IBM
9120 LBS Teaching
One of the most productive periods of my life was creating the business school for IBM at the London Business School (LBS). At the time I was in IBM education department, teaching IBM staff not customers. This was already a very high-powered operation.
In the mid seventies, as part of the formation of General Systems Division (GSD), the education department was split into those going to DP and those assigned to GSD. I found myself assigned to the small part, which was going GSD. This meant we had to create a whole new set of courses. As a result, the various requirements were doled out amongst us. With my management background, I found myself being responsible for business teaching; which was actually a very important part of the IBM education -- though the others with a background in sales thought that the sales schools were much more important.
There was immediately a competition for internal resources. I sat back and watched the others fighting for these and, when the fighting had died down, put in my bid. By then, all the internal resources had been allocated. This meant that I ‘had to’ go outside and get resources externally. Accordingly, I went to the London Business School and -- in one of my best selling jobs -- persuaded them to run business training for us. The best aspect of this was that we were able to get their residential accommodation, where they accommodated the senior managers attending their executive education, as well as all their teaching facilities and staff for the same price it would have cost us just to hire hotel rooms elsewhere!
The result was that I put together one month of teaching per student. The first two weeks of this was basic teaching, about the business functions -- including accounting and production as well as marketing -- which I personally taught on IBM premises. The second two weeks, though, were actually taught on-site at the London Business School; by their professors and lecturers. This element, indeed, comprised all the case studies of the first year of their two-year MBA; 20 cases in all - taught over half a day for each.
My initial contact there was John Stopford, who was one of their leading professors. John was very high-powered indeed, and later went off to New York to run the United Nations Commission on the Transnationals. I remember a number of anecdotes about him. One of these came about when, after an excellent lunch with him where LBS was blessed with an excellent restaurant, I spent nearly two hours talking with him over coffee in their common room. We were discussing the Civil Service. I pontificated about what I thought the civil service should be doing. But, after about three hours of discussion, I eventually asked John what his interest was; only to be told by him that he was heading a government task force investigating the service! The London Business School at that time, in the late 1970s, was very close to government. I remember a number of times the discussion of over the lunch table being about what they had said to Jim that morning. It was confusing because Jim Ball was the Dean of the School at that time. Almost invariably, however, they meant Jim Callaghan -- who was then Prime Minister!
The second anecdote was a meeting arranged between John Stopford and my new IBM boss Terry Osborne. Terry found out the John was going to the United States, to the UN, and was trying to help him about the housing problems there. He explained how difficult it was to find suitable accommodation, only to have John explain that he was already arranged for a brownstone off Fifth Avenue -- he had exchanged houses with a director of the World Bank! The final anecdote was even better. Terry was describing how he had attended the Senate hearings on IBM, assisting Gil Jones the IBM vice president. The response from John Stopford, which I assure you was not a put down, was "I know how you feel, I felt exactly the same way the first time I addressed the full general assembly of the United Nations"!
In terms of day-to-day running, however, one of their senior lecturers Robin Wensley was in charge. I remember my first meeting with him. I was taken into his office by John Stopford, beautifully dressed in his dark suit, to find Robin with his feet up on his desk. With a scruffy beard he was wearing a T-shirt, torn jeans and bare feet in sandals. My heart dropped. I needn't have worried at all he was absolutely superb -- and ultimately became Dean of Warwick Business School. Later on we added Sue Birley, who was a lecturer in small business, to the core team.
I was very fortunate, since the lecturers I was able to recruit from LBS were very good indeed, even at the early stages. And after that the IBM course built such a good reputation that I literally was able to have my pick of the lecturers and professors of the School.
It was a very intense course; almost like brainwashing. We didn't allow the IBM students a moment to themselves over the two weeks, apart from the weekend in the middle. Our acid test was that, where on the first couple of days their approach to the case studies was to analyse intellectually the problems they found, by the end of the third day we wanted their reaction to be almost visceral -- "God we are in the shit!". My job was to ride shotgun on the whole affair, spending the whole evening in the bar (which was a disaster from the point of view of my diabetes), following which - first thing the following morning - Robin, Sue and I got together and decided how the course should be steered; and then I briefed the lecturers for that day accordingly.
As part of the overall process, I developed a tape slide introduction to each of the cases. Thus, the first half-hour of each of the cases took place at the lecture theatre - while this tape slide presentation summarised the case study -- before the students went off to read it in more detail. Using this device we were able to compress the case study into half a day rather than the couple of days it normally took the MBA students.
While I was there, LBS hosted a conference of business schools from all round the world. I presented this technique, of the tape slide show, to this conference -- and later learned that it was put into practice in a number of places; including across the US.
Also, I was involved in other teaching. Thus, with a colleague, I lectured on the future of computing. This was a two-hour lecture to the whole MBA student body. It was a disaster, where we - correctly - stressed that the important way to think about the future was to decide what you wanted how do; for computers could do anything you wanted. There were, in effect, no boundaries to what you could do with hardware. The problem was that all 150 MBA students only wanted to know what were the latest technical gizmos.
M second contribution was as part of the accounting and finance course. Myself and the lecturer worked out a case study based on the financial case I was trying to make for the leisure complex at Hampton Court. This was a very successful case study, but it also was just successful in bringing together the best possible case to present to possible financial partners -- though we never did succeed in this respect!
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