HBR

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Most companies' orientation programs were designed to help new hires hit the ground running.
Trilogy's boot camp has a bigger goal: keep the company running. No Ordinary

Boot Camp by Noel M.Tichy

C

ORPORATE BOOT CAMPS. We've all

heard about tbem. Many of us have lived through them. In my case, I've even invented a number of them. It's fair to say that, while some achieve their goals better tban others, they're ail pretty mucb the same. They
APRIL 2001

typically focus on knowledge transferinforming new hires, for instance, about the company's products and markets and how to access key resources in the organization. The best ones, like those at
GE and Ford, do this by having the recruits work on real business problems,

where intense teamwork is required to meet tight deadlines (a technique I've described elsewhere as "compressed action learning"). I've studied tbem all.
I thought I'd seen it all.
But then I saw Trilogy University. It was 1998, and I was traveling around the
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HBR AT LARGE • No Ordinary Boot Camp

country, studying corporate universities as part of a benchmarking research project on action learning. Within days of my arrival, I knew Trilogy University was a breed apart ~ in fact, my definition of best practice shot out to the horizon line. I've spent hundreds of hours since then at TU, documenting its unconventional approach-and its phenomenal results. (It should be stated, by way of full disclosure, that I briefly consulted to Trilogy last year on the matter of its reorganization. But my relationship to the company and its university at this point is purely as an observer.)
Modeled after Marine Corps basic training, a corporate boot camp is designed to push new recruits to their limits. Each day offers some nearly insurmountable challenge, and the reward
for