issue is inadequately
dealt with. Most successful corporate universities are not DIY jobs.
They rely on outsourcing for advice, technology, content and services.
This ‘go it alone’ strategy is seen as a given –
it is not and should have been dealt with in the earlier chapters.
On funding he presents some useful models:
- Corporate Allocation Model
- Partial of Full recovery model
- Profit Centre Model
The pros and cons for all three are fairly discussed.
Delivery methods
The chapter on delivery methods is similarly weak. It has no real
sophistication in the chosen methods nor a method by which an optimal
blend of options could be chosen. Although he does take note of
the excellent US Department of Labour Survey showing that most learning
is informal, not through formal training. As Charles Handy said
‘The best learning happens in real life with real problems
and real people and not in classrooms’ (The Age of Unreason
1989).
top
Marketing
He gets back on form with marketing to build a brand, relationships
and success. The ‘elevator speech’ technique is all
too easy. There’s an empty page you’re expected to fill
with your speech but this quickly develops into a whole raft of
useful suggestions for pre-launch, launch and post-launch activities.
To be frank you really do need professional help here. This is not
as easy as he suggests and you’re likely to end up with a
half-baked brand and poor marketing if you go it alone. Where he
does score is in simply recognising that marketing is important.
For most people in education and training its an afterthought, if
thought of at all. There’s the usual chapter on Kirkpatrick
at the end – a real disappointment.
Throughout the book there are small examples of Corporate Universities
such as QVC, Defence Acquisition Academy, Micropower University.
These are useful but woefully short. The book is a little like a
book on the general principles of cooking but devoid of recipes.
There’s a huge number and huge variety of these entities in
the real world. The book, by showing no real knowledge of these
efforts, is too abstract.
It does follow a change management structure, but I would have
preferred to see him anchor his steps in real change management
theory. Kotter, for example, offers an excellent eight-step theory
and one of these steps ‘celebrate early success’ could
have been a useful addition to the process.
Evidence
There are literally dozens of examples of major corporate universities
with the usual mix of models, successes and failures. There’s
perhaps another book to be written on what worked, what didn’t
work and why. Now that we have lots of rapid-development, bottom-up
activity, informal tools and user-created content, there’s
a useful debate around the whole idea of top-down versus bottom-up.
Is a top-down corporate university actually a rather dated idea?
New models of learning habitats have emerged, rather than the LMS-driven
behemoths we’ve seen rise and fall over the last few years.
I can’t think of a single coporate university in the UK that
hasn’t had serious problems with integration, cost, reputation
and purpose. They often seem so out of tune with the real needs
of organisations.
The book assumes that corporate universities are a good thing,
this may not be true. Rather annoyingly the book is without an index.
At several points I wanted to find things I had read previously
or wanted to see if a person (in this case Kotter) had been mentioned.
This is an expensive book from a lazy publisher (can’t blame
the authors).
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