May 11, 2010 | Melting boundaries and building networks within organizations are important ways to encourage the kind of flexibility that’s required as the business and cultural environment becomes increasingly global, said Bob Reinheimer, an executive director of Duke Corporate Education.

Duke CE recently completed “Learning & Development in 2011: A Focus on the Future,” which is a study of global changes in business and in leadership education. Researchers interviewed 142 senior learning and development professionals in major companies around the world to better understand how the financial crisis had and would affect corporate education and learning.

Reinheimer is a former associate dean and professor of the practice of management at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business. Prior to coming to Duke, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas and was on the faculty of the University of Virginia and the FBI Academy.

He spoke with Faith & Leadership about global changes in business and in leadership education -- and why the Third World may be the source of a new generation of leaders. The following is an edited transcript.

Q: What is the business of Duke Corporate Education?

In effect, we help organizations align their human assets with their other assets to drive marketplace performance. We are not strategy consultants; we are strategy implementation consultants. Once a company understands what it wants to achieve in the marketplace, we add to the execution of the strategy. We help them think about the missing pieces. We also provide the education people need to deliver against their new responsibilities.

Q: What was the impetus behind your new study, “Learning and Development in 2011: A Focus on the Future”?

In 2008 to 2009, we were hearing from our clients that their world was changing dramatically. We wanted to better understand what was going on, how it happened, and what it would be like once the dust settled.

The economic downturn is one driver of the change. A significant number of our clients were finding that their ability to invest in people, invest in learning, invest in a lot of things, was dramatically diminished by diminished economic results. That one was sort of obvious. But what was less obvious is we also saw an awful lot of companies that were deciding not to allow people to travel. Part of it was economic and part was fear of pandemic and contamination.

Because our clients were forced to look for more efficient ways of distributing information and aligning people, they went back to technology as a solution.

The learning and development community had kind of walked away from technology because it just hadn’t met their needs. It wasn’t dependable; it wasn’t engaging enough. When these same people went back and took a fresh look in 2008, they found that technology had improved so dramatically that now all of a sudden it was a viable solution for some of the things that learning and development professionals do.

The perfect storm of the economic downturn, travel bans and improvements in technology caused a shift in how learning and development professionals think about reaching people.

Q: In the study, you talk about changing mindsets rather than skill sets. What does that mean?

Old models of learning and development fall short in preparing people to deal with a rapidly changing world. Senior leaders have to react to the realities of the world in new and agile ways. It is a fundamental mindset shift.

A study respondent from South Africa presented a hypothesis. She and her colleagues posit that the leaders of the future will be found among people who grew up in Third World countries. These individuals are used to ambiguous, rapidly changing, chaotic circumstances. That experience gives them a mindset advantage over Westerners who grew up in more fortunate circumstances.

They’ve developed the mindset by growing up in that environment. So it’s beyond competencies and it’s beyond skills. It’s shifting to a way of perceiving and a way of fundamentally reacting as a human being to an environment that is dramatically different, and that’s new.

Q: The expectations seem to have flipped. Rather than expecting stability, leaders need to anticipate disruption as a norm.

The new reality is a dynamic, chaotic world. It’s not something we can put our heads down and outlast. We’ve got to strategize businesses that can succeed against that environment. The ability to do that basic business strategizing and implementing against a chaotic environment is a whole new realm for those of us who try to help leaders succeed.

Q: How do you help leaders change their mindsets?

Changing the mindset is a years- to decades-long experience. We try to jump-start the process. We give our participants tools to more rapidly recognize what’s around them and integrate that new reality.

Rather than learning to do business in China from a classroom in Minnesota, for example, our participants go to China. The day they land, we put them out in the streets on bicycles. They immerse themselves in a different market reality. With facilitation and coaching, we improve their ability to rapidly scan, make sense of and integrate new experiences into their thinking.