PREFACE
When a manager could walk down the hallway and see all her employees, the issues of knowledge transfer and training were fairly simple. Trainers and employees shared a common culture and worldviews; they met under one roof for training. As the training concluded, they returned to offices in the same area so that they could continue to learn from one another. But this is a new millennium. Transportation and telecommunication advances have transformed corporate life. Many corporations are going global. Offices, retail stores, and restaurants that are part of the same organization may be located in a dozen other countries. The workforce is dispersed. Languages and cultures differ. Control shifts constantly between headquarters and local offices.
For the training and development (T&D) community, this globalization brings both challenge and reward. The challenge is to distribute knowledge and implement training across cultural, language, and geographic boundaries, to balance corporate standardization with local customization. The reward lies in being part of —or even presiding over—a T&D function that is unified in vision, values, and practices and that strives to spread the corporate “mantra” while retaining the flexibility to incorporate local ideas from multiple locations.
The worldwide evolution of global training has led us to focus on the management of a multiple-location system for the deployment of training and development, which can be thought of as a distribution network for corporate knowledge and training. Modern technology allows us to keep a virtual presence around the world while simultaneously using regional centers for personal contact in local offices. Regardless of the specifics, the primary concern of training and development systems is to improve performance, manage knowledge, and cultivate a quality culture.
This book will be useful to those who are responsible for distributing training and development across multiple locations and/or cultures as they struggle with ways to address these challenges while responding to both local clients and corporate managers. It includes some theory, but the focus is on the practice of the training and development function in organizations that are globalizing and have headquarter offices with divisional/regional centers in multiple markets, in multiple countries. This book contains models and paradigms, as well as illustrations and job aids, but the heart of the text is, of course, the many specific ideas for managing a multiple location training and development function.
We appreciate the patience of those who have been close to us during the period in which this writing took place, especially our spouses, Levirina Helena Krempl and Gae Tueller Pace. Jonathon Poh and Lori Figueiredo provided invaluable input into the initial thinking about the multiple-location system model. Janice Snow Lohmann contributed to the organization of the text and provided indispensable editing expertise. Dick Swanson offered kind and reasonable encouragement and provided excellent reviewers to clarify our thinking and focus our direction. Steve and Wayne met in Hawaii and created this work almost entirely via the World Wide Web as each labored in different parts of the universe, attending to their various professional commitments.
Stephen F. Krempl, Plano, Texas
R. Wayne Pace, St. George, Utah