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Corporate leadership
models
In the corporate world, the models also abound:
 From
Andersen Consulting's highly-impressive company university in St. Charles, Illinois, where
the world's largest firm of management consultants spends more than $400 million a year on
internal staff training - using the latest in multimedia, interactive case-study models.
From
Stan Shih's Acer Group and the $7 million it has contributed to set up The Acer
Foundation.
From
the United Kingdom's biggest company, British Telecommunications, which is mounting a
five-year, nine-figure millennium project to involve Britain's 60 million population to
communicate better.
And
from Apple Computers, which has pioneered one of the longest partnerships between the
corporate and school worlds.
Its Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow (ACOT) project has
been running in America since 1985. Some of the results have been spectacular.4
West High School in Columbus, Ohio, is the original
ACOT model. It operates as a school within a school. It caters each year to 120 of the
school's 1,200 students. Of the total school roll, only 15 percent of students have gone
on to college. Of those attending ACOT: 90 percent.
Students at Bell High School in south-western Los
Angeles County - a high poverty area - have won more than 100 awards for producing their
own videos as key components of their multimedia ACOT program.
Lincoln High School in San Jose, California, has worked
in closely with a local television station and the police department to pioneer digital
photography. Its students have even collaborated with NASA scientists to produce an
interactive educational CD-ROM about the effects of space on the heart.
But despite these great examples, America - the richest
nation on earth - continues to provide the greatest possible contrasts: corporate leaders
in informational software and hardware yet with a public school system that veers from
brilliant to appalling. By contrast, companies such as Microsoft, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard
and Netscape are revolutionizing the entire field of instant communications. And several
of them are revolutionizing their businesses into learning organizations.
GE Chief Executive Jack Welsh is caught up in building
what he calls a learning culture in a highly diversified corporation that was founded more
than 100 years ago by Thomas Edison. And as Robert
Slater quotes
Contents Page Preface
Introduction
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