Stefan Thomke is the William Barclay Harding Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and a member of the Technology and Operations Management Unit. In the HBS Executive Education General Management Program (GMP), he focuses on innovation and operations. Thomke recently shared insights on the nature of innovation today, the importance of engagement, and the value of GMP for senior executives.
GMP participants are in the sweet spot in their careers. They are rising to the top but still have a great deal of time ahead in which they can make a difference. The experience executives have in GMP creates very positive changes. The program delivers a very powerful personal and professional transformation that changes an executive's approach to managing and creating value for the business. For example, I recently received an email from a participant who told me how the experience has changed his business. He applied some of what he learned in the program and was able to create higher margins and year-to-year growth of more than 30 percent over multiple years.
Every aspect of the program is designed to facilitate executives' transition to general management. For example, they often don’t know who is going to be teaching a particular session, so they are not sure whether to prepare a case from a marketing point of view or an innovation point of view or from some other angle. That’s intentional. We want them to look at problems in a more holistic way—as a general manager must do.
The meaning of the word "innovation" has changed over the years—from having mainly to do with R∓D and new product development to being applied much more broadly. Today, innovation is everywhere. You can't open up a newspaper without seeing a headline about innovation. Even politicians talk about it. A few years ago, the Wall Street Journal counted the word innovation in public companies' annual and quarterly reports in the U.S. alone and found it was mentioned more than 33,000 times in a single year.
Innovation incorporates two concepts—novelty and value—both of which are important to business success. Innovation can produce many different kinds of results—new technologies, new products, new services, or new business processes. A company might find a new way to reach customers or an entirely new business model. So innovation is not only for R&D—it touches everyone.
For many people, the word "innovation" brings to mind a drastic revolutionary breakthrough. But in reality, most innovation is incremental. Incremental innovation is predictable. It provides a steady flow of revenue and can be managed well. Breakthrough innovation is riskier. Many breakthrough innovations fail and can be quite disruptive. To be successful innovators, executives have to be able to operate along the entire spectrum of innovation.
Many of our participants start out thinking that some people are born innovators and others are not. But that's a myth we try to debunk. We teach a range of tools and frameworks and management techniques that can help GMP participants from very different backgrounds manage innovation successfully.
When participants see me at the head of the classroom, they know that the session will be about innovation or operations and they will learn some practical tools. They also know it's going to be an innovative and energetic session. One thing I've learned from my years of teaching is that engagement is one of the most important parts of learning. So, I try very hard to keep people engaged. I'm very passionate about my subjects and I want to infect the audience with my enthusiasm.
If participants tune out, then I will lose them, no matter how good the material is. I've even gone to the extent of introducing magic tricks in the classroom, where I actually open a class with a magic trick that's connected to something I'm going to teach. That’s one way to get their attention very quickly, especially early in the morning. It creates a kind of puzzle in their mind. They're curious. And then I can build the whole class on this initial experience.
I am always thinking about how I can teach complex material in innovative ways. One of the cases I teach is on Apple and how the company innovates. A big takeaway is that Apple provides a phenomenal, magical user experience. I started to think about how I could actually teach someone how to design magical user experiences. I came across an interesting methodology called Lego Serious Play. I went through training, became a facilitator, and worked to modify the method so it would be suitable for our classroom. The result is a very new class about the design of magical user experiences—the kinds of experiences that will stay with you for many, many years.
It's a very different, very innovative way to teach something that is quite difficult to teach. I ask these grown-up, very successful managers to tell a story about a magical customer experience they personally had—and to build it using Legos. The act of building helps bring out the stories. As we share these stories, we draw out some fundamental principles about the design of magical customer experiences. People have a lot of fun and can also become quite emotional. One participant was talking about a very special experience he had, and started to cry tears of joy because this memory was so powerful. He then used that experience to draw out a very fundamental principle we should always remember when designing customer experiences. We added that principle to our list and the memory of that session reinforced these ideas for everyone. After class, people have come up to me and said that they'd never seen anything like this, that it really got under their skin, and that they’ll never forget it.
Before I walk into the classroom, I think deeply about what the intellectual takeaway should be and how I’m going to work toward that. I want executives to have an emotional experience that will be memorable and will reinforce their intellectual experience. I think hard about the emotional state of the participants. The classroom might feel very different on Monday morning versus Friday afternoon, for example. When a teacher can combine moments of intellectual learning with moments of powerful emotion, that’s when the magic really happens in the classroom. When I talk to participants a few years later, I find that the emotions have stayed with them.
I love what I do. It just gets better over time. The moments when I walk into the classroom are the best moments of the week—they're why I'm here. I know I will be in front of a great group of participants and will have very special interactions with them. I know that I will have one chance to teach that particular case to this group of people—just one chance—so I put my heart and my soul into it. My hope is that by the end of the session, I've changed the way they think, the way they feel, and the way they act.
The challenge for me as a teacher is to be confident that I have reached everyone in the room. I want everyone in the classroom to have a great learning experience. I ask myself, "How do I draw everyone into the discussion?" In any large group, some people will be quite vocal and others quieter. The quiet ones are good listeners, but they don't always share the thoughts going through their heads. But I want to make sure that everyone is totally engaged.
GMP is approaching its tenth anniversary and certainly has changed a lot during the years. As great as GMP is, we're constantly trying to innovate and introduce new things, whether that means incorporating new case material or changing how we interact with participants. We continually look for ways to introduce more learning-by-doing sessions.
I run a fun exercise on project management where we put the participants in competitive teams. These are experienced people, many of whom are probably certified in project management, so they are wondering what else they could possibly learn. During the exercise, they have to build something in teams under time pressure. After we debrief, even the people who have been doing project management for a long time tell me the session has been a transformational experience for them. We have created a fundamentally new learning experience. That's an example of what we're always trying to do.
I don't know what GMP will look like in ten years because the world around us is constantly changing. But my colleagues and I will continue to challenge ourselves by asking, "What are the best practices? Am I teaching all the best practices? Are there innovative ways to bring them into the classroom?"
One major reason we alternate on-campus and off-campus modules is to give executives time to reflect, connect the dots, and apply their learning to some practical business challenges. Case-based learning happens fundamentally in four stages. In stage one, you prepare the case on your own. In stage two, you discuss the case with your living group and prepare for the classroom session. You might think you have cracked the case, but then you go into the large classroom where stage three happens—a big discussion that completely opens your mind and you begin to see many very different perspectives you hadn't thought of.
Finally, there's a fourth stage, in which you reflect after class on what you learned. GMP offers the time to reflect on a particular session, consider how all the different sessions interrelate, and think about how to apply the learning on the job.
When executives come to campus for Module 2, they're experiencing the HBS environment and the faculty for the first time. We know each other on paper, but now all of us are meeting one another. Because of the intimacy of the classroom experience, we faculty get to know the participants really well. We talk with them outside the classroom and sometimes act as coaches.
When they come back to campus for Module 4, those relationships are already established. Participants are much more likely to reach out to us and ask for career advice and personal advice. I have a lot more meetings with people outside the classroom, and the relationships deepen.
The worst time for me as a faculty member is the last week, because I feel I know these individuals really well, I've become friends with many of them, and we have to say goodbye. So it's tough, that last class. Of course, they are eager to go back to their jobs, but they get so close to us that it’s difficult for them to leave as well.
But the evening of graduation is also a very special moment. Many graduates walk up to me with tears in their eyes. They tell me how much the program has changed them and how much they appreciate what we have done. And that feeling is mutual because we have also learned and changed by working with them. I feel tremendous joy to see what has happened to these individuals in such a short period of time.
We faculty really don't think about the program as five modules. We see it as the first stages of a lifelong relationship. To this day I have participants write back to me about what they do. We encourage them to stay in touch. It's important for their continuing development and it is fun for us.
We emphasize practical application throughout the program and especially in the later modules. During Module 3, participants develop their own case, and then in Module 4 we give feedback and help participants begin to develop a post-GMP agenda. The goal in Module 5 is to refine that agenda and start to execute it.
The idea behind Module 5 is maximizing the learning immediately after returning to work, while the program is fresh in one's mind. The challenge is that participants finish up GMP on a Friday, fly back, and start work on Monday. The emails have been waiting. Your colleagues are happy you are back and start to pile work on you. It's easy to get consumed by the day-to-day work. With Module 5, you have a structured way to take some time and think about a plan.
Many GMP graduates receive promotions after a few weeks or a few months, and they will have to grapple with the demands of a new role. What they learn in GMP will help them do that, but they need to continue the process of reflection that they started in GMP. We find that the participants who follow through and complete Module 5 are the ones who have done remarkably well in transforming their business.
The GMP program is a remarkable experience. When you leave campus, you will not be the same person as when you arrived. You will change for the better. You will have new ideas about yourself and about managing a business.
HBS faculty help to facilitate that transformation by bringing best practices into the room and continually challenging you. In addition, you spend time interacting with a great group of very accomplished executives coming from all over the world. The magic of this program—inside and outside the classroom—is something you will never forget. GMP is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
