News Release

CHAPEL HILL -- Measuring return on investment for training and development will be the focus of a new executive breakfast speaker series kicking off Nov. 10 in Charlotte.

Dr. James W. Dean Jr., associate dean of executive education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, will be the guest speaker at the free events. The Charlotte event will take place at the Marriott Charlotte City Center. The other discussions will be Nov. 17 in Raleigh at the Holiday Inn Research Triangle Park and Nov. 18 in Arlington, Va., at the Crystal City Marriott.

Seating is limited. To register for the breakfast series, e-mail unc_exec@unc.edu or call (800) 862-3932.

At the events, a continental breakfast will be served beginning at 8 a.m. Dean’s presentation will follow a brief overview of UNC Kenan-Flagler’s executive education programs. The events will conclude with an audience question-and-answer session.

Dean will outline a framework for evaluating return on investment, or ROI, for training and development, which he discussed in the October issue of Entrepreneur magazine. He will discuss the implications for choosing one level of measurement over another in terms of organizational culture and commitment. (The Entrepreneur article is at www.entrepreneur.com/article/0,4621,317038,00.html).

U.S. companies spend $60 billion annually on training and development, the American Society for Training and Development estimates. Yet more than half of the human resources professionals whom the society surveyed in 1997 said determining the impact of training on financial performance was their top challenge.

Pressure is on companies to justify whether or not the expense of executive development is worthwhile, said Dean, who also is a management professor and Sarah Graham Kenan distinguished scholar at UNC Kenan-Flagler. But evaluating ROI takes time, money and data crunching, he added.

"Most executives agree that training and development adds many benefits to their organizations and to the individuals involved, but when the issue of measuring ROI surfaces, many companies struggle with how to accomplish it," he said.

Leadership, organizational change, strategic decision making, international management and organizational performance improvement form the focus of Dean’s research and teaching. He was program director of the National Science Foundation research program "Transformations to Quality Organizations." He also served as an examiner for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award for six years.

For more information on executive education at UNC Kenan-Flagler, visit http://www.kenan-flagler.unc.edu/Programs/execEd/.

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UNC Kenan-Flagler contacts: Todd Boersma, (919) 843-6061 or todd_boersma@unc.edu; and Kim Weaver Spurr, (919) 962-8951 or spurrk@unc.edu