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Book Review
New &
Noteworthy
Corporate Universities
Jeanne
Meister
McGraw-Hill 1998
reviewed
by William H. Saunders
Corporate
university: The
strategic umbrella for developing and educating employees, customers,
and suppliers in order to meet an organization's business strategies.
(Meister)
Oxymoron:
a combination of contradictory or incongruous words. (Webster)
For
residential-campus-types, the semantics may amuse, but the realities do
not. The author is the head of a "corporate education consulting firm"--education,
not training. We traditionally associate knowledge/brains/education and
industry/brawn/training, but what's the difference when the driving economic
force is the knowledge industry? As computer programming moves toward
blue-collar labor, perhaps "corporate university" isn't quite such a contradiction
in terms.
Meister's
backdrop is the changing world of work in the global information economy.
Not much new here: corporations moving from fat and fixed to flat and
flexible, production lines from hot torch to high tech, workers from employment
to employability, educational requirements--driven by the decreasing half-life
of knowledge--from the four-year degree to a "40-year degree" with the
overriding job skill being the ability to learn (increasingly on one's
own and at a distance).
Meister's
selected data leads in a familiar direction, too. In 1993, in the United
States, education was 9.8 percent of GDP, second only to health care at
14 percent. (It's a good thing health care is still thought to be sick
or the schools might be even more under the knife.) Furthermore, education
has been in labor for half a millennium, with about 80 percent of most
institutional budgets going to salaries and personnel costs. Information
workers, 17 percent of the work force in 1900, will comprise 59 percent
by the year 2000, their job skills more mental than manual with an increasingly
short shelf-life. According to Meister: "In just eight short years, the
number of corporate universities has grown from 400 to over 1,000, while
some 200 colleges have closed down." You get the idea.
So
what does "Corporate
Universities" offer? A model, key principles, a design process and
examples based no doubt on both the author's consulting experience and
her homework. However, if you're looking for quantitative results to inform
decisions in this area for your own company, forget it. It's early in
the game, and most of the results reported are anecdotal. In looking them
over, elder educators may well get a little of that old new math feeling.
Witness the Sears University Learning Map, a graphic example:
"Using the metaphor of the waterfall, the pictorial illustration of Sears
Total Performance Indicators includes drainpipes of competition that illustrate
what happens when key measures such as customer satisfaction are weak.
In addition, water wheels are shown to depict how different indicators
such as employee satisfaction drive performance. 'You can't use these
maps once and expect results,' says John Greene, a former Sears store
general manager. 'Our maps are always hanging in the lunchroom, so both
associates and managers can refer back to them as needed.'" This may indeed
be water over the dam, because the last time I looked, the softer side
of Sears was hanging in the lunchroom at Wal-Mart.
Regardless,
Meister builds a coherent argument for the expanding role of corporate
education in today's economy and explores its need for partnerships with
suppliers as well as customers and institutions of higher learning. Throughout
are guidelines and suggestions to be considered in creating a corporate
university, and in closing she offers "twelve lessons in building a world-class
work force," identifies 50 companies "providing exemplary ongoing learning
opportunities" for employees, and lists "fifteen frequently asked questions
about corporate universities."
Of
greatest interest to traditional educators may be Chapter Seven entitled
Corporate Universities: Opportunity or Threat to Higher Education?
"In an
era of life-long learning, universities in the industrialized world
will be marginalized unless they are efficient and flexible enough to
meet today's myriad educational and training needs." --Sir John Daniel,
vice chancellor, Open University.
Again,
Meister's facts on the changing demographics in higher education are not
in dispute, but in the words of Bertrand Russell, "a collection of facts
is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house." You might hope
for insightful discussion of the intangibles associated with this issue,
but you'll be disappointed; and therein lies both danger and irony.
At
a recent academic technology symposium, an articulate Meister-minded presenter
covered much of the same ground and ended with similar conclusions concerning
the pressures on higher education for increased high tech delivery of
a curriculum more closely focused on specific needs in the work place.
She then fielded a question from a computing services manager who first
reinforced her arguments, calling it almost impossible to find people
coming out of college who already had the specific skills he needed. Even
when he did find them, the specific skills were soon obsolete. His solution
to the problem, increasingly, was to hire individuals, not for their specific
skills, but because their backgrounds showed them to be generally bright,
open to new ideas, capable of assimilating them quickly, of analyzing
problems from diverse points of view, of quickly proposing a range of
workable approaches, and then able to acquire (largely on their own) the
skills to effect a solution. The presenter nodded, adding that these are
indeed the capabilities of a successful knowledge worker today. The manager
then asked, "What produces people like that?" She answered without hesitation:
"A broad liberal arts education."
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