Executive Directions
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hen Xavier Gobille got the job of managing director at Renault South Africa in November 2007, the auto major’s subsidiary was bleeding: Sales were at an all-time low due to poor after-sales service and quality problems. The head office gave Gobille a twin mandate — get the company back in shape and win the perception battle. He knew he had a daunting task ahead of him.
Just three months earlier, Gobille had returned from Silicon Valley. There, he had undergone an intense five-week study programme at Stanford Graduate School of Business. He believed the course had equipped him to take on the challenge. He soon got down to work.
Over the next two years, Gobille engineered a dramatic turnaround of Renault South Africa. He improved service and availability of parts, expanded the dealer network, launched a slew of new markets and made handsome investments in local production. As a result, public confidence in the company returned to such a level that South Africa’s Car magazine recognised it as the Motor Company of the Year in early 2010.
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Gobille Xavier of Renault South Africa
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Looking back, Gobille has a lot to thank the Stanford Executive Program (SEP) for his success. “Attending the SEP changed the way I see myself in the company and the way I can decode my company,” he says. “It seems like I have a different pair of glasses now that allows me through see through walls.”
SEP falls in the league of advanced management programmes (AMPs) that are aimed at the top rung of the management ladder such as CEOs and CEOs-in-waiting. A typical AMP ushers in talented managers into the complexities of leadership, equipping them with the tools to tackle them. Across the world, hundreds of corporations use AMPs to build their management pipelines and improve the quality of their strategic thinking.
Often, it is a brief but intense voyage of discovery for the rising stars of the corporate world. Gobille recalls how a senior Stanford professor called Robert Burgelman had a tremendous influence him. The teacher introduced him to concepts like the ‘rubber band’ model to talk about how to match strategy with action. Using what he learnt there, Gobille did some hard thinking about the way Renault South Africa was dealing with its stakeholders. He resolved to put in a system that would benefit all. He also looked at the media to understand how Renault was perceived. “After looking at all the different perspectives, I was able to decode the relationship between all the different actors and change things,” he says.
And it is not just professional managers that flock to AMPs to shape up their leadership profile. Entrepreneurs often need the programme when the scale of their business expands or when they want to lead a major transformation in their enterprises.
Just as India began opening up to the outside world in the early 1990s, Ajay Piramal, chairman of Piramal Enterprises, realised that his company was not yet ready for the big change.
It had a very India-focussed mindset, the most international thing it had ever done being to export. “I wanted a global mindset — a more global point of view even in simple things like customer service and quality standards, and a good understanding of how other global companies operate,” says Piramal.
So in 1992, he enrolled for Harvard’s AMP. His batch had stalwarts like Keki Dadiseth of Unilever. The weeks he spent in Boston exposed him to the current thinking in business.
“There were those small moments where you suddenly understood how IT can be used as a source of competitive advantage, or how quality can be leveraged to your advantage,” says Piramal. Once back, he woke up his company to the wonders of total quality management, information technology and global standards in customer orientation.
Making the Leap
Given that they play a role in shaping up future CEOs, AMPs don’t come cheap. A week-long course can cost as much as $10,000 and a longer programme of, say six to eight weeks, can set a company back by $60,000. That’s one of the reasons why companies are very selective about who they sponsor for such a programme.
Take ICICI Bank. It has hundreds of business heads and prospective business heads. Sending them all to AMPs is impractical. That’s why a chance for AMP is reserved for only those who are likely to be elevated to the bank’s board or those of its group companies. “It really depends on how big your organisation is and what is the critical mass of people you want to cover,” says K. Ramkumar, executive director. At the most, ICICI sends one person a year to an AMP. Mahindra & Mahindra sends two are three. BP sends three or four from the entire Asia-Pacific region.
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