Corporate Universities

Organizations constantly need to adapt themselves to stay aligned with an ever-changing and increasingly complex environment. Corporate Universities puts "smart learning" at the forefront, with strategies to secure alignment between organization and environment, which need both speed of learning and learning in the right direction. Across the globe, corporate universities have emerged as vehicles of such strategy-driven learning. Corporate Universities bridges the gap between the disciplines of strategic management and corporate learning, combining general strategy with the concept of corporate universities, which, to date, has predominantly been an HR topic. Readers will find new concepts, as well as generic corporate university strategies to link corporate strategy to organizational learning. In-depth cases show how corporate universities are used to renew, transform, and optimize strategy and include important lessons learned by corporate university executives, from both small and global companies, as well as governmental organizations across different industries. Written for academics in strategy, HRD, and organizational behaviour disciplines, as well as practicing managers alike, Corporate Universities is the first book that offers a consistent set of concepts, frameworks, and cases to integrate general strategy with organizational learning.

What happens to the liberal arts and science education when universities attempt to sell it as a form of job training? In Lowering Higher Education, a follow-up to their provocative 2007 book Ivory Tower Blues, James E. Côté and Anton L. Allahar explore the subverted 'idea of the university' and the forces that have set adrift the mission of these institutions. Côté and Allahar connect the corporatization of universities to a range of contentious issues within higher education, from lowered standards and inflated grades to the overall decline of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Natural Sciences instruction. Lowering Higher Education points to a fundamental disconnect between policymakers, who may rarely set foot in contemporary classrooms, and the teachers who must implement their educational policies—which the authors argue are poorly informed—on a daily basis. Côté and Allahar expose stakeholder misconceptions surrounding the current culture of academic disengagement and supposed power of new technologies to motivate students. While outlining what makes the status quo dysfunctional, Lowering Higher Education also offers recommendations that have the potential to reinvigorate liberal education.

An exploration of the world of higher education and higher learning, and its relationship to the corporate world and the global learning society. Peter Jarvis synthesizes developments in HE, training and corporate research and development in order to map the future of learning and training.

Canadian universities are being slowly but inexorably corporatized. Casualizing academic labour, remaking students into consumers of education, implementing corporate management models and commercializing academic research all point to the ascendance of business interests and values in Canada’s higher education system. Academia, Inc. examines the tensions that result from the merging of two fundamentally incompatible institutions — the university and the corporation. Brownlee argues that moving from liberal education to corporate job training, public service to profit-making and critical research to commercial invention radically undermines the goals of higher education. Investigating the history, causes and impacts of corporatization, this book explores how this transformation has taken shape and its ramifications for both universities and society as a whole. Brownlee suggests several strategies for resisting this process.

The corporate university is now a highly advanced real-time process for increasing your company’s performance. This book offers a clear perspective on the use and reuse of your own corporate university application. It is a first class management guide to all the major areas to be addressed for a very successful and continuous outcome.

The emphasis on corporate universities has been a driving force in moving companies beyond a restricted approach to training, to a central vision for learning within the organization. However, there have been failures and many corporate universities have struggled to bring a business rigour to learning or to align their development with the key business and financial drivers of the organization. It is time for the Corporate University to demonstrate how business rigour, handled deftly and with strong and perceptive leadership, can revolutionize learning both inside and outside the organization. The Handbook of Corporate University Development is an important catalyst towards this process.It draws on experience from around the world, to provide anyone responsible for strategy and learning at senior levels in government, education and business with a picture of current best practice.

"The objective of this book is to provide innovative approaches for developing people and expanding organizational capabilities. If you also have this objective, this book is for you, because each chapter is written by a qualified author to provide the information you need." —Donald L. Kirkpatrick, Ph.D., professor emeritus, University of Wisconsin, and author, Evaluating Training Programs: The Four Levels

With more than 10,000 copies sold in its previous edition, Corporate Universities is a welcome update with an entirely new chapter on how to launch a corporate university and the 10 building blocks for running and revitalizing a corporate university. Highlighting the best practices in corporate education and training, this revised edition contains cases and examples of innovative programs from over 30 American companies and reveals the results of author Jeanne Meister's survey report, ``Corporate University Future Directions.'' Key findings in the survey include: Reliance on technology for learning; Business/higher education alliances on the rise; Curriculum focus on building ``Core Workplace Skills''; Interest growth in career development centers; Emergence of a chief learning officer.