Wharton@Work

August 2024 | 

Knowledge Is Power: A Classroom Return Delivers Results

Knowledge Is Power: A Classroom Return Delivers Results

Taking a break from day-to-day responsibilities to attend an executive program on analytics, pricing strategies, or scaling might sound like a luxury — but the results say it’s a necessity. “Our leadership team is well-educated — many of us have MBAs — but with time, those degrees get dated,” says Richard Pandohie, group chief executive officer of Seprod Group of Companies. “The world has changed, and it's very important that we stay sharp and understand those changes so we can keep up and guide the organization properly. That's what Wharton’s General Management Program [GMP] did for me.”

Pandohie enrolled in the GMP as his organization began the move from a local, Jamaica-based player to a regional contender. “The chairman and myself were thinking about how to ensure that our team has the capability to take us to the next level. We looked at a number of opportunities for several of us from the executive leadership team before deciding on Wharton’s GMP.”

“In terms of timing,” Pandohie continues, “I think we got lucky. COVID came along after we started, and the GMP was so pivotal in creating a mindset change. The pandemic meant everything had to change, and the GMP allowed us to have the mindset, capacity, and capability to lead the organization through it. The learnings about how the world has changed and is changing, and how you can organize yourself and your business to maximize it, are invaluable. You can't put a dollar value to the insights and the ability to look at things differently.”

Leaving as a Better Leader

The GMP consists of six individual executive education programs attended over the course of two years. Programs are chosen with the help of an individually assigned Wharton executive coach, who works with the participant to create a leadership-development plan that targets opportunities for growth, recognizing the skills and traits necessary for success in their current role and beyond. “The Wharton team wants you to leave as a better leader,” says Pandohie. “That was very important to me. When I was choosing programs, they pushed back, they explained, and they made recommendations.”

“From a personal standpoint, it's so exciting when you are investing in your own learning,” he continues. “It was energizing to be back in a classroom environment with people from different industries.” In particular, he says the programs that made the biggest impact were Scaling Business for Profitable Growth and Analytics for Strategic Growth: AI, Smart Data, and Customer Insights.

“Because we're in the process of doing acquisitions and scaling, the program helped me to step back and look at what we are doing with a different mindset. Post-Wharton, we have gone to another level in terms of acquiring and implementing technology. Wharton is probably the leading school now when it comes to AI, and attending the GMP gave me the confidence to be aggressive with that. We've created a data analytics department to extract insights and drive business decisions. When I went back for a reunion about a month ago, I went to a seminar about AI to reinforce what we're doing and what we want to achieve. I'm using the experience and the expertise at Wharton to just drive a lot of change within the organization.”

Pandohie is one of eight leaders from Seprod and its parent company who attended the GMP — and there was almost no overlap within the individual programs they attended. “We were not in class together. The idea was to create diversity in thinking, so everyone did not come back with the same experience.” Instead, what they came back to work with was a shared mindset. “No matter the program,” he explains, “the underlying base was the same. Each one was really about how to create value, how to enable people to drive our organization, and how to think differently.”

Gaining an Exclusive Network

The GMP also provides six separate opportunities to network with different groups of leaders from a range of industries and geographies — a benefit Pandohie is taking full advantage of. “You learn so much from the professors, but you also learn a tremendous amount from your colleagues sitting in the classroom. Now I have friends and colleagues in Saudi Arabia, China, Europe, Singapore, Africa, and the U.S. We're on LinkedIn and WhatsApp, actively sharing information, whether it’s somebody having an issue and asking for advice, recommending new books, or recalling information from one of our classes. It's like the GMP has ended, but the process has continued with our colleagues.”

Strengthening Analytics Capabilities

Ruben Carbajo, vice president of revenue operations at Avantor, completed the GMP in 2019. He says while each of the six programs he attended was “very practical,” Analytics for Strategic Growth: AI, Smart Data, and Customer Insights delivered serious results. “I didn't have an analytics team when I joined Avantor, and it's one of the areas that I've been building the most within the team. Now we have about seven people that are fully dedicated to analytics. This area of business in particular is just changing so fast and we are proactive in making an effort to connect with analytics resources in other teams in the organization. There might be somebody that is focused on supply-chain analytics issues, for example, and although they are solving different problems, we can still learn from each other.”

Carbajo’s efforts also include an analytics for growth initiative that drives bi-weekly sales actions based in data insights. “It's a very focused group that works with the latest agile practices to take insights into actions. We have a pipeline of ideas that we run through our analytics algorithms, and those who have a valid scope turn into actions.”

Other programs that have had an outsized effect on his career include the Executive Negotiation Workshop: Negotiate with Confidence and Pricing Strategies: Measuring, Capturing, and Retaining Value. “When I started the GMP, I was moving to a pricing role, so Pricing Strategies was particularly useful. And the negotiation techniques I learned are something I use every day,” says Carbajo.

But the impact of the GMP on his career “certainly is more than just attending those six individual programs. It triggered me to take a new role in a new company, and my role has expanded a lot,” he says. “Between the connections I have made, and some of the Wharton events I have attended [through the alumni status awarded by GMP upon completion], the experience has been much more than the sum of the pieces.”