Expanding Horizons for Home-Grown Leaders

Why did you seek executive education for yourself and your leadership team?

Ferguson has succeeded by reinventing itself every five to six years, and we have great growth potential—within and beyond our current businesses. However, realizing that potential depends on having leaders who can think strategically, make decisions confidently, and work together effectively to drive excellence in every discipline.

In general, our leaders are home grown, so we want our team to get outside of our space and our culture to gain a broader understanding of what's happening in business around the world. Executive education helps people move beyond their comfort zone. It provides the opportunity to take a close look at best-in-class companies and identify best practices that we can adapt. Ferguson used to participate in a number of executive education programs at different institutions. Over time, we've narrowed our focus to HBS Executive Education programs because they offer something unique.

What made the Advanced Management Program a unique learning experience?

The intensity of the program was not only surprising, but also very valuable. AMP improves your ability to prioritize when you have more things coming at you than you can possibly do at once.

The living group experience is unique to HBS—and it's wonderful. Only 20 percent of the class was from North America, and the global diversity of the group intensified the learning and networking opportunities.

In the HBS classroom, you don't just listen to lectures, you also participate— sometimes whether you want to or not! The quality of the faculty was amazing, and they were so much more accessible than professors I had learned from in other programs. The HBS professors seemed to thoroughly enjoy our interactions inside and outside the classroom, and were learning from us while we learned from them. I've stayed in contact and continue to take their advice. For example, when we were looking for a chief marketing officer, it was natural to turn to my HBS faculty contacts and ask, "How would you go about initiating this search?"

In what ways have you applied what you learned in AMP?

I developed the attitude that whatever the economy is doing—whether it's up, down, or stable—we need to think about what we should be doing differently. One quote from AMP really stuck with me: "Fear the status quo more than you fear change."

Specifically, I learned how important it is to protect emerging businesses for the future—and how to do it. During the economic downturn, we were cutting costs like everyone else, but we had also started getting into e-commerce. It was very tempting to say, "We can't do this now." But instead, we carefully incubated that initiative, and it's now 15 percent of what we do. Through these efforts and others, we used the downturn to become a better, more efficient company. As a result, over the past four years we've had the best productivity and performance ratios in our 60-year history.

At AMP, we also discussed doing business in different countries and explored differences in priorities, cultures, and ethical frameworks. This helped me better understand the perspectives of my European colleagues. I've advised them to attend the program, too, so they can better understand us.

How do you select the executives that Ferguson will sponsor for AMP?

We identify executives who are currently making a difference and who are going to be part of the senior leadership team in the future. They've either just taken a new position or are preparing to do so. Our goal is to get them out of the Ferguson world and provide them with a new perspective in a learning environment that only HBS can provide. At first, executives always experience some trepidation about leaving family, friends, and work for so long, but those of us who have attended the program know that things will keep working just fine in our absence.

What do executives do differently when they return from AMP?

Everyone, including me, comes back thinking and acting very differently in ways that are helping us to grow as a company. Participants are impatient to apply the approaches that great leaders are using in other businesses.

When people come back full of ideas, I want them to settle in and decompress. I tell them, "Don't talk to me for eight weeks." Then, I ask them to tell us about their experience and show us how their big takeaways translate into what we need to be doing in the future. We also discuss how they are personally different—how their experience has changed the way they see the world, their responsibilities, and their leadership potential.

Everyone benefits from, and is deeply affected by, the diversity experienced at AMP. Because of HBS, we're a more diverse organization than we were 10 years ago—in thought as well as background and experience.

Will you continue to send executives to AMP?

We now send two people a year and will continue to do so. Each person goes alone because it's important that they isolate themselves from work issues, get outside the company culture, and be completely immersed in AMP. It's an exciting and invigorating time for everyone.

HBS is now playing a major role in our senior leadership development, and is helping us to grow, perform, and improve in all our disciplines. We've learned that we compete very well on a global stage, but we also hope to take what we learn at HBS and use it to become a disruptive force in our industry.