Ted Hoff: Leading IBM's Education Solutions

Tim Sosbe - 1/6/03

IBM is no stranger to the concept of corporate education. In fact, providing workforce development opportunities is part of the technology giant's corporate heritage, a time-tested effort to ensure market leadership through top-notch associates trained an

Name: Ted Hoff
Title: Vice President of Learning
Company: IBM
Successes:

Basic Blue for Managers program results include:
- Alumni reports of first-year business enhancements due to leadership skill improvement averaging $450,000 each.
- A cost savings of $24 million in learning through the deployment of innovative e-learning solutions.
- Five times more content delivered to managers vs. previous manager offerings.
IBM's $80 million Role of the Manager program, less than one year old, has already:
- Served as a catalyst for IBM's managers to create and sustain new momentum to achieve and exceed revenue goals for the year.
- Helped produce a net return of more than $20 million in just one of nine IBM business units.
- Increased employee engagement and morale, increased achievement of IBM's strategic objectives and increased collaboration and communication among brands and teams.

Learning Philosophy: Learning is in the core DNA of IBM. It is fundamental to our heritage and our future. Our strategy for delivering value to our customers demands innovation and teamwork, and rests on a customer-driven, high-performance mindset. Our executives have high expectations for how learning should enable IBM to develop the people and organizational capabilities that produce innovative, integrated solutions for our customers.

"IBM as a company has in its DNA a philosophy that learning is essential to its success," said Ted Hoff, IBM's vice president of learning. "I saw this as a newcomer to the company. I have seen a lot of large corporations. This company has a very special heritage and commitment to learning. It's ingrained in all the senior executives in IBM. There is an expectation we're going to be conducting learning, we're going to be developing employees, we're going to be developing new ideas. Now the demand and the challenge is to see how well we can actually do it."