The lone individual who worked by day in the corporation and by night at the local university campus used to be viewed as an ambitious achiever, carving out his or her ascendant career path by degrees.

No more. Continuing education has shifted from being the employee's route to promotion to the corporation's prerequisite for success. As a result, the number of companies establishing their own educational venues continues to grow. This corporate "home schooling" is not, they say, a rebuff of traditional business schools, but a strategy to enhance their company's performance and competitive position.

The diverse businesses that have established their own instructional facilities-regardless of whether they call them universities, learning centers or any other name—seem eager to collaborate to enhance their company's performance and competitive position.

"The difference today from executive development in the past," said Robert Halperin, director of executive education for MIT's Sloan School, "is that development of those employees has to be tied into the strategic and competitive objectives of the company. It's not just individual development anymore."

"A sign of what's beginning to happen," said Al Vicere, director of executive education at Penn State, "is that ongoing development and learning are becoming so critical that they are being seen as an element of competitive advantage." An example of the seriousness of the trend, he said, is that General Electric, whose in-house education has long been used as a benchmark, says that its educational processes now will only be shared with suppliers and customers. Similarly, another company that approached Penn State to develop a course said there would have to be a secrecy agreement and that the course would be delivered only to the company's approved audience.

In conversations with several executives in corporate education, "Newsline" found a deep strain of pragmatism. They regard traditional academic institutions as quality knowledge resources, but do not have a binding loyalty to business schools. They are looking for capable allies that are flexible, responsive, able to customize instruction and willing to work as a team with the corporate educational staff.

Company-based schools that send out RFPs in search of a partner intend to gain a competitive edge by satisfying the strategic and specific needs they have defined. The need might be for the physical and service resources of the academic campus-libraries, computers, communications uplinks, facilities, administrative assistance and other amenities. It might be to gain association with a credentialed institution. It might be to benefit from the university's research capabilities. Or, it might be to tap into a multi-disciplined, intellectually innovative faculty to shape a program or curriculum the company cannot develop in-house.

"Organizations are saying, 'There are times when we need a lot of help. We need help in program development or in the creation of learning methods and technologies. And we need an entire university infrastructure as a partner. And there are times when we just need somebody's two cents,'" Vicere said.

On the academic side, more schools are seriously considering the corporate requests for proposal. "Business schools want to be closer to their market," said John Neuhauser, dean of the Carroll School of Management at Boston College.

The growing market today is experienced, adult workers who cannot afford to stop learning, and who rarely can afford to stop working to learn. Although reaching out to this segment complicates the orderly academic life, probably few business schools, whether private or public, can be indifferent to the expanding opportunities.

"The partnership has to be consistent with the nature and mission of the school. It cannot be any old alliance. It has to be one that reinforces, enhances and expands the vision and mission of a given school," said Robert Sullivan, director of IC² at the University of Texas at Austin.

Schools report they often receive requests they cannot consider because what is wanted is not within their core competencies, or because the work called for would not forward the school's interests.

MIT's Halperin said, "We get inquiries almost every day from companies that would like to partner with us, or have us develop programs with them, and we have to politely decline most of those requests because we don't have the capacity. We've got a relatively small number of faculty. It isn't so much the prestige of the companies, it's the overall relationship we have with that company."

Recruiting, research, executive education, international focus and philanthropy are all dimensions that a school looks at to determine whether it can work with a company or not.

"There's a complicated mixture of dimensions that make up the relationship," Halperin said. "When Company X calls, we do a kind of screen of what's the relationship of that company or the potential relationship of that company to MIT? That will be an important factor in determining whether we develop an executive education partnership with that organization."

Sometimes the company and the school cannot know if their intentions are compatible until they talk.

This was the case two years ago when Bank of America was looking for a training resource that could put together classes for managers in the technology division.

"The technology people tended in some cases to be pretty isolated from the business partner," said Suzanne Watson, executive vice president and office of the chair relationship manager for Bank of America. "Part of our challenge was to get the BASE (Bank of America Systems Engineers) much smarter about business so they could go into a conversation with the business partners and be that much more educated about what's going on."

The committee expected to hire one of several training vendors that had submitted proposals. The University of North Carolina was invited for an interview only because a member of the selection committee had been impressed with a brochure from the b-school's executive education department.

"People walking into the meeting were already pretty set on going with one of the vendors," Watson said. They had worked with the vendor before and knew it had offered good training packages. But when the meeting was over, the interview team chose UNC.

"It opened our eyes to the intellectual difference between going with a university and going with a vendor," Watson said. "There's always going to be room for both. Not everyone wants or needs to go through university-based education. But when talking with either senior executives or people who tend to be intellectually bent to begin with, people respond better to university-based instructors. They have more respect for the research and the thought that has gone into that. When talking about a group of people who are fairly well educated — and fairly cynical — the more rigorous and engaging you can be with them the better."

The person who represented UNC in that meeting was Jeanne Hauser, the director of custom programs in the executive education department. Hauser said she went into the interview only after deeply researching Bank of America and preparing a lot of questions to determine whether BofA was committed to collaborating on the work it would require to design a custom program. "I wasn't there to sell a program off the shelf," she said.

BofA and UNC together designed an integrated, highly customized, two-year-long course called Building Business Partnerships to develop 350 information technology managers in the United States, Europe and Asia in an understanding of business. The program uses top faculty from North Carolina's b-school to teach business strategy, finance and marketing as they apply to BofA's way of working.

"This is tremendously time and effort intensive," Hauser said. "You can't just walk in and brush off your old notes from Marketing 101."

Hauser said UNC also wants to be sure that there is a mutual exchange of benefits in their arrangements with corporations. In the case of Bank of America, she said, "We bring a lot of intellectual capital to the table and that is what we are supposed to do. But banking is a big and important industry globally, so by working closely and proprietarily with an important bank like BofA, it gives us an opportunity to add to our intellectual capital."

Alliances such as UNC and BofA's can work even though the allies are 3,000 miles apart. If the environmental advantages of the campus are a main goal, however, geographical proximity is obviously the first criterion for selection.

When the Arthur D. Little School of Management decided to move from its corporate campus to a university campus by this fall, only schools in the Boston area were in the running. With location and high quality educational resources as a common denominator for all the schools it interviewed, ADL could select for other benefits it wanted. The choice was Boston College.

"For an alliance partner, we were looking for flexibility," said Will Makris, chief operating officer of ADL School of Management. "One of the reasons it worked out well with BC was they were willing to say, 'Fine, let's walk into this and see how it goes.'"

The ADL school had been located at the corporate headquarters since it was founded in 1964. The move to Boston College's campus provides many facilities that will support its 63 students.

ADL's former campus only had a classroom, meeting rooms, access to research facilities and a librarian. The move has brought a larger campus infrastructure to support operations and provide services such as athletic facilities, large computing centers and an expanded network for students seeking career placement.

The two schools, operating side by side, remain independent. Both have their own degree-granting authority. Faculty at ADL consist not only of Boston College faculty, but also some from Boston University, Babson College, Northeastern University, Bentley, Harvard and MIT. Other faculty members are senior consultants from Arthur D. Little, including some from the Brussels and Paris offices.

There are two major benefits ADL's presence provides for BC students, said Haskell McClellan, associate dean for graduate programs at Boston College. One is a new range of electives that students can choose, as part of a reciprocal agreement. The other is a new course, funded by ADL School of Management, in which the b-school students will work in multi-disciplinary teams with Arthur D. Little consultants on client projects.

The students enrolled at ADL School of Management are employees of ADL clients. Ninety percent come from outside the United States and have an average of seven to eight years of work experience. Their employers are looking for a truly international management education, not dominated by any culture in the classroom, Makris said. They want their managers to have experience in across-cultural community.

This aspect of ADL's program complements Boston College's commitment. "One of our emphases is on globalization and the issue of management of global competition," said McClellan.

"We said, 'This is an opportunity to capture the expertise, knowledge and opportunities of someone who is very aggressively involved in international activities.'"

An additional capability the college hopes to draw on from the corporate school is a proficiency in recruiting internationally. McClellan expects that some of ADL's overseas students will become interested in pursuing either a two-year MBA or a one-year management of science in finance at his school, as well as the one-year master of science in management that ADL confers.

The quest for assistance with internationalization can reach both ways in the world of corporate-academic alliances.

The Whirlpool Corporation indicated the strategic importance of its focus on internationalization by creating an alliance for global training and education with three major universities in 1992. The schools — INSEAD in France, the University of Michigan and Indiana University — worked with Whirlpool's corporate director of organizational effectiveness to design a global curriculum strategy. The curriculum includes a Leadership Academy, the Excellence College, a simulation curriculum, a humanities curriculum and an effort called One Company Initiatives.

"We had to first organize ourselves and create some governance mechanism," said Cam Danielson, Indiana's director of executive education. The schools created a University Partners Council and an across-the-board process for the design, development and delivery of the curriculum, which they call the D3 process.

Besides offering its curriculum at the Brandywine Creek Performance Center, which Whirlpool opened in Michigan in1994, instruction also is offered by the schools' faculties in Camerio, Italy, Sao Paulo, Brazil and Hong Kong - the company's European, Latin American and Asian headquarters.

Danielson said the director of organizational effectiveness for Whirlpool did not want the overhead of a large internal staff nor just the personal commitment of a cherry-picked faculty. The size and breadth of the international strategy called for an institutional commitment from major universities.

"Up until a few years ago we did very few custom programs, but the market has shifted and we're being responsive to that and offering more custom programs for companies," said MIT's Halperin." We have a long history of developing consortia to support research in an area of common interests. Now there is more of a focus on developing those partnerships in the educational program area."

Motorola, Johnson & Johnson and Siemens Nixdorf, the electronics company, all recently have used MIT's research and teaching capabilities to enhance some aspect of their existing executive development.

Halperin cited Siemens Nixdorf's innovative Change Agent Program as an example of an educational collaboration. The company selected 30 "change agents" who will be measured on their ability to accomplish either an important cost reduction or revenue enhancement over the course of a year.

As part of the project, the agents go through two weeks at MIT, where they get fundamental training in some functional business areas. Then they look more deeply into what change is all about, how to understand the organization's culture and the way it changes, and how management has to change the way it works to accomplish major change initiatives.

"What drew them here," Halperin said, "is that we have some of our top researchers who also are our good teachers. We can say to people that we're literally bringing into the classroom the people who wrote the book on the subject."

Halperin sees the serious interest in corporate ongoing education as a boon for schools like MIT. "Rather than taking business away from us, I see it as providing us with a logical partner and a focus of activity between us and those particular companies. When they setup those corporate universities they realize they aren't necessarily in the teaching business and there are certain kinds of programs and learning activities that it makes more sense to partner with a university, particularly a research-based university," he said.

Sullivan's IC² institute also is seeing new possibilities for combinations of research and teaching partnerships with innovative companies.

The institute recently formed a partnership with 3M to experiment with what Sullivan calls an "innovation boot camp." The company will choose two or three employees to be in a graduate degree program at UT-Austin, focused on commercializing science and technology. The employees will bring with them some of the hundreds of new technologies developed at 3M that are not yet marketable. Their project within the degree program will be to set up a company that can become a self-sustaining marketer of these innovative products.

"The hope is that they will create a $100 million company or bigger, wholly owned by the 3M company but coming out of our degree program," Sullivan said.

Some might say that too close a partnership will blur the line between the academic pursuit of knowledge and the pursuit of commercial success. "It can happen," said Sullivan. "But the way we're structuring it is that we have a common star we are shooting for. If we're successful with 3M, we've really had a breakthrough in the whole innovation process and that enhances the learning process, enhances the master's program. It's part of our business to do that. Even if we didn't get money from 3M we'd be doing this."

The cost of creating a curriculum that is academically credit-worthy is prohibitive for most companies. And even if a company could afford it, it would not be a strategic deployment of its resources. On the other hand, cherry picking an assortment of high-level faculty from a variety of schools can give a corporate university a reputation for good teaching, but it still cannot satisfy the credentialing need.

Eaton School of Retailing, part of the Eaton department store chain, and Ryerson Polytechnic University, both in Toronto, have formed a partnership to deliver a four-year bachelor's degree in retail management starting in fall 1998. Before deciding how to set up the school, the Eaton School's general manager, James Chestnutt, visited or talked with about 150 different corporate universities in the United States and Canada.

"We found that the best practices are those that involve a partnership between a major corporation and a major university," he said. Chestnutt noted that many corporate universities failed for lack of a university relationship that could support the effort even if the corporate champion left.

"We had no idea when we began that it would be Ryerson," said Chestnutt." We did know we wanted to work with a major academic university because it can offer what the student wants, a transferable degree credit. The credit from a degree-granting university is much more highly cherished than one from Eaton's."

The Eaton school, formed in 1993, has about 2,000 students, 1,500 of whom are Eaton employees and 500 of whom are from other retail stores.

Employees in other Canadian cities attend courses at several other universities, which supply the logistics at the direction of Ryerson. Ryerson also hires the professors who will teach in the other locations.

Eaton made the first contact with Ryerson through the university president's office. When it became clear which resources were needed, the president turned to the business school's continuing education arm.

"Our first contact with them, in some sense, was good luck," said Phil Schalm, program director for continuing education in business at Ryerson. "They initiated it, but I had been trying to establish some presence for retail programming because I always felt we were not serving a major sector."

Another corporate university that turned to academia to gain what no one else could provide is TVA University in Knoxville. That school, started in1994, obtains some commercial courseware and then uses in house instructors to deliver its programs to employees. But when it came to a credentialing need, TVA talked with three or four institutions and chose Tennessee Technological University.

"We needed an institution that would help us earn CEUs for a number of courses," said Cathy Hammon, general manager of TVA University. "We wanted to work with one institution to help us learn how to go through the process of accreditation for those courses, to actually be the reviewing body of our courseware and of our faculty, and then be the institution that assigns those CEUs."

TVAU went to Tennessee Tech's president first. He expressed interest in developing the relationship with the TVA school and quickly brought in the dean of graduate studies and extended education to work on the specific arrangements for courses.

"It became clear to us very quickly that Tennessee Tech was prepared to be the most flexible. They were willing to look at altering some of their internal administrative processes, to keep certain kinds of records that met not only their needs but ours as well. They were prepared to adapt some of their systems and processes to some of ours so that we could make this work in a customer-friendly fashion for our workforce. We learned the ropes with them and the partnership has been excellent," Hammon said.

TVA University also selected the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga to be in a pilot program for a distance EMBA degree for TVA managers in the company's seven state region.

"Part of what we look for in a relationship is being able to meet our needs set as we define it and not necessarily as a standard curriculum might define it," Hammon said. "The flexibility around timing, the ability to implement a distance learning strategy, their understanding of the nature of our business were all important aspects in our making that decision."

Employees and managers more so need to be able to change, to adapt, to get out in front of what has to happen in their division or company. It may be more important for them to be watching global issues of culture, finance, diversity. It may be keeping up with quality issues or communication issues.

Technology may look like a bigger issue in corporate education, said Sullivan at IC², simply because the more sophisticated high technology companies are more prone to get into this kind of education. They have technology at hand and they use it to communicate and educate. Their way of being in the marketplace is to use technology — and they tend to be more forward-looking as a function of their high technology interests.

"Probably the driving force is the globalization of the economy," Penn State's Vicere said. "That coupled with technology has really increased the speed of change from the standpoint of how quickly a competitive advantage evaporates. The company has to be constantly finding new sources of uniqueness and, clearly, ongoing development will be a key part of its ability to build the capability within its culture to keep doing that."

Almost all of the people interviewed by Newsline agreed with a recent survey reporting that corporate universities intended to offer 50 percent of their programs by distance technology in the year 2000. Whether or not they all will be able to actually do it by then is a question. "It will require a lot of technology enhancements," ADL's Makris said.

Chestnutt at Eaton's in Canada said that while his school now uses the Ryerson facilities completely, eventually the whole program will be offered via the Internet. Already two pilot courses have been offered on the Internet and a six-week audio Internet course called Issues and Innovations was scheduled to start this past August.

Relationships among the individuals and institutions who work together in the company-campus partnership have to be high and deep if they are going to be long-term.

Vicere referred to the "tight relationship" with one of the companies for which his school designs and delivers executive leadership programs. "It's a very intense and involved development process that now has gone several layers into the organization. It started at the very top," he said.

Years before ADL moved its school of management onto Boston College's campus, faculty had been teaching at the headquarters campus. And the chair of Arthur D. Little is on the Carroll School's advisory board.

"We want to know the level of commitment and how high up is the level of commitment," said UNC's Hauser. "Are we going to get support when we need information and facts and backgrounding and briefings and all the kinds of things we ask them for?" She said that if faculty need to speak with BofA's CEO, they make the request and a senior executive in the company will be able to arrange it.

"These are deep relationships with a tremendous reciprocity," Hauser says of the companies UNC works with.

For Whirlpool, the commitment had to be at the dean level, not just the executive education level. "And they had to be schools in which top management had some familiarity and certainly confidence in. Michigan and Indiana both have placed a number of graduates into Whirlpool over the years who are in senior management positions.

"There was not simply comfort or familiarity, but a confidence level. That was critical to this process," Danielson said.

Indiana is using its curriculum work with Whirlpool as a doorway to move into other areas. "We want to elevate our conversation with Whirlpool to a more strategic level. We really want to go to the upper reaches of their organization as they continue to think about their future," said Danielson." We can be partners in that, both from the standpoint of certain resources, but also because we belong to certain networks and we can bring other people and resources to bear."

While it sounds almost trivial, those kinds of problems indicate the constraint in the academic setting that is not experienced in many corporate schools.

"Things move very fast at ADL," said Makris. "There are not the traditional constraints you find in the politics or the nature of the institution. We basically think about the curriculum changes we want to make and we make them. There is a longer planning process in a university than at ADL. For the most part, we will not be impacted by that because we are in control of our faculty and what we want to do." Chestnutt at Eaton said mutual respect is vital because of the great differences in the cultures of business and academia.

"I come from an industry that expects everything to be done yesterday," he said. "They come from an industry where everything can be done tomorrow. I've had to learn how to slow down and they've had to learn how to speed up. So even though we may be the source of a great deal of fundraising, we can't necessarily demand; we can't be looked upon as being autocratic in this process, it's a partnership."

Even if a company does not intend to be autocratic, it still may make demands that are off the institutional pace. When a company wants something on Friday night, or Sunday morning, the school and the faculty that want to collaborate have to be willing to say, "No problem," said Kennesaw State's b-school dean, Timothy Mescon. "Part of the faculty commitment has got to be delivery at non-traditional times and non-traditional locations."

Kennesaw State has created multiple relationships, both for credit and no-credit, with corporate universities such as Kroger, Post Properties, Equifax and Bell South Applied Technologies.

Mescon said another big challenge for established schools like his is being willing to be subjected to "ongoing, incessant and very critical analysis of programs."

"You really need to check your ego at the door as a business school," Mescon said, "because when they say a component of the program did not work, you have to be able to admit it and rectify it."

The challenge, for those who are not used to the immediate and unrestrained evaluation, is to accept and respond to feedback quickly.

"As you get closer and closer to individuals who are actually practitioners, there is no leeway for being obsolete," said McClellan." You are constantly trying to stay ahead of the curve. For faculty who made a significant investment in learning a particular discipline, and then tended to live off that like a time-release individual, now they've got to constantly renew themselves. You have to make sure you are teaching and providing the information that is relevant. The evaluation process is not only the formal part, but the informal process that takes place in the classroom and in the interactions every day."

Mescon said the faculty feedback is "fast, focused and sometimes not necessarily what you want to hear." But he said, after the initial shock, faculty have been responsive to it because it helps them refine what they do and it benefits not just the corporate programs but the campus programs also.

Kennesaw State has invested thousands of dollars in faculty development, sending them to seminars and workshops and bringing in consultants to improve professors' presentation skills, Mescon said.

At Eaton, student feedback to the faculty is immediate. "There have been a few feathers ruffled when some of them read the feedback sheets," Chestnutt said, "but the people that Ryerson picks in the first place are their best. There's only been one professor, in Quebec, not invited back."

The evaluations that corporate faculty take for granted can be awkward for business school partners agreed Hammon at TVAU.

"Their faculty are not accustomed to having systematic student evaluations and organizational evaluations that are actually used. A dean may not have the power to necessarily influence a faculty member's performance. The power systems within academic institutions are unlike those in business," Hammon said. "That creates special challenges when you're asking them to sort of hold themselves as an institution and their key players accountable for a certain standard of performance just like we would hold ourselves."

"It's becoming one of the major programs of all the schools, equal to the MBA, undergraduate and Ph.D. in relative importance," said Indiana's Danielson about these corporate alliances. "Faculty are getting recruited and promoted based on their ability to succeed in this arena."

Danielson cites positive consequences from faculty members' involvement in a new type of executive education that might call for curriculum innovation, research and publication, conferences and presentations.

Three Indiana Ph.D. students involved in developing Whirlpool's curriculum and providing tutorial assistance, for example, have won places on the faculty at INSEAD, the London Business School and the University of Michigan. One also has collaborated on scholarly articles and a book.

Of the 15 tenured faculty who have worked in the Whirlpool partnership, Danielson said, three have earned major endowed chairs and three more have earned minor endowed chairs. "That's a clear indication that their time being spent over here is valued," he said.

Another reward for professors is the opportunity to work more closely with practitioners and non-traditional academics who may be publishing and writing even as they are working in their field and to identify research opportunities.

At Boston College, its corporate colleague already has provided faculty grants for curriculum development in areas that needed strengthening. "The way we currently are handling the compensation or rewards for executive education is pretty much strictly on an incremental basis," said Neuhauser," so it's very lucrative for faculty to get involved in it."

"You often hear the expression, 'bridging the gap between academia and the real world,'" BC's McClellan said. "There is no need for the bridge in a professional school of management. If there is a need for a bridge, there's something wrong."

Watson at Bank of America views the insider-outsider combination as highly complementary. "The UNC instructors make their living doing research and understanding the topic they are teaching," she said. "They spend a tremendous amount of time with our subject matter experts ahead of time, designing and developing the classes. When they get up in front of our managers they can talk to the way we do things here. It is clear they are imparting information that may be new but also wrapping that into things we already have in place."

While most of the requests coming into a b-school presume the faculty already has the knowledge base for developing a curriculum or a program, the situation at Ryerson in Toronto called for an entirely new level of faculty collaboration. The degree that Eaton was seeking didn't exist in the university. Of the 40 courses in the four-year program, 20 of them were specific to retailing and 15 of those were brand new developments.

"We had to create the opportunity for faculty who did have retail background, whether they came out of accounting, finance, retail operations or human resources," said Ryerson's Schalm.

"We reached outside the business school in a number of different schools to pull together the existing faculty. We have some in liberal arts. In economics we found someone who is a transportation economics specialist. We first had to cast our net within the institution to find out what knowledge base we had and what expertise. Then, in addition, we have complemented or supplemented that with external people whom we bring in on a contractual basis. We buy part of their expertise to assist us internally in developing the program," he said.

The possibility of the elite schools taking over the market for highly remunerative partnerships with corporations is always there.

"Brand name institutions have greater opportunity," IC²'s Sullivan said." Industry prides itself on working with brand name institutions. It's possible that a handful or two will dominate."

"It requires so much that you really have to have people on both sides of the equation who understand partnering," said UNC's Hauser. "It will be a select group of universities, other consulting firms, or whatever, and a very select group of thinking people who don't want to do programs, but who want to change their companies and have a continuing resource. You don't want to go out and build a university. What you want to do is plug your coaxial cable into the back of the mind of a great university. Link up to its brainpower."

But Danielson foresees many schools that want to play in the corporate education marketplace finding niches for themselves. "The market is getting more complex," he said. "You have a more sophisticated consumer and there will be greater segmentation, greater nuances. More schools will ask where are we going to play in this arena and how are we going to position ourselves?"

The university-based b-schools that partner with corporations will have to be willing to do the work, not of changing missions, but expanding their mission into new territory.

Schalm at Ryerson believes this is going to take an attitudinal shift on the part of many universities that have gotten used to a certain relationship with industry. That relationship was more of accepting corporate contributions and having the discretion to determine how it would be spent. This is a totally different model of collaboration, he said.

The long-term relationships between business schools and corporations are a given, Vicere believes. "The future is long-term partnerships and alliances, not just with companies, but linking b-schools, so there are a couple of business schools working with a company, or a couple of companies working in a larger-scale consortium," he said.

"The challenge to b-schools," said Vicere, "is that not everyone at the beginning was willing to step up to this idea of being a partner and helping a company develop processes. Now that everybody is interested and stepping up, it's not necessarily all of our core competencies. We know how to develop what we do - traditional educational methodologies — but we've got to learn some new ways of operating pretty quickly."