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Sep 17, 2002
No Ordinary Boot Camp
"Boot Camp" is a military term, everybody knows the Marines boot camps. Many corporations offer boot camps themselves, allowing employees to get to know the company, to bond, and to be instilled with the values of the corporation right from the start.
But when management professor Noel M. Tichy looked into the boot camp of software corporation Trilogy, he was astonished to see a completely different kind of boot camp, and one that was so much better than everything he had seen before.
Those two goals-preparedness and bonding-are usually the whole focus of a boot camp, and achieving them is worth a great deal.So, what is it they do, in a short summary?
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The interesting thing about Trilogy University is that it achieves those goals and more. Much more. It also serves as the company's primary R&D engine and as its way of developing its next generation of leadership. It even succeeds as the impetus and incubator for Trilogy's strategic thinking.
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In the simplest terms, these things happen at TU because top leadership is on the scene and deeply engaged in it--and top leadership stays on the scene and deeply engaged in TU because these essential activities are happening there.
But this is a new-employee orientation session that's so fundamental to the company as a whole that it's presided over by the CEO and top corporate executives for fully six months of the year. Why? In two three-month sessions, these top executives hone their own strategic thinking about the company as they decide what to teach the new recruits each session. They also find the company's next generation of new products as they judge the innovative ideas the recruits are tasked with developing--making the program Trilogy's main R&D engine. And they pull the company's rising technical stars into mentoring roles for the new recruits, helping to build the next generation of top leadership. After spending months on-site studying Trilogy University, Tichy came away highly impressed by the power of the virtuous teaching cycle the program has set in motion. Leaders of the organization are learning from recruits at the same time that the recruits are learning from the leaders. It's a model, he argues, that other companies would do well to emulate.Tichy wrote a very good Harvard Business Review article about it. By the way, if you want to save the $6.00 at Harvard, someone has put up the full article here as well.
Posted by Stefan Smalla on Sep 17, 2002 at 11:25 | Permalink