Essentials of Management
Opening The Door to a New Career

Wesley Co earned his management stripes in operations as an R&D engineer, process improvement leader, and business unit manager at 2 Fortune 500 multinational manufacturers. With a BS in Chemical Engineering, he had worked in positions with increasing responsibilities before joining Therma-Tru, the top exterior door manufacturer in the United States. In 2002, he earned a Six Sigma Black Belt — and he wasn't afraid to use it. At Therma-Tru, for example, he and his Six Sigma associates had implemented a hybrid Six Sigma approach leveraging kaizen speed and lean enterprise efficiency that saved more than $4 million corporate-wide within the first year of its deployment.

But as he approached 30, Co had reached a point in his career where he wanted to move beyond the operations world of manufacturing. A few years earlier, one of his mentors had asked him what he wanted to be "when he grew up." Co shared that he wanted a broader leadership role. "When I told my mentor at the time that my goal was to be in a general management position in 5 to 10 years, he responded by saying that in order to become an effective business leader, no matter where you end up, you need experience across the entire organization and to truly understand what drives the business."

In pursuit of this broader experience, Co was tapped to become a corporate product manager for Therma-Tru's Patio Door Systems business. While this role would require a strong understanding of engineering and manufacturing, it also demanded marketing and broader leadership responsibilities in the sales arena. "I knew the role would be a stretch coming in, and I quickly realized that I was in a different world when top execs started looking at me for answers on new product launch dates and how that would affect resource constraints in parts of the business I didn't even know existed," he said. "We were launching a new business unit in an adjacent category where everything I knew was limited to developing, making, and shipping the product. I was afraid I didn't know enough!"

A Broader Perspective

Co and his supervisors knew that he needed new knowledge to tackle this role, so he enrolled in the Wharton Essentials of Management program in December 2003. It provided a context for some of the insights he had gained on the job and introduced him to a broader view of the business beyond operations. "It allowed me to step away from manufacturing, to understand why sales, marketing, and finance did what they did, and the strategic value of organizational alignment. To sum it up, I learned in a couple of weeks what would have taken a couple of years."

The program accelerated and deepened the learning he had done on the job. "Imagine a boot camp where you get to jump into a time machine that has the ability to take you through the professional lives of yesterday's and today's captains of industry," he said. "Now combine that experience with the world's best business professors serving as tour guides and teaching you the essentials of management. That is what the EOM experience was like for me."

His technical background gave Co a distinctive view of new business development. "One of the critical lessons I learned early on is that when you take on a new position, no matter how different it is, not to forget what you learned in previous experiences, but to build upon it," he said. "Development myopia combined with failure to both capitalize and leverage knowledge from previous experience is where most GM-track professionals fall short," he added.

Crossing Career Milestones

What advice would he give to others as they reach and cross their own career milestones? Among the keys:

  • Seek good mentors: "I have been very fortunate in my career because I've had some really good mentors," Co said. "As early as my engineering internship days in college where I would get an average of 5 hours coaching time per week, to this very day working for a VP/GM who gives me 5 minutes of meeting time on average — consistently learning from a mentor-manager you aspire to become one day is simply priceless," he said.

  • Achieve better education: Education accelerates on-the-job learning. "It was great to learn about the fundamentals and theories behind what I had lived and be able to piece it altogether. The Wharton Essentials of Management program gives you a totally different perspective on your position, why you are doing it, and why other parts of the business make the decisions they do."

  • Broaden your vision to gain the best insight: "At the end of the day, every business leader needs to cultivate a broader view of the business they're in. Keep your options open and your mind wide open," he said. "Don't let what you've learned in the past hold you down. Continuously learn and unlearn."

Co, now 31, has since moved to a new position as corporate marketing manager of James Hardie, the U.S.'s #1 siding manufacturer, a role that demands even deeper marketing insights. He has signed up for a strategic marketing management course for later in 2005 and is planning to pursue an Executive MBA the following year. He is considering a number of programs on the West Coast, including the Wharton MBA for Executives at the Wharton West campus in San Francisco. But the short and intense Wharton EOM gave him a quick injection of new insights and a framework for business thinking, without breaking his stride.

Co is also planning to send his own direct reports to the Wharton EOM program. What advice would he give them? "For 2 solid weeks, check your biases and ego at the door. You have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to learn the unfiltered truth behind every major business fundamental from the masters themselves. The Wharton faculty, specifically those who teach in EOM, are at the top of their respective disciplines. However strong or lacking your mentoring was in the real world, that won't matter at EOM, because you'll get the real thing from the same professors who have educated some of the world's best executives. Absorb as much as you can from every class, because by simply doing that, you should experience the same immediate return on investment that I did when I went through EOM."

In addition to the knowledge gained, being sent to a program such as EOM is an important sign that you have reached a milestone in your career. "If you are at a point in your career where your manager or any leadership team member at your company is willing to invest as much as they are to send you to a program like EOM at Wharton, whether you realize it or not, it is a major milestone," Co said. "You are getting ready to make the transition from a functional, tactical role to a much broader, strategic role. It is a sign that your superiors want to invest in your future and have you step up to see the broader picture they're seeing from their vantage point."

    

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