Customer Reviews

What CEOs Expect From Corporate Training: Building Workplace Learning and Performance Initiatives That Advance

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Written for Training Professionals, this book is based on extensive interviews with CEOs across several industries and will help you understand their ideas about how effective training can help achieve corporate objectives. In the world of Training and Development, this book offers information everyone claims to want, and very few manage to get. This book is written for a general audience, and to help readers apply these crucial insights to their own efforts, the authors have created a conceptual map of behaviors and relationships, plus a selection of practical worksheets, checklists, and other tools. Unlike previous work based on what trainers believe they should be doing, What CEOs Expect from Corporate Training directly identifies the training imperatives defined by CEOs and the results they demand.

I am a corporate trainer who uses practices borrowed from the theatre to transform organizations. I bought this book hoping to gain insight into the decision making processes of CEO's. Instead, I found myself mired in a swamp of technical language and what looked to be quite outdated studies.

I used to think of this kind of material as "above my head," but not anymore. The authors pedantic writing style is so boring it's barely readable. CEO's are dynamic, engaging people, not bookish researchers. I think the minutia presented in this book would be an immediate turn-off to most corporate execs.

Obviously, what the co-authors share and discuss are the expectations of specific CEOs prior to the publication of this book (2003). I have no idea how many of them are CEOs now, nor to what extent (if any) their expectations have since changed. That said, it seems safe to assume that corporate boards and CEOs are under increasingly greater pressure to justify a substantial investment of resources in formal, informal, and "blended" learning initiatives. Now more than ever before, they expect those initiatives to be in proper alignment with overall strategy and help to achieve ultimate business objectives.

What we have in this volume is an analysis (co-authored by William Rothwell, John Lindholm, and William Wallick) of four primary sources of research data concerning CEO opinions of Workplace Learning and Performance (WLP) professionals, more specifically "the roles that should be played and the competencies that should be demonstrated by those whose job titles were once `trainer,' `training and development practitioner,' or `human resource development (HRD) professional.'"Rothwell, Lindholm, and Wallick's book is primarily based on three research studies, supplemented by their interviews of more than 70 CEOs from a broad cross-section of organizations. The three are:

The first study is "ASTD Models for Workplace Learning and Performance: Roles, Competencies and Outputs." The researchers obtain responses to two major research questions:

1. "What competencies do WLP professionals, senior WLP professionals, and line managers perceive as currently required for success in workplace learning and performance?

2. "What competencies do WLP professionals, senior WLP professionals, and line managers perceive will be required in five years?"

Another, " Study of CEO Perceptions of the Competencies of Workplace Learning and Professional Models," obtained responses from CEOs to three questions:

1. "What are the major business challenges CEOs perceive to be impacting their businesses?"

2. "How do CEOs perceive workplace learning programs to be linked to business challenges?"

3. "What competencies do CEOs recognize to be most important for the person responsible for workplace learning?"

The third study, CEOs' Perceptions of Trainer Roles in Selected Multihospital Health Care Systems, "examined how CEOs perceived the roles of WLP professionals, compared with their perceived roles against the seven suggested WLP roles, [i.e. manager, analyst, intervention selector, intervention designer and developer, intervention implementor, change leader, and evaluator] and further compared these perceived roles to the formalized job descriptions from the surveyed organizations. Sixteen CEOs from the largest health care systems in the United States were interviewed." Those who read this book are provided with Rothwell, Lindholm, and Wallick analysis of the responses.

Presumably there will sometimes be a gap (perhaps a wide gap) between what a WLP professional assumes her or his CEO's perceptions and expectations are, and, what in fact they are revealed to be by that CEO. For that reason, the authors strongly recommend, if their readers have not already done so, that they can select those questions that are most relevant to their own organization's immediate needs and ultimate objectives, then obtain responses to them from their own CEO. "Questions to Ask Your CEO" are provided in Appendix A.

Rothwell, Lindholm, and Wallick devote a separate chapter to each of the aforementioned "roles" and include within each chapter relevant comments from various CEOs who participated in one of the studies or who were interviewed. In fact, the head note for each chapter is provided by one of them. For example, introducing Chapter 7: "So I think [WLP professionals] have to be change-oriented people with new ideas, new thinking, and be comfortable with sponsoring new approaches that give people more latitude, as opposed to less latitude. I would think that they should be champions in unleashing the potential of our people as opposed to harnessing the potential of our people." I also appreciate Rothwell, Lindholm, and Wallick's skillful use of various "Figures" that organize key points as well as their various checklists that facilitate, indeed accelerate review later of those points long after the book has been read.

Those who share my regard for this book are urged to check out Return on Learning co-authored by Donald Vanthournout and his associates on Accenture's Capability Development team, Jay Cross's Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways That Inspire Innovation and Performance as well as The Chief Learning Officer (CLO): Driving Value Within a Changing Organization Through Learning and Development co-authored by Tamar Elkeles and Jack Phillips, Edward Lawler's Talent: Making People Your Competitive Advantage, John Hager and Paul Halliday's Recovering Informal Learning: Wisdom, Judgement and Community, Dean Spitzer's Transforming Performance Measurement: Rethinking the Way We Measure and Drive Organizational Success, and Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution co-authored by Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David Robertson.