IBM
0244 GSD Education
When, after I had been in post for two years, the IBM Education Department was broken up, and we were split off to GSD education,we had to produce a complete new set of courses. At least we didn't have to, but - as always - everyone wanted to show they could do things that much better than their predecessors. So we were set the task of producing not just a rerun of existing courses but completely new ones. There was an immediate stampede by the instructors, now in GSD, to grab the best resources. I stayed out of this stampede. I had already, thanks to my extensive background, managed to get myself the job of business education. When the stampede finished, I was left with no resources -- as had indeed been my intention. Hence, I went crying to the management saying “What can I do?”. They, understandably, said “We haven't got any more people or resources…All we can offer you his money”. That was the reason I had waited. They gave me a large budget, which ultimately was running at the quarter million pounds a year; a great deal of money in the mid Seventies. This was mine to spend as I wished! Everyone else thought I was mad, because I didn't have the usual IBM support wrapped around me; but I knew what I wanted.
I immediately trotted off to the London Business School and, in my best ever sales pitch, persuaded them to become our partners in this education. It was not too difficult, since at the time the staff at the London Business School were fascinated by IBM -- which was then the most successful company in the world. Accordingly, they wanted to get their feet in the door to see how it worked. To cut a long story short, I managed to sell them on the partnership, but I suspect that it really was the other way round -- with my contact, Professor John Stopford who was one of the leading gurus, really getting the deal he wanted. Even so, the deal was very good for IBM, not least since we could use their residential accommodation, which was designed for executives and had en-suite facilities. When this was bundled together with their teaching charges it only brought the total to what we would normally have paid for hotel accommodation. For this price I got the best professors in the business school.
They were a few cultural shocks on the way. When John Stopford first introduced me to the senior lecturer who was to manage our courses the latter could not have been further from the IBM image. At the time he was sitting with his feet on his desk, which only emphasised the sandals he was wearing and his bare feet under them. The rest of him was just as hippy -- torn jeans, a T-shirt and a quite extravagant beard. Robin Wensley had, however, a brilliant mind and he was largely responsible for the success, of course. He later went on to be the Dean of Warwick Business School; but there he abandoned his sandals and looked quite like the senior manager – even wearing a suit!
Eventually, we also added on Sue Birley, located at the LBS small business unit. Sue again was one of brightest minds that I've known. She later went to be a professor at Cranfield and then to Imperial College, when her husband became dean there.
The London Business School was an ideal environment to teach in. It was located in a beautiful series of buildings on Regents Park: far removed from IBM. The lecture theatres were excellent; not least all the seating was curved - so the lecturer was the focus. On the other hand Robin Wensley disliked this, since it allowed the lecturer to dominate the audience; so he used to teach as a disembodied voice from the back of the curve!. As I said the facilites were excellent, with ensuite bedrooms, and the food was five-star. Accordingly, we used to run all the two weeks long residentials actually at the London Business School. During this time we taught the students the twenty case studies from the first year of their MBA
I taught the trainees the basics of the first year of the MBA. In something like two weeks we went through accounting, production, marketing and strategy. This was great fun, not least since the students were not just very bright, and postgraduate level, but also had considerable business experience themselves. It was a joy to teach them. I think I often learned as much as them. Once again we used the facilities of IBM to produce superb lectures; not least the magnetics (printed lettering with attached magnets which could be positioned anywhere on the classroom’s magnetic chalkboards) made teaching accounting much easier.
A problem then emerged when the course became so popular that it was decided to put the existing field personnel through it as well. Clearly it was difficult enough to release them for the two weeks residential part, but they couldn't be spared for the teaching in advance. Accordingly I had to produce what was in effect a distance teaching course -- though I didn't realise this at the time, and certainly didn't realise I was producing material in parallel with the Open University. The key to this material was, though, textbooks -- the standard ones that the LBS used with their first-year students -- but associated with these were my extensive notes. Equally, I provided a tape-recorded introduction to these, which continued through the distance taught course. I did all these at home, using my own tape recorder, but the end result worked very well -- and the field force were well prepared for the case studies when they arrived. Of course, they themselves have been exposed to vast amounts of commercial experience in their sales careers.
Finally, to speed up the introduction to the individual case studies -- of which there were 20 during the two weeks (each taking half a day) -- I produced an audiovisual introduction which very quickly went through each case study; in turn setting the context for the reading the students had to do before they started. These were in the form of a tape-recorded talk electronically linked to a slide presentation; so we could simply set it up in the lecture theatre and it would automatically run through while the students watched it. This was so successful that it was presented by me as a key session when LBS hosted business schools throughout the world to an international convention. I was told that a number of leading US schools had later taken up the approach.
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