June 29, 2009

Washington, DC -- On Monday, June 1, 2009 the nation's leading organization for workplace learning and development, the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), honored Kelley Direct and Ingersoll Rand Co. with the Excellence in Practice citation. This award recognizes practices that "have demonstrated clear and measurable results of achieving organizational goals, meet a demonstrated need, have appropriate design values and are clearly aligned with other performance improvement initiatives," according to ASTD.

The citation recognized Kelley Direct and Ingersoll-Rand for an MBA program that integrates Kelley Direct's MBA plan of study with cases specific to Ingersoll-Rand. The three-year program concludes with a unique, hands-on project in which students work on a key Ingersoll Rand business challenge in consultation with company executives.

From left to right: Jim Caprara, chair of the ASTD board; Tony Bingham, ASTD president and CEO; Rita Smith, vice president, enterprise learning at Ingersoll-Rand; Richard Magjuka, chair of Kelley Direct; and Rob Lauber, chair-elect of the ASTD board.

At the award ceremony, held in Washington, DC at the annual ASTD conference, Richard Magjuka, chair of Kelley Direct and Rita Smith, vice president, enterprise learning at Ingersoll Rand reflected on the benefits of the collaboration. "The single most interesting part of this for the school in working with Ingersoll Rand has been how we address faculty staffing," said Magjuka. "We work with executives inside Ingersoll Rand as they co-lead student teams in their projects. As a school it takes us beyond how we have traditionally thought about MBA education. In no other program do we have this kind of cooperation with executives from a single company. For us, that has been the best outcome of our relationship with Ingersoll Rand."

With business operations and executives in 200 nations around the globe, Ingersoll Rand faces challenges in both time and distance when addressing executive development. "Ingersoll Rand was looking for a way to get more out of executive education while customizing a program that gave people real development opportunities as well as offering payback to the company," Smith explained. "With that in mind we did our research and Indiana University's Kelley School of Business was chosen, particularly for its advanced asynchronous component.

"This program, which started in 2004, has been very successful. There is a lot of flexibility in the relationship, which allows us to customize the program as our business needs change. It allows us to move the talent while they are still in the program. That happens a lot," Smith observed.

Among the unique elements of the Kelley Direct-Ingersoll Rand program is the Integrative Capstone Course, which is designed as a vehicle for business development. Employing the tools learned and practiced throughout their program, students work in small teams to develop plans for new businesses, or entrepreneurial activities within larger organizations. There is also a business computer simulation that is designed to integrate the knowledge, skills and abilities learned earlier in the program.

In a highly competitive business environment, Ingersoll Rand is as concerned with keeping its high performers as it is sharpening their skills. "The bottom line for us is retaining the high performers," said Ingersoll Rand's Smith. "This program is a retention tool for us. We are interested in the promotion rates among people who complete the program."

Those promotion rates are one measure of success of the program, she added. "We look at the output of the projects as a measurement as well. The Capstone work is very much quantitative output that can be measured. We can see the work contributed from the group."

Perhaps the most important lesson learned for Kelley Direct is the impact of programs like those with Ingersoll Rand on other areas of the Kelley School of Business. "A key point, and one that Kelley's dean, Dan Smith, points out is that one of the values of having a corporate-sponsored program is the things you learn spill over and are applied to other programs," explained Magjuka. "There has been a great deal of transfer of what has been learned in making the Ingersoll Rand program work well. That has transferred into our relationships with other companies and into other Kelley programs."

ASTD presented the Excellence in Practice Awards and Citations to 40 organizations from five countries: Canada, China, India, Thailand, and the United States. The Excellence in Practice Awards program recognizes organizations for results achieved through learning and performance practices and solutions. From 132 submissions, 17 awards and 49 citations were given in nine categories: career development, learning technologies, managing change, organizational learning, performance improvement, training management, valuing differences, technical training and workplace learning and development.

"The winning organizations advance the knowledge of the workplace learning and performance profession and contribute to increasing workforce capability and organizational competitiveness," said Tony Bingham, ASTD president and CEO. "Their accomplishments demonstrate how learning increases the performance and success of organizations worldwide."