HPLP @ Harvard Business School

The real art of Leadership is creating a world that other people want to belong to’

-          Jim Morris, GM, Pixar

How often do you attend training of any form, let alone Leadership Skills for 6 continuous days of 15 hrs each and not feel drained out?  Here I’m. This is one such rare occasion where I feel so energetic and positive after this demanding training program. 

For those of us who had already shelved the dream of doing a full time MBA from one of the premier institutes in the world, what better opportunity can arise than dong a ‘Executive Leadership Program for High Potentials’ at Harvard Business School.

Thanks to my investors (SAP and my leader - Ferose VR), I got selected to attend this program at the esteemed Harvard school from 26^th Oct to 31^st Oct 2014.

The program team from Harvard planned it meticulously, well in advance and had sent all the pre-work that had to done before arrival. This also included an Emotional and Social Competency Inventory (ESCI) that I had to undertake by asking various stakeholders (roughly 20) to do it for me.

The pre-read material itself was quite exhausting and I have to confess that I didn’t manage to go through all of them before arrival. I decided to take my usual ‘Indian approach’.  Manage reading it right in time somehow – which is exactly what I eventually did by reading the relevant case studies the night before till 0200am for almost the whole week. Well, I even believed to be smart in stating that its not easy to go through all the cases in advance which can be confusing.  J

Participants profile:

There were:

• 96 High Potential Executives covering key roles like Sr. VPs, VPs, GMs, Sales Exe., HR Exec. 
• From 86 different companies with diverse Industries focus
• 37 different nationalities

Faculty for this program @ HBS:

• Linda A. Hill - Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School (http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=6479)
• Anthony Mayo - Senior Lecturer of Business Administration  (http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=154993)
• Joshua D. Margolis - Professor of Business Admn. in the Organizational Behavior unit (http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=10658)

Method in the madness:

Although 6 days of leadership training sounds madness & overkill with too much info to consume there seems to a method that is pioneered by HBS – the case method.

The case method is a profound educational innovation that presents the greatest challenges confronting leading companies, nonprofits, and government organizations—complete with the constraints and incomplete information found in real business issues—and places the student in the role of the decision maker. There are no simple solutions; yet through the dynamic process of exchanging perspectives, countering and defending points, and building on each other's ideas, students become adept at analyzing issues, exercising judgment, and making difficult decisions—the hallmarks of skillful leadership.

In other simple words… Learn through ‘Real life stories of leaders’.

Reaching Boston and Harvard campus:

As a sincere student, I arrived in this beautiful city of Boston, MA a day in advance. Wow, I have to confess that I immediately liked the city. Its located along the b’ful river Charles and has a sense of history (in US context though J). I visited a bit of downtown that evening and enjoyed it thoroughly.

Harvard Campus adds beauty to the Boston city. It had the great sense of learning and history to its architecture.

The feeling of coming back to school after 14 years (I graduated in the year 2000) felt extremely good. Although I have attended several training in the last 14 years, nothing gave this feeling of coming back to school.

My Work group – 4B:

I was part of a sub-group 4B (96 of us were divided into subgroups of 8 members each). I met my group for the dinner on the first day and immediately felt that this is going to be an awesome ride for the next whole week. Bunch of 8 amazing individuals to collaborate with:

• Ted Frazee, VP-Sales, Redwire, USA
• Carlos E. Ferreira, Finance Director, Burger King, USA
• Chris Fry, Finance & Business Development Director, Shine Australia, Australia
• Emin Karimov, Head of Liaison office, Pasha Holding, Turkey
• Wayne Brailsford, Director, AstraZeneca, Sweden
•  Andrew Mailer, VP, Coffey, Cananda
• Diego Leguizamon, Executive-Sales, Verizon Enterprise Solutions, Colombia 
• Myself (Sundaresan LN), Chief Dev. Expert, SAP SE, Germany

Well, 8 of us from 5 different continents. J The idea of forming subgroup is of course to create a strong bonding and also have a discussion in smaller group every morning before coming into the larger class room.

So good was our frequencies, we started as members of 4B but we signed off on the last day to stay as friends for a long time. J 

Key Leadership aspects covered and Learning through case study:

Well, without going into the day break up which can be too long to read, let me summarize the key aspect of leadership that we discussed facilitated by the different case studies that we had to read and be prepared.

1. The Imperatives of Leadership:
• Reference case: Bob Anderson from Cambridge Consulting Group
2. Leading Your Team
• Reference cases: Rudi Gassner, CEO of BMG International and the Executive committee and Taran Swan at Nickelodeon Latin America
• Real life test: We were asked to take real life test of Subarctic Team Exercise
3. Leading with Presence:
• Reference case: Gordon Bethune at Continental Airlines – Most inspiring story from business turn around perspective that I learnt during the training.
• Power of stage presence from the eyes of Stage Actors: Ariel group spent close to 7 hours with each one of us to train us on better story telling which possibly was one of the best part of the training. Each of us were made to tell a personal story which was awesome alongside was trained to be very impactful. My blog will not be enough to talk about all exciting stories that I heard. After listening to all the stories, it was extremely obvious that this training can do wonders to make one a powerful speaker.
4. Leading Yourself:
• Reference case: Wolfgang Keller at Konigsbrau-TAK (A)
• Emotional Intelligence: Based on the survey we all received our respective reports. It indicated where we stand in the EI part of helped us identify the key areas of strengths and improvement.
5. Managing Your Network:
• Reference case:  Flextronics: Deciding on a Shop Floor System for Producing the Microsoft Xbox
6. Leading Change:
• Reference case: Gary Rodkin at Pepsi-Cola North America
7. Leading Through the Life Course: The Three Imperatives of Leadership
• Reference case: Kathy Giusti and the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation. 
• This is another truly inspirational story and great lesson for everyone to not give up at any cost. 
• Best part was Kathy was in room physically and talking about her life.
• It was a truly WOW moment !!!
• She is also now named in the TOP 50 Greatest leaders. I’m fortunate to see her in person. http://fortune.com/2014/03/20/fortune-ranks-the-worlds-50-greatest-leaders/
8. Leading Innovation:
• Reference case: Vineet Nayar and HCL Technologies
9. Rising to Leadership Responsibility
• Reference case: Fritidsresor Under Pressure: The First 10 Hours

I have to state that although we had 96 people sitting in the class room for all these sessions, it was one of the best class room sessions that I have ever attended with structured method by the prof. to take everyone’s inputs and make everyone reflect on the same.

In addition to this the model of having a smaller discussion group which meets every morning and reviews the cases ensured that all of have collected our thoughts and are well prepared to share our minds in the larger audience.

So, with this awesome experience for 6 days at HBS, how do I turn this into some action at my workplace. It made sense to take sometime and put an action plan on things that I will work on. My personal action plan is:

• Build stronger self-awareness through Acknowledgement of my own strength and weakness
• Work on ‘Influential’ and ‘Inspirational’ leadership qualities by following:
• Crisp articulation of compelling story OR vision
• Building the ability to convince others by appealing to their self interest
• Make ‘Story Telling’ the default way of my presentation style
• Build effective working relationship with PEERs by seeking to understand more
• Build a plan to close the ‘Opportunity gap’
• Conscious awareness of building, keeping and nurturing the power of Strategic and Operational ‘Network’
• Spreading the great learning to my team and organization
• Learn German language to appreciate the culture better.

So, here I’m trying to spread the learning to all of you by blogging about this fantastic experience.

I hope to tune back in 6 months to blog about my progress on my action plan.