Business Value

Stories waiting to be told….

I will have the privilege of working with the executive education directors of several of the world’s most prestigious business schools next week in Fontainebleau. I will begin my workshop by challenging the group with one single “fact,” “During a recent interview on management development, the DHR of one of Europe’s largest service companies confided to us that he could not recollect a single case in which the company had worked directly with a business school”. I will then ask each participant to discuss the significance of this “fact”: does it represent client pain, does it reflect on the problem facing European business schools, or does it provide on an opportunity for future work?

Facts hide stories waiting to be told….

Best practices in e-learning

Several of my colleagues and I are currently working on the European Community project eXel focusing on “best practices of e-learning in corporate education”. On the surface the project’s objectives seem simple enough, we need to interview business schools, experts and corporate clients to identify common themes and metrics used in the multitude of recent experiences in Europe and abroad. In digging a little deeper we’ve come to realize the difficulty of this task: success stories are both very few and very far between.

Can “best practice” ever be reconciled with pushing corporate learning outside the work place and the work day?

Patterns of experience

In a stately demure nestled in the well ordered harmony of Vienna, I had the opportunity to work this week with a number of “IT” consultants on the somewhat slippery concept of business value. In line with the sharply defined contours of Heldenplaz, several of the consultants attempted to paint a clear picture of the extent to which their past experience helps them with deal unexpected business challenges.  Why do most of us feel more comfortable living on past accomplishments than actively preparing for the future?

In this “place”

I had a rare feeling of my “place” in walking through the almost empty castle Neus Scholss last November 1rst in Oberschlessheim. The impression of the winds of time and space in strolling through dozens upon dozens of rooms populated solely with an art collection that rivals many national museums was a strange feeling indeed.  My impressions were probably quite different than those of the tens of thousands of visitors that pass through this site each summer weekend.  Their impressions are probably different still to those of Max Emmanuel who hoped the castle would provide a fitting setting for the future emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.

Can business schools and corporate universities build a proper setting to enhance corporate education?

One "right" solution?

Certain truths taught in management schools have trouble standing up to the realities of business:

• Most well run businesses know where they’re going.
• Mission statements, organizational charts and job descriptions tell us how organizations function.
• Every problem has one “right” solution.
• Everyone has an equal chance to succeed or to fail in business...

Is there a danger in fitting corporate reality into the neatly ordered boxes of the classical principles of management?

Learning from the shadows

One of my current Masters students pointed out an apparent paradox in two of this blogs’ entries: If learning should be tied woven into the fabric of the work place, why do most managers today fail to learn how to add value to their clients, teams and careers? The answer to this riddle can’t be found in the light of each company’s mission, organizational schema or procedures, but in studying the shadows of the informal networks that tie managers to their peers, clients, and business communities. What can we learn from the shadows to improve these social networks?

Practicing what we preach...

Like several European business schools, we will be hosting an evaluation team from the AACSB this week as part of our efforts to obtain another international (American) accreditation. We have been told that the team will be interviewing program managers and faculty to gage how we develop, deliver, and evaluate the content of management education. Is accreditation the key to a school’s competitive advantage in the years to come? To what extent should the value proposition of management education in general, and corporate education in particular, be tailored to the specificities of specific markets and corporate cultures?

Learning isn't compulsory...

If few would contest the W.E. Deming's contention that “learning is not compulsory but neither is survival”, why do managers have so much difficulty learning what needs to be done to add value to their clients, companies and careers? Why are companies progressively turning away from traditional higher education and towards alternative structures for training their workforce to focus on business value? What if anything has changed in what we need to learn to compete and to succeed in the work place?

What you sow is what you reap

Many consumer goods companies are learning new lessons about business value in the networked economy. Most management education institutions are not.

In the last few years, technology companies have created totally new communication devices, including mobile phones, PDAs, and virtual private networks. In a similar time span, consumers have increasingly focused their value judgments focused their value judgments on their appreciation of service quality than on of the characteristics of the products themselves. As a result, new opportunities for building business value stem from the companies that can develop market share across consumer dimensions. The irony of corporate education is that much of this knowledge is under-exploited, precisely because the current mindset is limited to ‘packageable’ program opportunities.

Deming's Dilemma

The story that Andreas sent along in response to an earlier contribution to this blog (included below in the comments), led me this week to come back to the potential dangers of assuming that the simple use of IT will help managers learn about business value.

If a manager’s principal challenge is adding value to his or her organization, we have to admit that the vast majority fail to rise up to this task. In the majority of cases, it’s not a question of their incompetence or their motivation, but a question of the failure to learn about what can true value their clients, their teams and their careers. Information technology in itself isn’t a magic wand; it can focus manager’s attention as easily on true roads to value as on false paths that endanger a firm’s culture and mission. In The Effective Organization, we identified several potential pathologies: