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 And the old approaches -- from classroom lectures to multimedia CD-ROMs -- seemed hopelessly out-of-date.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.