I'll give an example of a middle management programme. But my main point is that, as soon as you make a statement about getting individuals up to certain standards, and you as a manager decide what those certain standards are, you are training the organisation and not the person.

All middle managers have to take a number of courses, some 'intermediate' and some 'advanced'. Each of the courses is a day long and seeks to encapsulate the ethos of the organisation - this is how we do things round here.

There's a million management models and a million ways to measure success/standards but managers in this organisation have to work to the 'way we do things round here' as laid out in the courses.

One course is 'recruitment and selection'. All delegates learn how to use the company's competency framework to test, interview and select new hires. No deviation from the procedures are tolerated. Anybody who brings up evidence for the potential weaknesses of competency profiling is politely but firmly told to follow the company line.

In setting the standards, often arbitrarily, the company is training the organisation - to be the organisation. If I was slightly more hysterical I might say that the training programme was designed first and foremost to inculcate workers into the preferred methods of upper management - training is part of command and control.

But I'm not hysterical and will say that this inculcation is merely incidental. Nevertheless, training in organisations has the effect of training people to be like the organisation.

You're right that we don't get groups of workers of all levels together for collective training. This is bonkers but, again, a symptom of using training as a tool to shape/reinforce the organisation rather than enabling personal development.

Am I right in saying that you'd see 'training the organisation' as a positive thing? Are we disagreeing on the definition of the word 'training'? If it helps, when I talk about us having always trained the organisation, I'm talking about us doing something that we've called training but that has few of the positive connotations.