...is a waste of effort and resources that focuses on needless documentation and self-referential language used to define very specific problems or processes that have been manufactured by the very 'training' that is taking place. Project Management is a perfect example. For centuries, projects have been successfully managed WITHOUT a gigantic tome of rules and words to memorize. They have been managed WITHOUT forms and reports by the thousands.

Really, how hard is it to make people do what you want them to do, especially if you are their boss? The level of knowledge required to manage a team of 5 to 100 people is dwarfed by the amount of things that a technical person has to keep track of on a daily basis. This is why the technical people stay on after a down-sizing or reorg...middle managers generally do not.

I have been a technical person, a PM, and a group manager. By FAR the easiest of those jobs was group manager. My boss told me what he wanted done, and I told my team, and they did it. Not difficult.

This is not to say that anyone can be a manager, there are a number of techies floating around out there with zero capability to interact with other humans in a meaningful way...this is why they are techies.

Leadership IS different, but it also cannot be trained. Leaders are generally in possession of a mild level of psychosis that makes them believe that every passing fancy is an excellent idea and then proceed to turn the organization towards that passing fancy with vague generalizations about success. She/He has not thought at all about the challenges of implementation and does not care. The end result is spectacularly bad decisions punctuated with occasional flashes of genius. If the occasional flash of genius is frequent enough, the the spectacularly bad decisions are accepted as the cost of doing business