Cisco's Quick Study

It was the rhetorical shot heard around the training world -- a declaration about the future that frightened traditional educators, energized reformers, and launched countless dotcom business plans. "The next big killer application for the Internet is going to be education," declared John Chambers, president and CEO of Cisco Systems. "Education over the Internet is going to be so big it is going to make email usage look like a rounding error."

That was easy for Chambers to say -- enthusiastic talk from the leader of the world's most Internet-centric big company. But making the CEO's rhetoric a day-to-day reality inside Cisco is the job of Tom Kelly. Kelly, 51, vice president of worldwide training, joined the company in December 1997 with a clear mandate: to make Cisco a model of Web-based excellence in the one part of its business in which it was a laggard. Cisco is famous for using the Web to reinvent how it takes orders from its customers, how it manages its finances, and how it hires new employees. But three years ago, jokes Kelly, a 20-year veteran of the technology industry, the reality was, "Friends don't let friends work at Cisco training." The problem? Cisco's training division had little credibility, no cohesive strategy, and not much support from the top. "It was broken," says Kelly. "Actually, it was shattered. People were demoralized. Whenever you walked into a room and said that you were from training, you could hear the 'ughs' -- that is, if people weren't already walking the other way."

Talk about slow company. The training group that Kelly took over had a budget to support 80 people. But the group had managed to attract only 50 people, all of whom were understandably overwhelmed by their jobs. They were responsible for training 4,000 internal Cisco salespeople, as well as the company's then 15,000 partner organizations and thousands of customers, in a vast array of new products, whole new categories of technology, and new Internet-based business practices. It seemed like an impossible mission: How could this group match the pace of learning at Cisco with the speed of the company's product releases and changes in its markets? And the old approaches -- from classroom lectures to multimedia CD-ROMs -- seemed hopelessly out-of-date. "Our internal sales force received about 85% of its training in the classroom," Kelly marvels. "We were pulling thousands of people out of their jobs, out of contact with their customers, flying them to different locations and shutting them in classrooms for days at a time. It made no sense."

Over the past three years, cross-functional teams, led by Kelly's group, have worked to reinvent the way that the company delivers ideas, information, and best practices to what may be the most important part of the Cisco empire -- the tens of thousands of people who have the closest day-to-day contact with customers. He has become an influential thought leader and a change agent in a field -- training and learning -- that should be one of the key strategic outposts of the knowledge economy but that often isn't. And he is deploying a set of Internet-based tools that educators find either fascinating or frightening -- but that few ever use. In short, he is writing a new curriculum for Web-based learning that may actually deliver on his CEO's pronouncements.

"E-learning is not the answer to every question, but it needs to be applied as broadly as possible," Kelly says. "The classroom simply cannot address business issues. If you have to teach 100 people about one topic, you can train 25 people in a classroom at a time and repeat the course four times. But if you have to train 3,000 people every 60 days on a new product, or on a new technology, or on a new market -- there's no way that the classroom can work. There's no way to scale. There's no way to have an impact on the company. It is doomed to fail."

Hence, Kelly's relentless focus on the Web. But before he and his team could equip Cisco with the most up-to-date learning technologies, they had to deal with obsolete mind-sets -- assumptions, attitudes, and prejudices that afflict the leaders of most big companies. One such mind-set: that the training operation is not a real part of the business. "There are very few high-tech companies that truly respect how much learning has to happen to allow them and their people to stay current," Kelly says. Sure, almost every company talks about knowledge workers, the information economy, even the learning organization. But few companies act as if they believe what they're saying. There's too much work to do, too many deadlines to meet, too many quarterly results to deliver.

"Learning time is not a respected part of the work environment," Kelly says. "But you can't be so busy that you allow yourself to get stupid. People find the time to do whatever it is that they have to do. Staying current is an increasingly important part of everyone's job. We make choices every day: Do I go to lunch with my boss or do I go to my customer's site? Well, in this industry, you can't afford to be stupid. You've got to spend time learning."