Back to School

Why successful executives are heading back to business school

Many of the company founders I've talked to over the years have been at a crossroads of some sort. Their roles were changing, or they needed to rethink growth strategies. To deal with these questions, many of them are taking seminars. I decided to attend one of these courses myself -- Harvard's Owner/President Management Program -- to find out what a professor can teach successful executives about managing a growing company. -- J.G.

The night before his first class and before bedding down in a dorm room for the first time in 18 years, Glen Johnson, the president of Oakley Millwork Inc., thumbs through a directory of his classmates, amazed at their diversity. His colleagues at Harvard University hail from all regions of the United States, and from Greece, Kenya, Colombia, and a dozen more countries. The range of businesses represented might well keep a small city running indefinitely. His group includes general contractors, a couple of car dealers, and a health-care company. From others you could order laser printers, a log house, even a used jet airplane.

The international flavor and variety of businesses are a hallmark of Harvard Business School's Owner/President Management Program (OPM), generally regarded as one of the premier executive education programs for small and midsize companies. To date, more than 1,300 company owners and presidents have completed the program's three three-week-long units, one per year.

The success of Harvard's program reflects a growing hunger among business executives for continuing-education programs. Approximately 12,500 executives return to college campuses across the United States each year. With fees averaging upward of $5,000, the annual tab for corporate America easily exceeds $62 million.

Most executive education programs target managers of Fortune 500 companies. For many years, entrepreneurs had only two real choices. They looked to Harvard's OPM, started in 1972, and to Stanford University's Executive Program for Smaller Companies, inaugurated four years later. Even now, only a handful of universities offer programs for executives of companies with fewer than 1,000 employees (see "College Catalog," page 5).

Most of these business programs tackle management issues confronting small companies. A few are more specialized: for example, the University of Pennsylvania focuses on family business and Dartmouth College on minority-run companies. Each program costs at least a few thousand dollars -- Harvard charges $22,500 -- and requires the chief executive to spend a week or more away from the office.

On the plane from Chicago one morning last January, Glen Johnson had weighed the prospect of three weeks away from Oakley Millwork. And surprised himself. Johnson, who has never allowed himself more than a week's vacation at a time, realized he wasn't agonizing over his absence. His employees would have to make do on their own. Besides, he had his own concerns, namely a slight case of the jitters. He was bound for Harvard, after all.

Arrival means shedding suits and ties for less formal attire, donning a name tag, and getting down to the first order of business: sizing up one's classmates. It's like freshman week at Dartmouth or Princeton, where it seemed everyone was captain of his high-school football team or president of the National Honor Society. "That first Sunday afternoon, everybody was so eager to explain who they were. We were all promoting," says Rob Dorfman, director of a Hong Kong manufacturing company.

Scanning the pages of the OPM directory, Johnson spots only a few women. Most participants seem to be men in their thirties and forties. Reading the capsule descriptions they had been asked to provide for their businesses, Johnson figures (correctly) that Oakley's 22 employees and $6.5 million in sales made his one of the smaller companies represented. There are no absolute upper or lower sales figures determining admission, but Harvard looks a bit doubtfully at applicants down around $1 million in sales and up past $100 million. Most important is experience -- 10 years or so of wrestling with a business's problems -- in other words, grist for classroom discussions, more case histories to learn from. Johnson's own, perhaps?

"Oakley Millwork," Johnson had written in the OPM directory, "assembles finished windows, exterior steel doors, and pre-hung interior doors from components that it buys from various vendors. Items that require some assembly comprise about two-thirds of the volume of sales. The remaining one-third of sales is from items which are merely distributed. Although the majority of sales comes from manufactured items, we are really in the service business. Our real job is translating the customers' vaguely perceived need for 'trim' into the complete and correct materials requirements for their houses.'

When Johnson joined the company a decade ago, sales ran at about $500,000 a year. In the three and a half years since he took over from his father, he has tripled sales. And this was one of the main reasons he'd enrolled at Harvard. The growth concerned him. Did he want to keep growing so quickly? "I realized I'd gotten the company beyond the point at which I felt comfortable. Like I was white-water rafting and had lost my paddle, and here I was spinning toward some dangerous rapids.'

Back home at their companies, most OPMers know one way of running their businesses -- their way. At Harvard, suddenly, their way no longer necessarily rules. Their instincts are subject to challenge. Gone is the comfort of a familiar office and set routine. That first Monday morning, upon entering the two amphitheater-style classrooms, these CEOs turned students are greeted by one of the many small details that OPM attends to: assigned seats. Like everybody else, Glen Johnson looks for his name, printed on big block letters on a piece of cardboard fronting the semicircular rows of desks, a little like the country identification signs at the United Nations. OPMers' names appear up near the top, with plenty of room below. The following day, in their first marketing class, they discover why.