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Don's
Picks
No
Ordinary Boot Camp
©
2001 by Noel M. Tichy University of Michigan Business School
Appearing
in: HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW April 2001 Edition
Most
companies' orientation programs were designed to help new
hires hit the ground running. Trilogy's boot camp has a bigger
goal: keep the company running.
Noel
M. Tichy is a professor at the University of Michigan Business
School in Ann Arbor. The ideas in this article will be further
explored in his forthcoming HarperBusiness book Leader2Leader:
Generating Knowledge in the Twenty-First Century (with Nancy
Cardwell). He can be reached at tichy@umich.edu.
Corporate
boot camps. We've all heard about them. Many of us have lived
through them. In my case, I've even invented a number of them.
It's fair to say that, while some achieve their goals better
than others, they're all pretty much the same. They typically
focus on knowledge transfer-informing new hires, for instance,
about the company's products and markets and how to access
key resources in the organization. The best ones, like those
at GE and Ford, do this by having the recruits work on real
business problems, where intense teamwork is required to meet
tight deadlines (a technique I've described elsewhere as "compressed
action learning.") I've studied them all. I thought I'd
seen it all.
But
then I saw Trilogy University. It was 1998, and I was traveling
around the country, studying corporate universities as part
of a benchmarking research project on action learning. Within
days of my arrival, I knew Trilogy University was a breed
apart-in fact, my definition of best practice shot out to
the horizon line. I've spent hundreds of hours since then
at TU, documenting its unconventional approach-and its phenomenal
results. (It should be stated, by way of full disclosure,
that I briefly consulted to Trilogy last year on the matter
of its reorganization. But my relationship to the company
and its university at this point is purely as an observer.)
Modeled after Marine Corps basic training, a corporate boot
camp is designed to push new recruits to their limits. Each
day offers some nearly insurmountable challenge, and the reward
for overcoming it is an even harder one the next day. It's
intense and intimidating, but people emerge on the other end
of the program highly confident that they are prepared for
anything. They also come away with deep bonds to their fellow
recruits and strong ties to the organization.
Those
two goals-preparedness and bonding-are usually the whole focus
of a boot camp, and achieving them is worth a great deal.
That's why so many of the top-performing companies put their
faith in such programs. In the mid-1980s, I ran General Electric's
Crotonville leadership development center, where I led the
development of its Corporate Entry Leadership Conference,
a three-day program in which new hires learn about GE's strategy,
its culture, and a bit about themselves. "Old man Watson"
at IBM ran them, as did Ross Perot when he founded EDS, as
does Andy Grove at Intel. And for years, the commercial banks
have run their commercial-lending boot camps for college hires.
In the past decade, consulting firms and service organizations
have dramatically increased their investments in boot camps
for new recruits. Accounting giant Arthur Andersen, for instance,
has a 700-bed facility in St. Charles, Illinois, which runs
at capacity year round. Many old-line industrials have also
set them up because they realize that energizing new hires
and engaging them in the culture is just as critical as making
sure they have the technical skills to do their specific jobs.
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. How can it
do all that? By now, it almost couldn't fail to, thanks to
a virtuous cycle that was established early and continues
to gain momentum. 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.
Welcome
to Trilogy
Trilogy
University is orientation program of Austin, Texas-based Trilogy
designed to turn the company's raw recruits-hired straight
off campuses of MIT, Stanford, U. Michigan, and the like-into
highly productive contributors. Started in 1995, it is the
brainchild of Trilogy's president and CEO, Joe Liemandt, and
its vice president of marketing, John Price.
The company has a pressing need for new-employee orientation
because its growth has been extremely rapid, and the biggest
drag on growth has been the difficulty of recruiting and bringing
new talent up to speed. Trilogy started fast out of the gate
in 1989 when Liemandt nailed a market opportunity to create
"configuration software" for large manufacturers
like Hewlett-Packard and Boeing. The products these companies
sell have innumerable variants, as alternative components
are assembled to suit each buyer's highly specific preferences.
Trilogy's software solves a huge problem traditionally faced
in the selling process by allowing a salesperson with a laptop
to translate a customer's needs into a workable specification.
The software spots where components are incompatible, for
instance, or where one part requires another, and it configures
a system that will work. Then-and this is really important
to those salespeople-it produces an accurate price quote on
the spot.
Trilogy's breakthrough allowed it to do something most small
software companies only dream of: sign up brand-name accounts
like Hewlett-Packard while the product was still in its infancy.
Since then, Trilogy expanded on its original offering to launch
e-commerce applications for both the buying and selling of
products, and its revenues have grown to about $200 million.
Along the way, its employee base has grown 35% annually. In
2000, the company brought 450 new hires into an existing organization
of 1,000.
Joe Liemandt realized early on that, as each influx of new
hires came through the doors, the company needed to equip
them with not only the skills required for their jobs but
also the vision and values they should align their work with.
But because each new group represented a fair proportion of
the whole organization, assimilation wasn't going to happen
in some natural, organic way. It would have to be deliberately
managed. Having to compress a great deal of learning and acculturation
into a short time frame, Liemandt decided he needed a boot
camp.
Three
High-Pressure Months
"The
first day, Joe walks in. And, like, his very few first words
are, 'You're going to be the future of Trilogy--the company
is relying on you--and everybody's waiting on you.'"
The speaker is Vince Mallet, a computer science master's grad
who was wearing a Java T-shirt, his long hair in a neat ponytail,
and a broad grin as he recently gave me the student's view
of TU. Liemandt's message was apparently hitting home. Mallet
told me, "I just want to go out in the company and be
able to have that impact." It would be a tough several
weeks before he got that chance.
Trilogy University is run twice a year. In the summer, it
currently includes 170 to 200 hires, and in the winter about
60, all coming straight from campus. A class typically has
a sprinkling of freshly minted master's and PhDs, and a fair
number of liberal arts majors, but it's mostly drawn from
undergraduate computer science departments. The program generally
lasts 12 weeks. It's structured to take students through a
well-thought-out process to develop skills, relationships,
and values, which they then apply in intense R&D projects
before they're ultimately introduced as a positive new force
into the rest of the organization.
Month One. When you arrive at Trilogy University, you are
assigned to a section and an instruction track. Your section,
a group of about 20, is your social group for the duration
of TU. You share a section leader (an experienced person from
Trilogy who serves as a mentor) and virtually all of your
time with these people. Tracks are designed to be microcosms
of future work life at Trilogy. For example, as a future developer
or consultant, you might learn about technologies like XML
and JSP one week by building a customizable sales analysis
Web site for a fictional company. The technical challenges
in such exercises closely mimic real customer engagements,
but the time frames are dramatically compressed. The assignments
pile up week after week for the first month, each one successively
more challenging than the last.
During that time, you're being constantly measured and evaluated,
as assignment grades and comments are entered into a database
monitoring your progress. The functional training is so intense
that it would be easy to assume it's the most important goal
of TU. But Allan Drummond, the Trilogy vice president who
runs TU, says that's not the case. "If people don't learn
Java in TU, I don't care. They're very bright-they can pick
up what they need. But if they don't develop nearly unbreakable
bonds with fellow TUers, if they don't learn to prioritize
and make smart decisions, if they don't leave charged up,
then TU is a failure."
The goals Drummond is emphasizing are the focus of the sections.
Unlike tracks, sections continue past the first month. In
a sense, they last for life. Effectiveness at Trilogy depends
on having trusting relationships with coworkers, and sections
are designed to prime that process. That's why, Vince Mallet
explained to me, "on the second day, we were all asked
to tell the most significant emotional experience of our lives."
Vince says some of the students' first reactions were cynical:
"Yeah, we're going to tell stories about us. Whatever."
But the technique worked its magic as people began to talk
and listen. Before long, he says, "Some people were crying,
some people were making other people cry. And I thought, whoa-this
is totally unusual." People were getting deeply acquainted,
not incidentally but intentionally. The individuals in each
section represent a cross-section of functions; upon graduation
from TU, the students will disperse to all corners of Trilogy,
and the trust and bonds they develop will form horizontal
networks linking them to people throughout the company for
the rest of their careers.
Beyond developing skills and relationships, month one of Trilogy
University also begins to instill values. Humility is one
of the values Liemandt wants to see, and that's one reason
the tracks deliberately stretch students beyond the point
of failure. Other values are introduced through what people
at Trilogy refer to as "big talks," which Liemandt
or other Trilogy stars have with the whole TU class, usually
in a Socratic style, and which are further discussed and debated
in sections. Students learn early that Trilogy values creativity,
innovation, and being a force for positive change in the workplace.
They learn that Trilogy wants to see teamwork and a strong
belief that success means solving the customer's problem.
More than anything, they learn that Trilogy values risk-taking.
Along with the skills and relationships forged in month one,
these values will be sorely tested in month two.
Month Two. Month two is TU Project Month. This is when the
TUers, most of them 22 years old and employees for all of
a month, take on the responsibility of inventing the company's
future. "We tell them that, in order for the company
to survive, they have to come up with a frame-breaking great
new business idea," says Liemandt. "And they believe
it because I really believe it."
Liemandt's learned, he says, "the hard way" that
taking risks and suffering the consequences is a crucial part
of any business. When he decided to launch Trilogy, he was
in his senior year at Stanford. Rather than miss what might
be a narrow window of opportunity, he decided to drop out
and dedicate himself full-time to it. At least one very accomplished
businessman, a former GE senior executive (who also happened
to be his father), told him: "You're a moron."
The TU Project is Liemandt's way of giving new recruits his
own experience all over again. In teams of three to five people,
they have to come up with an idea, create a business model
for it, build the product, and develop the marketing plan.
In trying to launch bold new ideas in a hyperaccelerated time
frame, they gain a deep appreciation of the need to set priorities,
evaluate probabilities, and measure results. Mind you, these
projects are not hypothetical-they're the real thing. But
even more important, when each team presents its innovation,
Liemandt is there, deciding whether or not to put up the money
to launch it. It's exhausting but it's also energizing, because
Trilogy's best and most senior people are in the mix. New
employees know they're getting noticed and that their ideas
have a chance of being taken up.
How big is that chance? About 15% of the projects survive
beyond the month allocated to them in TU. It's that humility
thing again. Drummond describes the reaction of recruits who
think their ideas are brilliant but then see them fail. "They're
like, 'We stink. Not near good enough.' Actually, we never
want that feeling to end. Because the minute you get arrogant,
someone comes and beats you."
At the same time, the seriousness with which Liemandt and
all the rest of Trilogy take the projects builds confidence.
"We encourage them to go for the fence with their ideas
and, while we don't reward failure around here, we don't punish
them for it either," says Liemandt. "So, when people
leave TU, most of them are thinking, 'I know I can make a
difference, and I am not afraid to try'-which is exactly what
we want them to think."
Month Three. Month three at Trilogy University is all about
finding your place and having a broader impact in the larger
organization. A few students continue with their TU projects,
but most move on to "graduation projects," which
generally are assignments within the various Trilogy business
units. People leave TU on a rolling basis as they find sponsors
out in the company who are willing to take them on.
The graduation process is a meeting between the graduate,
the new manager, and the section leader. Before the meeting,
each has been asked to evaluate the TUer on his or her various
abilities. At the meeting, the three of them discuss the evaluation
to resolve disagreements. "We don't just want understanding,
we want agreement," says Drummond. "On all of the
rankings where there is a disparity, they have to reach an
agreement." The TUers have also written lists of objectives
and their thoughts on how they want their careers to unfold.
The manager responds to these with a list of specific goals
that the TUer must agree to. Typically, the manager will set
three to five year-long goals that include a skill-development,
a mainline-execution, and an organizational-development goal.
In addition, the manager creates another plan focused on creating
the job assignments and coaching opportunities that will help
the TUer reach his or her longer-term career goals.
"We
want everyone here to be a star. We won't graduate TUers until
they have found positions they want and where the new manager
will take responsibility for helping them become a star,"
explains former TU head Danielle Rios. The TU faculty sometimes
help persuade managers who are reluctant to take a risk, but
a TUer who ultimately can't find a sponsor is out of the company.
It's the rare TU graduate who can't find a home within Trilogy
because, clearly, Trilogy University succeeds at the basics
of basic training. Graduates emerge from it prepared-by their
skills, their relationships, and their values-to hit the ground
running. But what really sets this boot camp apart from others
I know is that it contributes much more to Trilogy than that.
First, thanks to the energy and attention devoted to the TU
Projects, TU has become the company's primary research and
development engine. Second, it has become the setting for
Trilogy's leadership development. Third, it provides a great
context and impetus for management to revisit and communicate
strategic direction. And fourth, it serves as a constant source
of organizational renewal and transformation.
A
New-Product Pipeline
Joe
Liemandt recalls the day in 1997 when a TU project team of
six kids pitched the idea for selling cars on the Internet.
At the time, e-commerce was still pretty much virgin territory.
EBay was not alive yet. Amazon was a start-up. Liemandt told
them their idea was one of the dumbest he had ever heard.
They clearly didn't understand the automotive industry, franchise
laws, and how dealers would prevent this from happening. And
they were totally naïve to think people would spend that
kind of money over the Internet.
The team thought Liemandt was the one who was missing something,
so they decided to prove him wrong. They went ahead and developed
CarOrder.com, lined up struggling dealers who were willing
to cooperate, and-lo and behold-started racking up sales.
Today, one of Trilogy's most talked-about businesses is its
global alliance with Ford. Without the consumer-side technology,
experience, and credibility Trilogy developed from that TU
Project - the CarOrder.com Web site won PC Magazine's 2000
Editors' Choice for Best Car-Buying Site-the Ford relationship
would not have happened. Liemandt, who first designed TU Projects
purely as a learning exercise, has come to see them as his
biggest source of strategic innovation.
It makes perfect sense if you think about it. Playing the
role of the venture capitalist, Liemandt is wholly focused
on the merits of the ideas as business propositions. And because
he and other senior managers are paying attention, the students
are truly giving their all on these projects. Meanwhile, the
intensity of the bonds between teammates helps ensure that
deep collaboration is taking place among them, leading to
higher creativity. And the fact that these are new hires straight
out of college means their ideas are less likely to be constrained
by past practices-at TU or anywhere else. For all these reasons,
R&D gets done at Trilogy and gets done well. Since 1995,
TU projects have produced $25 million in revenue and have
formed the basis for $100 million in new business for the
company. A recent TU class, for example, developed Fast Cycle
Time, an Internet-time delivery methodology now being used
by more than 20 of Trilogy's customers. In late 1999, several
TUers created a Web site called IveBeenGood.com, which enabled
shoppers to put products from popular retail sites like Amazon.com
or ShopNow directly into a single shopping cart, which IveBeenGood
hosted. Only nine months after its creation, a refined version
of this universal shopping-cart technology, renamed UberWorks
and still run by TUers, was sold to Network Commerce for $13
million. The initial investment was $2 million.
The
Next Generation of Leaders
TU
also succeeds as a proving ground for developing the next
generation of leadership at Trilogy. I've mentioned that the
section leaders are experienced people. What I haven't said
yet is that these are the best and brightest technical stars
Trilogy has to offer-and that they dedicate themselves 100%
to TU for three months. Trilogy's Chief Scientist, David Franke,
for example, was a section leader in 1999. So was Scott Snyder,
Trilogy's vice president of development, who in summer 2000
asked for a turn as a section leader before he moved over
to help grow Trilogy's European operations.
This
is an extraordinary investment, to be sure. But consider the
payback. In the hothouse of TU, and under the direct eye of
Liemandt, these technical people are learning and testing
out the essential skills they need to be effective leaders:
inspiring others, mentoring talent, evaluating performance,
communicating vision and strategy, and more. During their
three months at TU, they are not only exposed to Liemandt's
latest ideas about the direction of the company, they're also
engaged with him as partners in developing and implementing
those ideas. In the process, they are transformed from being
members of the "old Trilogy" into dedicated change
agents participating in its next round of transformation.
Again, it makes perfect sense. But what a contrast with typical
practice, which assigns orientation duty to the staff the
business can most easily spare. Or outsources it to consultants
and professional trainers. At Trilogy University, believe
it or not, it's an honor to be asked to instruct. Trilogians
know this is the fast-track experience they need to move up
in the company. Ben Zaniello, a leading product manager in
Trilogy's financial services practice, actually declined a
promotion in 2000, opting instead to become a section leader.
"I felt that to really drive our financial service offerings
forward into places like on-line wealth management,"
Zaniello says, "section leading was a better opportunity
for growth and for really innovating."
Clarity
on Strategy
Another
benefit was at first unexpected but is now a crucial piece
of TU's contribution to Trilogy's success: twice a year, Liemandt
and other Trilogy leaders must decide what they want to teach
and how they want to focus the new class of hires.
For any leader, regardless of whether he or she is ever in
a classroom setting, having what I call a "teachable
point of view" is crucial. This is, essentially, a clear
idea about where the company (or organization or team) needs
to go, a general understanding about how it's going to get
there, and the ability to explain it in a way that inspires
others. But while leaders' TPOVs must be firm and clear, they
must also constantly evolve to take new conditions into account.
What TU does for Liemandt and other Trilogy leaders is to
compel them to update their TPOVs at least twice a year. As
a result, Joe and the senior leadership are continually challenged
and given candid feedback that helps them improve the way
they craft and share their vision. TU is the impetus and the
process for improving Liemandt and his senior people as leaders.
Organizational
Transformation
There's
at least one more thing TU contributes to Trilogy that a typical
boot camp does not-and it may be the most important thing
of all. It serves as a force of organizational renewal and
transformation. Traditionally, orientation programs are designed
to teach newcomers to fit into the existing organization.
But TU sees its fresh hires as its best chance to change the
company. "With each TU class, we have the opportunity
to create in the minds of 60 or 160 new people the vision
of Trilogy not as it is but as we would like it to be,"
says Drummond. "We make sure that they bond into a strong
trust network among themselves and with the leaders who mentor
them in TU, which gives them confidence. Then we send them
out into the company, where they have the critical mass to
make a real impact."
This,
in fact, was the goal that led to Trilogy University in the
first place. As Liemandt tells it now, he was concerned in
1994 that the new people coming in might have their eyes on
a rather short-term prize. The company was a one-trick pony;
it had a very hot product, and a quick sale or an IPO could
have paid off handsomely. Liemandt had already spotted that
kind of perspective in some of his colleagues, and he didn't
like it. He was in it for the long haul, and he wanted an
organization devoted to building, as it says in the company's
motto, "the next great software company." So that's
when he decided to get a team of new hires, isolate them from
the legacy organization, and spend three months helping them
get the religion.
This is a big part of why the TUers' entry into the company
is so carefully orchestrated. In the first few weeks of TU,
they're highly isolated from the rest of the company. As the
weeks go by, the amount of contact increases. By the third
month, they're ready to venture out into the company, while
retaining their home base and their support network back in
TU.
"I
and most of Trilogy don't think of TU as a training program.
It is a transformational experience," Drummond says.
It transforms the TUers, it transforms Liemandt and other
Trilogy leaders, and, ultimately, it transforms the company.
The
Virtuous Teaching Cycle
Of
everything I've seen at Trilogy University, I'm most impressed
with the power of the virtuous teaching cycle it has put in
motion. The leaders of the organization are learning from
the recruits as the recruits are learning from the leaders.
Each element in place here-new-hire training, product innovation,
leadership development, and the rest-fuels the others. It's
not just that all these things get done at Trilogy University.
It's that all of them get done better than they would otherwise.
Now stop and read that last sentence again, because it's big.
It's all done better.
New hires learn faster because they are working on real projects,
with guidance from the best managerial talent in the company
and with the full knowledge that their efforts are not going
unnoticed. Leaders in training learn more because they have
real leadership responsibilities and must engage thoughtfully
with the vision and strategy of the company. Even R&D
pays off better because people with unconstrained perspectives
are brainstorming ideas just as they are internalizing that
vision and strategy. The personal involvement and commitment
of the CEO keeps the cycle in motion. He serves as a role
model for it and demands it of everyone else.
So
Why Doesn't Everyone Do This?
I'll
say it again for emphasis: what I have observed at Trilogy
University is completely different from what I've seen in
other corporate training programs-even in other boot camps.
So why is that? Why didn't someone like Jack Welch think this
up? For that matter, why didn't I?
In Jack's defense and mine, I'll point out that this revolutionary
model was also an evolutionary one-and arose from a particular
circumstance that few companies share. Back in 1994, Trilogy
was a very small company hiring so many people at once that
the incoming group had the power to make a needed shift in
the culture. Under those circumstances, to claim that new-employee
orientation is the best use of a CEO's time-even three months
of his time-is not such a stretch. But how many places does
this describe? At this point, not even Trilogy.
Happily, TU evolved by adding other elements so important
to the company's future that it remains the best use of senior
management's time. In fact, at this point, the cycle is so
powerful it's hard to imagine it breaking down. And the evolution
continues: starting in 2001, Liemandt has decided to bring
customers into the process. Selected customers can sponsor
a TU session, sending their own executives to the program,
which would then focus on a set of their key business challenges.
Trilogy will get invaluable executive exposure for its R&D
efforts and its leadership development process. The customer
will get several man-years of innovation time-and a potential
breakthrough. The point is, this isn't a case of taking top
people out of the action. This is the action.
The challenge for other companies, then, is to set this kind
of virtuous cycle in motion given their larger scale and established
processes. Most will have to overcome a lot of inertia; some
will even have to reverse a cycle that's going in the opposite
direction.
That's not an easy task, and along the way the most dedicated
reformer will constantly run up against some predictable objections:
It's too expensive. We can't take our best people off the
line. We can't leave innovation up to kids. We can't trust
them not to train on our dime, then take their skills elsewhere.
Excuses, excuses.
I'm not saying there aren't legitimate reasons that a full-blown
TU-style boot camp might not be for you. Maybe most of your
new hires don't come straight from campus and simply can't
deal with the intense work-life imbalance of a boot camp.
Maybe you're not in a hot enough business-like pre-IPO software-to
attract the kind of talent that could dream up your next big
hit (although Liemandt would certainly counter that the best
way to attract talent is to offer this kind of opportunity).
There may be more reasons that TU can't be replicated everywhere.
But it seems clear that many other companies can do this--and
could reap the same results. What has held the rest of us
back, I hope, is not that we couldn't use this model but that
we haven't yet imagined it. And we haven't yet seen it succeed.
We've discovered it now, and it seems to work. Now it's up
to other leaders to imagine it in their own organizations.
More than anything, making it succeed will require top management
on the scene, truly committed to learning as a two-way street.
Without those people and that attitude, no orientation program
will get much respect or have much impact. With them, the
impact can go far, far beyond the goals of simple orientation.
That's what has happened at Trilogy.
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