In his role as president & chief executive officer for Embraer Commercial Aviation, John S. Slattery is responsible for leading the world's third-largest manufacturer of commercial jets. He participates in long-term strategic planning and leads 2,400 professionals in multiple locations across the globe. In the Advanced Management Program (AMP) at Harvard Business School (HBS), John experienced a transformation in his leadership perspective, gained real-world insights, and formed lifelong friendships.
Transformational. The infrastructure that supports your learning at HBS—where you're thinking about competitive strategy, macroeconomics, financial accounting, and leadership—allows for deep moments of self-reflection over an eight-week period. It's unquestionably transformational for every person attending the program. It makes you a more thoughtful leader, more mindful about how you want to lead in an organization. I was promoted to a divisional president soon after completing the program. I don’t know if there was a direct correlation, but participating in AMP certainly didn't hurt!
I could have gone anywhere, but the HBS reputation is, of course, amazing. At HBS, you interact with world-class professors who are best of breed in their roles. To be able to examine topics like the marketplace, business functions, or business operations through the lens of the HBS faculty is phenomenal. It's an especially valuable experience if you've been in a single business setting for years and years and have gotten used to doing things in a certain way. Without the guidance of the professors, you would just get on with the business, the old school way. Nobody leaves AMP content with getting on with business the old school way.
I wouldn't make it any shorter and I wouldn't make it any longer. Not many senior executives have the ability to take two months out of work and pursue self-perfection of our professional lives for that extended period of time, but AMP is worth the time investment.
When you leave work for eight weeks, the reality is that for the first two weeks you're still distracted with work memories that linger, and for the last two weeks you’re thinking about reentry. But, in the middle of that, you've got four weeks—an entire month—when you're released mentally and emotionally from the work environment. You are able to give your undivided attention to learning, to experimenting with the new thought processes. Most executives never have the opportunity to experience that kind of freedom, so the people who do take that opportunity really apply themselves. People come to AMP to learn. We had fun, but we took our learning very seriously. We understood that we had an obligation to our organizations to make the most of being at HBS and bring what we learned back to our companies.
There are two key parts to the AMP learning experience—the case studies and the living groups. There were eight people in my living group, and we met each evening for a couple of hours. We'd begin our conversations discussing the learning that happened during the day, and then we'd apply the takeaways from the day to our own working experiences. The learning group discussions were also a great opportunity to get perspectives on the cases we read from other C-suite executives working in different industries. This process takes the cases out of academia and puts them into the real world, which makes the learning experience so much more engaging and raises it far beyond what you could get by reading about it on your own. There’s then an element of excitement as you get ready to debate your ideas in class the following morning with the professors and class members.
Eight weeks is a long time, and the living group is a support mechanism and in itself a reservoir of learning. Throughout the AMP journey, different people in the group stepped up to carry the baton. You're living with these seven other executives for eight weeks; deep friendships are formed. I expect that the people from my living group will be my friends for life.
The diversity of AMP is manifested across all key metrics. I think we had somebody from every inhabited continent and almost every religion. The student body included men and women representing many fields of expertise and almost every industry. People came from all walks of life, but the one common strand of DNA was that we were all senior executives, and eager to learn, debate and have some fun in the process. Each executive brought an impressive level of gravitas to the discussions. Each time someone made an observation in class, we paid attention because we knew it was going to be something to take note of. Our professors told us that we were able to accomplish in one hour what an HBS MBA class would take four hours to do! This was because our absorption rate was so much higher and because our diversity, maturity, and breadth of experience delivered a unique level of insight.
For me, it wasn't anything in a case study, a book, anything said in a lecture, or even anything specific that I learned in the living group sessions. It's amorphous. You come away from AMP with a better understanding of who you are and who you want to be. That realization washes over you during the course of the eight weeks; and it’s a moving and powerful transformation. It was amazing to watch this happen for everybody in my class.
After AMP, my decisions on every dimension of business are now more thoughtful. AMP put a spotlight on the process of analysis and decision making. It honed and refined the thinking process and has helped me evolve into a stronger leader.
