IBM
0163 IBM Business Education
IBM took management skills so seriously that about one-third of its year-long classroom training for new entrants was dedicated to general business training. The most spectacular element of this, which was also made available to all its sales professionals, was a full month of `business school'. This took the key elements of the first year of the London Business School MBA course, and compressed them into just four weeks. The first two weeks were taken up with the classroom teaching of the theory that was the backbone of the MBA course, covering accounting, marketing and production, as well as corporate strategy.
In the case of the trained sales professionals, who found it difficult to justify the time off territory, this part was covered by my first attempt at `distance learning'; using text books and specially prepared notes. To make learning even easier the course was summarised (albeit with nearly six hours of material) on audio cassettes, so that the sales professionals could play these when driving. Despite my inexperience in such matters, it was a success.
But the pinnacle of this programme was a two-week residential course at the London Business School (LBS), which I ran for a number of years. In this time, more than 200 key members of IBM's field force were taken (by the lecturers and professors of the School) through the 20 case studies that were the backbone its first year MBA programme. But, as anyone who passed through the marathon process will confirm, our version of this was more akin to brainwashing (although in a very enjoyable way) than to conventional classroom teaching. The case studies covered the same ground as the theory I had previously taught, consolidating and extending this.
The residential part of the course always started with the participants applying their substantial combined intelligences, and newly acquired business knowledge, to solving the intellectual problems encountered in various case studies. That dispassionate, intellectual view was not, however, the prime objective. The goal was instead to immerse the course members so thoroughly in the different business environments that they personally felt the emotions of those involved in such situations. Their experiences were to be as vivid as if they had worked in the real company.
They started the course typically with rather theoretical, and certainly uninvolved, comments such as: `What can we do to solve the problems of that company?' By the end of the first week, though, their reaction had become intensely personal, much more typified by: `What a mess we are in, how can we pull our company out of the mire?'
By the end of the course the students could at least use the language of an MBA graduate, and were better qualified to handle management theory and practice it than most of their customers' executives. It gave our sales professionals a distinct edge in their contacts with customers. This was reflected in the significant sales increases they achieved over the next months and years. Indeed, their division, GSD, managed to triple its sales volume within a couple of years.
I give this example partly because, as the manager responsible, I believed it was by far the most productive sales training I ever ran; but mainly to indicate that there is normally no upper limit to the amount of business education that a manager can profitably absorb.
hits