Corporate universities are an important and growing contribution to the education of general managers and executive specialists throughout the world. As presumably elite universities continue their trend toward self-involved detachment from the realities of the practical needs of working organizations, becoming over-enamored of their own pet theories, corporations of all types and sizes, and all over the world, are increasingly turning their attention to addressing the education and training needs of their managers directly. This is a bracing and promising trend.
It is important, however, to bear in mind the reasons it is occurring, and to avoid replicating the irrelevancy and parochialism of the university systems mentioned above. These traditional institutions are actually only teaching quantifiable models, and are in fact only training what are, in effect, highly skilled clerks. They focus on, and do a creditable job of teaching, technical skills in areas such as accounting, financial analysis, and even systems analysis, and the like.
Unfortunately, however, they tend to gloss the rest – and the rest is what makes managers. It seems to be the hope of such approaches that the technical training will take the place of practical experience in functional areas of the graduates’ organizations, enabling them to leap-frog their way into mid- to senior management.
However, other than fuzzy leadership programs that, being unquanitifiable, receive plenty of lip-service but little if any real, useful attention, graduates aren’t really taught much of what managers actually have to deal with at those levels. There are some quite promising developments in this area, but there remains a lot of work to be done to ensure that even these experimental venues break free of the internally-referenced academic management models so beloved by the top-shelf university and post-graduate educational settings.
Corporate universities have the opportunity to prepare graduates to properly frame problems and make decisions. They should maintain a focus on meeting the practical needs, such as these, of their own institutions and managers, and developing a forum for assessing and addressing them.
Moreover, they should be sure about why they exist. They aren’t poor substitutes for the traditional “elite” business schools: they exist because the elite schools aren’t doing the job, and don’t even know how to.
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