“DON’T ask the barber if you need a haircut—and don’t ask an academic if what he does is relevant.” So wrote Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book, “The Black Swan”. The trouble for academics, particularly those who teach business, is that companies seem to be posing that awkward question more and more; and then coming up with an even more discomfiting answer.
Firms looking to put their managers through development programmes are increasingly creating their own, rather than relying on business schools, consulting firms and the like. Companies are not only spending more of their training budgets in-house but are setting up their own “corporate universities”.
The idea is not new. General Electric is considered to have opened the first corporate university, in 1956. Perhaps the most famous is McDonald’s “Hamburger University”. Since 1961 around 275,000 people have passed through one of its seven campuses worldwide. However, such in-house academies have become a lot more common in recent years. A survey by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) found that the number of formal corporate universities in America doubled between 1997 and 2007, to...
from The Economist: Business http://ift.tt/1Pmj086
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