The Learning Business, L.L.C.
	Where learning becomes business

Sending Business Back to School
Copyright 2006, The Learning Business, LLC

A recent article in Harvard Business Review discusses how top business schools have lost their relevance with the business community. Around the same time, a survey of HR professionals found that many could not articulate how their company’s support of educational assistance programs impacted their workplace. Another study found that many employees were not even aware of their company’s programs.

There appears to be a disconnect between academia and the business community. Their relationship may be more about “eating your spinach because it’s good for you“ than a collaboration between partners in learning. Neither side is necessarily at fault. It is probably that each simply has for too long taken the other for granted. What needs to happen is for both partners to start actively working on their relationship.

The article How Business Schools Lost Their Way (Bennis and O’Toole, Harvard Business Review, May 2005) points out that top B schools have become focused on research and publishing at the expense of practical application and business relevance. Much of the research is based on mathematical analysis of clinical data and not on discovering and solving real-world business problems. What goes on in the classroom, and what the students take back to their jobs, has become an afterthought. The Man Who Invented Management (John Byrne, Business Week Online, November 18, 2005) discusses how Peter Drucker was never accepted by academia because they took issue with the rigor of his research and the lack of hard, quantifiable data. The article goes on to note that Drucker “would never have gotten tenure in a major business school.” Yet he is credited with inventing modern management.

On the business side, the June, 2005 issue of Training reported on a study by the Council for Adult & Experiential Learning dealing with employer educational assistance programs. The vast majority of the 904 HR professionals surveyed said that tuition assistance programs were strategically important for their company. However, many had no idea how these programs impacted their employees. Spherion Corporation’s 2005 Emerging Workforce Study found that less than a third of employees in companies offering tuition assistance were aware of the program. This suggests that tuition assistance is more window-dressing and a perk than an investment. What’s missing is the link between the program and performance: accountability. Few businesses can afford to make serious investments in programs that cannot demonstrate a return. They want to know why eating spinach is good for you.

Through a combination of academic insulation and business indifference, it is difficult to determine whether formal business programs are delivering the right product at the right time to the right customer. Try to sell that to the employee who is struggling with whether going back to school for a business degree is worth it. Some business schools are combating declining full time enrollment by beefing up part time programs and creating specialized business degrees. However, there is no guarantee that institutions accessible to local employees have recognized or made changes relevant to their business and scheduling needs. It can be a real challenge to find business-experienced faculty for courses where seasoned business people demand answers to their problems.

Before relevance can be addressed, business must determine what is relevant. What training programs and educational opportunities are musts? Training can be considered knowledge, skills and attitudes employees need to perform their current jobs. Education is future-oriented and broad-based and goes beyond the borders of what the person or organization is right now. It looks at how others think, view the world, and address problems and opportunities, whether we are talking about business processes, leadership, problem solving, or ethics. Thus, when discussing training and education, we are talking about what is and what could be, both for the employee and the business. Once training and educational needs are identified, then the business can determine whether they are best addressed with in-house programs, consultants, workshops, or through collaborations with academic institutions.

Business should not expect academia to address all of its needs. In a world where continuous learning and fast, just-in-time response are business survival skills, there is much that business will have to supply itself. Learning in the business organization is generally incremental to formalized academic programs. There are also many business needs and ways of addressing them that are unique to a particular business. Some areas represent a competitive edge, way of doing things, patent or copyright and are not for public dissemination. Other areas are occurring too quickly in the business community to be incorporated in academic content. A good example of this was the boom in personal computers. They were well established in the business community before they became common—and even required—in the classroom.

Academia is slow to react to change because its very nature requires a significant and common demand before it can martial the resources and the commitment to incorporate it. Business is not unaware of the need to make more immediate and customized learning connections. Sue Todd, President of Corporate University Xchange, notes that corporate universities are alive and well in an article of the same title (The Corporate University: Alive and Well, 2005). In fact, she says, they are “growing and expanding in scope” to meet business learning needs.

This is not to say that there is not a place for academia, far from it. Academia is particularly good at creating grounding in requisite business knowledge, skills and attitudes and at different levels of need. The academic environment represents common and sustained needs for education and research that reach far beyond the practices or views of any one organization, helping both potential and existing employees merge new ideas and frames of reference into the business.

There is an interface between the worlds of corporate and academic learning. It can be freely crossed from both sides through actively managed and supported collaborations. Collaborations occur when business and academia work together to identify and create programs to support each other’s needs and missions. The level of collaboration is based on a number of factors. These include the accessibility and capability of institutions, needs in common with other businesses and organizations, and the commitment of business resources to develop, manage and support the collaboration. These collaborations gain significant strength when instructors are shared in the delivery of program content, whether in an academic or corporate environment, in lead or support roles.

For this collaboration to be successful, business must become an active partner with education to define, develop, support and deliver the content that addresses its workplace needs. This entails developing the commitment, relationships and the organization to implement and manage sustainable change. Business is notoriously fickle when it comes to long-term sustained commitment, especially in the arena of training and education. There are always new problems that require attention and management sponsors last only until their next assignment. To establish commitment, organizational resources need to be permanently placed at a level on the organization chart that demonstrates the support of and partnership with upper management. The individual in charge of this organization must have professional qualifications and credentials in training and education. This individual will also need to have the interpersonal, organizational, managerial, and business skills to grow the organization and partner with the numerous internal and external stakeholders in business, education and government who will need to be organized and coordinated. Both the organization and the individual in charge will need to have a long-term perspective, and commitment, for this effort to be successful.

Instructors supplied from business operations can bring a wealth of practical experience and application into the classroom while monitoring how well the program design is meeting business needs. These instructors also develop the working knowledge to set expectations and monitor the performance of employees who come from or return from these programs, especially when the instructors are supervisors, managers, or respected senior staff looking for a productive transition into retirement. Academic instructors gain valuable insight from their business counterparts into how to blend concept with application and what key workplace issues need to be researched and addressed.

The payoff is well worth the investment. Academic programs will be more aligned with the needs of the business partners while becoming more flexible and adaptable because of the relationship. Sharing instructors across business and academic organizations creates a better sensitivity to workplace needs and expectations as well as an awareness of how others are addressing problems and capitalizing on opportunities. Employees who attend programs can be exposed to concepts and applications that add value to themselves and their organizations while enriching the classroom with their experiences. Students who are drawn to attend partnering institutions are more likely to seek employment with one of the business partners while business representatives participating in the classroom can get a good look at potential employees. This is also a good way to educate the public about the business. Leveraging costs through the public and private funding available to educational institutions reduces the overall training and education costs of the business organization. In short, effective business and educational collaborations are a win-win for everyone involved. It is not a question of why it should be done, but of why it hasn’t.

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