Establish trial-and-error regiments for your employees, and you will enjoy increased efficiency and profits, he says. But don't neglect rule three: Measure the time it takes employees to master their learning. In Breakaway, Fred explains how to calculate a proficiency rate and how to map a proficiency curve that compares the number of service units required to reach the proficiency threshold, where the organization can deliver on its value proposition.

By keeping close tabs on employees' cycle time to proficiency, a company can help its people learn more skills faster over time. And speed is still important. Fred says speed is, in fact, now equal to quality in its value to customers. Still, trust remains paramount.

"The absolute unilateral focus must be delivering on promises," Fred says. "The companies that break away will have a pure external focus on the customer. They will think about gaining new customers, keeping the ones they have, and coming up with new ways to wow the customer. The ones that immediately look internally for problems will find behind. They will be laying people off, blaming employees, and firing their CEO. They will be so internally focused that they won't be able to see who the customer is anymore."

Anni Layne Rodgers (arodgers@fastcompany.com) is the Fast Company senior Web editor. Learn more about Charles L. Fred on the Web.

Sidebar: Six Ways to Help Your People Learn -- Fast!

Charles L. Fred interviewed roughly 300 CEOs, technical leaders, training managers, and entry-level employees while working on Breakaway: Deliver Value to Your Customers -- Fast. The most successful companies he studied followed the three rules for corporate training outlined above, but some lackluster companies did too. Why the inconsistency?

True breakaway companies also exhibited some special, enigmatic qualities, or "mojo," Fred says. Here, he describes the six themes common to organizations that learn fast.

1. Make proficiency an organizational priority. "Workforce efficiency is not a departmental issue or an HR issue; it's a board-level issue. Every time Starbucks looks to open a new store or a new market, the company leadership asks, How quickly can we get those new people to deliver the company's culture and values? Home Depot and Australia's WestPac Bank do this very well too. They make workforce proficiency an agenda issue at the board level. They make it a leadership priority."

2. Be impatient with wasted activity. "Few of the successful companies that I studied had large training budgets. They didn't set aside 5% to 7% of revenue for training. They didn't have fancy solutions. They had creative, innovative training strategies that worked because their people cared. If you have no money, chances are you'll devise simple, effective ways to train your employees. If you have a large training budget, you'll probably have a lot of waste.

"Wal-Mart is a great example of a big company that, I swear, has no training budget, yet its whole team is always ready to roll. Wal-Mart has no patience for a system that takes eight months to implement. It hasn't overengineered the learning process. It knows that people with the right drive and motivation will get up to speed in time, even without a corporate university or a chief learning officer."

3. View employees as consumers of learning. "The typical assumption is that educators should know how everyone learns best. The best companies understand that their employees know themselves best. They let their people choose the delivery method best suited for the way they learn. They don't homogenize their people."

4. Stress simplicity. "The learning processes in the best companies were so simple -- it was almost scary. Most of the money was spent running practice sessions, like simulated call centers, and helping employees acquire experience. The training itself was purposely simple so that the companies could change it fast, if a new tool or piece of information arrived on the scene. If training gets complex, they get rid of it."

5. Innovate to learn. "Fast companies often have training methods that look goofy from the outside but that deliver raw innovation and really help their people get up to speed fast. They are so driven to deliver faster than their competition that innovation has to happen. They can't afford to wait around for typical training programs to take hold, so they launch grassroots efforts that strike a real chord with people."

6. Cultivate candor. "The companies that moved the quickest were brutally honest about training. They examined every institutionalized process that made no sense. They questioned everything. They didn't protect the status quo; they exposed it."