Joseph Lo, who attended the General Management Program (GMP) at Harvard Business School (HBS) in 2007, looks back on how the program helped him gain new skills and perspective—and build a successful career.
My career goal at the time was to move into a P&L leadership/general management role. I already had an MBA degree, but I knew that the professors and the caliber of students at HBS would deliver a different kind of experience than I'd previously had. My objective was to take advantage of the integrative way GMP examines the general manager's perspective and to become a more effective manager and leader.
I was working as a director for Bell Canada when I attended GMP, and within nine months of returning from HBS, I was promoted into a general management role. From there, I was promoted into a variety of positions at the company before transitioning to my first role as president for a leading provider of executive health care. Today, I am president of Movati Athletic. There's a direct correlation between my GMP experience and the impact I can have now in a position focused on end-to-end leadership of an entire organization.
There were a few ways in which the program immediately affected my company. While I was at GMP, Bell Canada was engaged in one of the largest leveraged buyouts in history. One of the GMP lecturers was John Kotter, the change management guru. I was able to spend some extra time with him, and he gave me his perspective on the massive change that the company was going through—truly sage advice. Those conversations, along with the coursework, helped me develop the first iteration of a 100-day plan. Even though the company didn't end up going private, we did have a significant change in leadership, so my boss and I had to create a plan for how our unit would move forward. I did a lot of the early prototyping for that plan during my time at GMP.
My classmates and I don't see each other nearly as often as we would like, but when we are on business trips, we let each other know and try to connect. We often discuss issues, both personal and professional, tapping classmates who we think might have specific area knowledge.
I was actually the first person Bell Canada sent to any Harvard Business School program, but shortly after I completed GMP, I sent two of my direct reports to the program. Like me, they were high performers on the verge of promotion who still needed to build certain functional skills and leadership attributes. I was pleased that my success with the program made it easy to gain sponsorship for my colleagues.
