The Leadership Investment

The Leadership Investment is all about greater expectations for potential leaders in the corporate environment. Utilizing some of the better companies in the business world today, Robert Fulmer and Marshall Goldsmith offer concrete examples and guides for producing an educational program within your corporation that will increase productivity and loyalty. Globalization of the economy, increasingly complex technology demands, the need to drive corporate strategy, the Internet, and e-commerce - these are just some of the forces pressing today's managers, CIO's and CEO's. Clearly, the very concept of what it means to be any of the aforementioned is undergoing a radical transformation. Now more than ever, corporate leadership is being asked - no, required to master many areas. Training and education programs are a must according to authors Fulmer and Marshall. Drawing on research done with a number of well known corporations such as Johnson & Johnson, HP, GE, Saturn and the World Bank, just to name a few, old style managers are becoming extinct, if not outdated. Based on their research, the authors indicate that today's managers are being asked to substantially increase their participation in shaping the strategic direction of the company, to accepting more responsibility for initiating business change projects and to become more aggressive in introducing new technology into the organization. Corporate universities are a strategic force that any company big or small must invest in, if they intend their managers, CIO's, CEO's and employees to become new-economy leaders.

The Leadership Investment gives invaluable insights into the executive development and education programs of some of the best companies in the world. Each chapter delves deeply into the benefits of offering education programs, how these programs are set up in six of the world¹s top companies, and how the programs continue to grow and change with the times. These first chapters are a helpful guide to any company looking into setting up a corporate education program. Perhaps the most interesting sections of the book are the sections on leadership development firms and corporate universities, in that these sections reveal an alternative route to executive development. This book will be incredibly useful to any company in its efforts to set up a leadership development program.