The Future of Corporate Universities

Richard Dealtry

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781787434530
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Gestión

The corporate university is a whole-organisation endeavour for today, tomorrow and for the future, raising questions about the size and shape of your business and where you aim to reach. This book introduces you to the major areas of corporate university performance and value management, examining the evolution of the corporate university alongside emergent business challenges. It provides the pieces of a large jigsaw puzzle for you to assemble using the key disciplines and skills within your organisation.
Change is an integral part of business life, and it can seriously affect your company's value. Gaining a good understanding of how all business processes add value to your company is vital. The aim of this book is to help you to access new ways to create a widespread culture of people and organisational development. You will discover effective management practices that will help you and your colleagues to become the leading agents of continuous change and development in all parts of your organisation. With the help of the corporate university model, your company can develop business solutions to resolve the challenges ahead in a changing world.

PART I

MANAGING RESEARCH REPORTING

1

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS WITH REFERENCE TO THE CORPORATE UNIVERSITY

Contents

• More Questions than Answers
• Most Frequently Asked Questions with Answers
• Summarising Points

This chapter lists the foundation questions that are uppermost in people’s minds when they are considering introducing the corporate university development platform into their organisation. Some of the questions are simple and direct whilst others are rhetorical in nature. The questions are those which have arisen most frequently in early discussions with client companies.

The approach taken in this chapter is to provide informative insights into the subject of the corporate university and to initiate thought leadership that will result in the full realisation of the corporate university concept.

MORE QUESTIONS THAN ANSWERS

The corporate university development, with its melting pot of diversity both in terms of thinking and management disciplines, can appear arcane – fuzzy and full of mystery. Questions about what it is and what it does often result in more questions rather than providing clear-cut answers.

When introducing ‘hard’ performance-improving management techniques the starting point is usually quite obvious and the instructions on ‘what to do’ and ‘how to do it’ are clear and logically progressive. In these cases, questions about aims and outcomes are relatively easy to answer.

Alternatively, soft development packages aimed more towards releasing individual potential and building organisational capability are more complex in terms of their processes and are more difficult to articulate, although, the majority of these are usually well-prescribed and targeted at a well-defined audience with particular needs. Consequently, managers can get their minds around these subjects without much difficulty.

However, at the level of business development intervention that accompanies the introduction of the corporate university, more serious reflections, research and preparations are necessary to make a successful start. From experience, it is possible to be presented with a wide variety of different answers describing perspectives and scenarios on what the corporate university is and what the intervention entails.

Some experts emphasise one particular aspect whilst those companies already engaged in the development of a corporate university often appear to be adopting different strategies and emphasising different aspects of people, management, organisational and business development.

One of the difficulties is that if someone is asked for their view of something it will be influenced by many factors including self-interest, their experience and in particular their standpoint.

If someone is asked what a car looks like when they see it for the first time, they will give a very different answer to someone who has sat inside a stationary car and to someone who has watched a car pass by them.

The level of confusion generated by asking someone about the corporate university who is not familiar with the full concept and its possible relevance to your particular business can result in you having the unwelcome privilege of paying for their learning curve.

Added to that the fact that the full potential of the concept is still unfolding and maturing, this will detract from what should be an exciting, intellectually challenging and very profitable enterprise for you and your company.

How the initial enquiry is handled from a company who is considering the corporate university application is, therefore, very important. Knowing the right questions to ask is the important first step in this process. The second is to get coherent answers from an independent and unbiased source. Helping managers to achieve these two steps was the main reason why the following question and answer exposé was developed.

It is important to provide such a guideline and questioning clarification for managers who have the task of formulating a meaningful strategic approach to their company’s investments in the corporate university.

MOST FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS WITH ANSWERS

What Is Its Purpose?

There are many definitions in the literature of the corporate university. One that reaches out into the meaning of the full concept and its strategic role whilst being quite thought provoking is that:

The corporate university is a management intervention that takes a company or organisation into a new robust and sustained phase of business development that it would not achieve with its current levels of opportunity for thought leadership and styles of learning behaviour.

Is It Necessary to Use the Term Corporate University? What Name Should We Give to Ours?

Many companies are quite satisfied to apply this term as the word ‘corporate’ captures the company’s ownership aspect of the development. The word ‘university’ connects with a place that provides instruction and facilities for research and advanced learning and also gives recognition to the level of learning achieved.

On the other hand, this title is totally unacceptable to some companies. They neither like a title that could imply that this is a head office driven initiative nor that it has a strong academic focus.

The term corporate university has, however, become the common currency for discussing this development and is a useful cachet. Each company will generate its own preferred title and it is recommended that this is a tactfully managed issue.

Naming and branding the corporate university is very important. It is a symbolic act that sends messages to all the internal and external stakeholders and demands a unique balancing of all the motivational factors to arrive at a brand profile that is positive and energising for everyone.

Guidelines for naming would include:

• name of the company
• name of the industry or business sector
• its intellectual or learning style:
  • academy
  • university
  • school of, etc.

Is the Corporate University Just for Large Corporations?

Not necessarily so. The issue is about how to sustain competitive advantage through the acquisition and application of new learning and this starts at the level of the individual.

It is concerned with leadership development and enhancing the quality and relevance of the learning experience. The main thrust is to achieve thought and intellectual leadership throughout a company’s business sectors: to have the capability to be a lot smarter and quicker off the mark than the competition.

Size is therefore not an issue, although larger companies have tended to make the running in taking up this initiative. There are logistical and structural benefits of scale that are inherent in corporate university thinking that also make it an attractive development and promotes its adoption.

Small and medium sized companies aim to achieve and sustain this state of know-how leadership, their competitiveness depends upon it. But it is an awareness of the mental processes that counts with them, rather than structural considerations.

What Types of Companies Are Getting Involved in Corporate University Development?

The initial trend was established by hi-tech businesses, professional services firms, consultancy companies and companies with a strong scientific or technological base. The ethos for continuous innovation and leadership in every aspect of their businesses is well established in such companies and the need to press ahead is ever present.

Exercising the full corporate university concept provides them with opportunities to develop thought leadership and provide a more stimulating environment that reinforces cultural values around learning and achievement.

The trend is now taking hold in more traditional businesses where the combined benefits of properly managed business-led learning, shared knowledge and e-technologies are being put to good use.

Where Are the Corporate Universities Located?

Larger companies have tended to locate formal programmes in campus-style training and development centres. However, the essential positioning of it is in the minds of people and in the psyche of the organisation.

Benefits are only realised when people doing things ‘thinkingly’ and take executive action in the real-time environment, in the office, in the factory, in discussion and in negotiation with suppliers, when building relationships with customers, in making interpersonal and organisational links work and in the social environment.

The corporate university ‘campus’ has no outer limits. Learning and development can take place anywhere anytime when you know how to do it efficiently and effectively. Also, it is about adult learners and they are different. They like to learn in different ways at different times. What they do need is a healthy supportive quality learning infrastructure that serves their particular need to learn dynamically, on time every time wherever they may be.

One company defined it in this way, ‘we aim to develop a high quality learning infrastructure and rewarding environment that is worthy of people’s participation’.

Is It Like a Traditional Academic University?

The fundamental objectives of providing quality instruction, facilitating research and advanced learning and giving recognition to the level of learning achieved are the same. However, the management, strategic context, the learning processes used and developmental objectives of the corporate university are very different from a traditional university.

The corporate university is a hybrid development that brings together the rapidly changing nature of corporate training and development as previously known with certain elements of the intellectual discipline and rigour that underpin academic processes.

It is true to say that it is not like any older patterns, academic or business, but is a new entity and culture more in-phase with the modern business landscape.

Is the Corporate University All Inclusive – For Everyone? Do the Slowest Set the Pace?

The starting point for every company is that you have the employees, staff, managers, executives and directors that you have and they are there for everyone, not for the slowest or the chosen few. But this does not mean ‘wall to wall’ everything: the opposite is true.

One of the most difficult jobs for the managers of the corporate university is to determine how and when scarce resources are directed to particul...