Chapter 14 - Tomorrow's business world

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Tomorrow's business world	483

  The group's Dorothy Perkins women's wear chain, for example, has more than 500 branches. Every branch manager and all area and regional managers have been through Speakers International peak-performance training. Walk into a training session and you're likely to see petite women managers breaking through thick boards with their bare hands, learning to juggle and developing new memory-training techniques.
  Says Personnel Director Kim Morton: "We want all our people to realize they can develop talents beyond what they may have thought possible." 22
  Her company is also using other training in innovation techniques and Kaizen continuous-improvement methods to increase the supply of ideas from all 6,000 staff members.
  In three separate 1996 trials using accelerated learning methods, store sales in three months increased by 10 percent. In the full 1995-96 financial year, Dorothy Perkins increased its profits from $6.6 million to $25 million. The total Burton Group raised its full-year profits by 54 percent to $246 million. 23
  "We certainly can't attribute all that to training," says John Hoerner. "But the ability to use new methods to improve the skills of management and staff is undoubtedly a key factor. That involves, firstly, all senior executives combining both long-term leadership and short-term management roles. It involves a corporate culture where everyone is encouraged to be a lifelong learner, and a creative, self-acting manager. It involves training and development programs that produce specific results both for the group and for all the individuals involved in it. And it entails efficient communications so we can duplicate innovations that work." 24

The school or college as a business venture
 
  Author Alvin Toffler has described knowledge as "the ultimate business resource".25 And where university-based knowledge has already teamed up with innovative business, the results have changed the world. The Stanford University-venture capital-brainpower base for Silicon Valley, M.I.T.'s Media Lab, and the bonds between the giant Japanese companies and their universities are striking examples.
  Now some schools and colleges are moving in the same direction. Mt. Edgecumbe High School in Alaska is one model. Another comes from British twin entrepreneurs Peter and Paul Templeton. Their family runs two private London colleges, Lansdowne and Duff Miller, which

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