The Leadership Investment: How the World's Best Organizations Gain Strategic Advantage Through Leadership Development. - Brief Article - Review - book review

HR Magazine, Feb, 2001

By Robert M. Fulmer and Marshall Goldsmith

AMACOM, 2001,

352 pages,

List Price: $27.95

ISBN: 0-8144-0558-4

Jeffrey Immelt had plenty of internal competition before General Electric's board of directors tapped him to succeed longtime CEO Jack Welch late last year. One reason: GE's powerhouse leadership development program at Crotonville, N.Y., targets "A players" and trains about 4 percent of the company's 240,000 employees each year. That's just one way that leading global organizations are using leadership development for competitive advantage, according to authors Robert M. Fulmer and Marshall Goldsmith.

Fulmer, co-author of four editions of The New Management, is a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Graziadio School of Business at Pepperdine University. Goldsmith is the founder of Keilty, Goldsmith & Co., a provider of leadership development, and executive director of The Financial Times Knowledge-Leadership Dialogue.

This book begins with an introduction to the concept of leadership development. Chapter 1 presents reasons why programs need to be aligned with all the strategic objectives of the organization, the advantages of "growing" leaders (rather than "buying" them from other companies) and various tools used to assess development programs.

Chapters 2 through 7 focus on individual programs at six leading organizations--Arthur Andersen, GE, Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson, Royal Dutch Shell and The World Bank. Each chapter provides a mini history of an organization and how it developed, and continues to expand, its leadership programs.

For example, Royal Dutch Shell created its Leadership and Performance (LEAP) program in the mid-1990s to create leaders at every level in the organization. Team projects, rather than traditional classroom sessions, allow individual tailoring of LEAP offerings to specific business needs. At Hewlett-Packard, the Accelerated Development Program was created to provide leaders with the opportunity to develop skills to assume new challenges. The effort is helping HP identify and groom high-potential employees for senior management positions.

Chapter 8 focuses on corporate universities, with details on how these "corporations" are developed and measured. Chapter 9 presents summaries of five universities tied to corporate training: Harvard Business School, London Business School, Institute for Management Development (Lausanne, Switzerland), Thunderbird and Pepperdine's Graziadio School. Chapter 10 discusses leadership development firms, such as the Society for Organizational Learning and the Center for Creative Leadership.

Chapter 11 concludes with the strategic challenge of making leadership development real and relevant. The book includes an appendix on benchmarking to ensure the systematic transfer of best practices and an appendix on web sites about corporate universities.