MIT Sloan Fellows Program in Innovation and Global Leadership

Bruce S. Gordon is that rare hybrid, a social visionary and an astute businessman. After 35 years rising through the ranks of Bell of Pennsylvania, Bell Atlantic, and Verizon, he retired at 56. In his final position, he led the company’s largest division, retail markets, which served 33 million residential and small business customers. He also directed corporate advertising and brand management and brought in $25 billion in annual revenue. After his retirement, Gordon took the helm as president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) until stepping down in the spring of 2007.

Often lauded for outstanding leadership, Gordon was included in Fortune magazine’s 2002 roster of “The 50 Most Powerful Black Executives.” Black Enterprise magazine named him “Executive of the Year” in 1998. “I'm definitely a believer,” he says, “that leadership technique has an immeasurable impact on a business.”

Gordon believes his experience in the MIT Sloan Fellows Program was critical to making him the leader he is today. “Executives from 17 countries were represented, very accomplished business people from a wide spectrum of business, industry, government, and military organizations,” he says. “Even if working with that diverse group of people was the sum total of the Sloan Fellows experience, I would have walked away a winner, but there was so much more – the faculty, the curriculum, the learning experience, the trip to the Far East. The experience was remarkable.”

Francis Yeoh is an innovator’s innovator. An engineer with a PhD in telecommunications, Yeoh has been immersed in high tech entrepreneurship for most of his career. He was CEO of an internet services company, headed an R&D organization that spun out a bevy of start-up ventures, even set up Singapore’s first Internet service provider. Now, as CEO of Singapore’s National Research Foundation (NRF), Yeoh is driving research, innovation, and enterprise using a holistic, highly collaborative model inspired by his time at MIT.

As head of the NRF, he connects inventors with investors and subject experts to develop multipronged commercialization strategies that increase the odds of entrepreneurial success. And through the pioneering initiative CREATE—Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise—he is bringing together many of the world’s top research institutions (including MIT) under one roof to pool knowledge and solve some of the most intractable problems of our age.

When Forbes magazine named James C. Foster “Entrepreneur of the Year” in 2002, the Chairman and CEO of Charles River Laboratories had transformed his 56-year-old family business into one of the world’s leading biotech companies. And he did it by taking back control of the company from a multinational corporation.

Although he had a law degree, Foster knew if he was going to grow Charles River Laboratories into a biotechnology giant, he needed a strong management foundation. Not wanting a traditional MBA degree, Foster never even considered other schools or programs. He knew what the MIT Sloan Fellows Program had to offer and headed straight for it.

Foster says that the program prepared him for the gauntlet of professional challenges that culminated in his 2002 award. “The MIT Sloan Fellows Program is not just an education, it’s a life-altering experience,” he says. The powerful relationships forged with faculty and fellow students, the CEO seminars, and the trips to New York City, Washington, and beyond made the program an experience that he says was perfect for him at that juncture in his career. Charles River Laboratories now employs 8,000 people at 70 facilities in 18 countries.

MIT Sloan taught Foster that to be successful in running a business, you have to take balanced risks and create an environment in which people are given incentives to be risk-takers. “You want to be constantly soliciting people’s input,” he explains, “to say, ‘What do you think?’ and ‘Why don't you go out and try that?’ And if it doesn't work, you have to be able to say, ‘Thanks for trying.’ ”

Keiji Tachikawa was actually disappointed when placed in charge of NTT DoCoMo, the mobile telephone unit of the Japanese telecom giant Nippon Telephone and Telegraph. He’d had his eye on what he considered a more coveted job leading NTT East, the company's local phone service unit.

That disappointment only served to fuel Tachikawa’s vision for DoCoMo. Three years after taking the job, he had grown the unit’s market capitalization to $225 billion – bigger even than that of NTT itself. He also took the company global, carving out stakes in mobile companies in Europe, Asia, and America.

Tachikawa was named CEO and, soon after, “Asian Businessman of the Year” by Fortune magazine “for his role in one of the world’s greatest business successes of 2000.” The honor, the magazine explained, was bestowed on the leader who proved to be “ahead of the pack, in profits and vision. Tachikawa leads on both fronts.”

Tachikawa credits the Sloan Fellows Program with helping him shape an effective methodology for business management and decision-making. “In addition to the basic courses of law, economics, and accounting, and subjects such as strategic policy, finance, and marketing, I became aware of the diversity of ideas,” he says.

If Tachikawa’s entrepreneurial triumph took the global business world by storm, it did not surprise his classmates in the MIT Sloan Fellows class of 1978. Indeed, it was his experience at MIT Sloan that inspired his motto for corporate management, “Think drastically, execute steadily.” A motto he has brought with him to the Japanese space program–JAXA–which he has headed since 2004.

Kofi Annan can remember the day. It was 1971 and he was in the middle of his first term in the MIT Sloan Fellows Program. He was walking along the Charles River, ruminating about his place in the class, wondering how he fit into the audacious group of global leaders who were his classmates.

When the answer came to him, Annan says, it came to him most emphatically: “Follow your own inner compass...know who you are, what you stand for, where you want to go, and why you want to get there.” He recalls that at once, his anxieties began to fade.

Annan believes that as a result of that walk by the river, he took away from MIT “the intellectual confidence to help me locate my bearings in new situations, to view any challenge as an opportunity for renewal and growth, and to be comfortable in seeking the help of colleagues, but not fearing to do things my way.”

MIT and the United Nations, Annan says, have more in common than might be at first obvious. The experimental method, for example. “An international organization,” he says, “is an experiment...an experiment in human cooperation on a planetary scale.” He notes that “international organizations must be closely tuned to their environments, quickly correct their mistakes, build cumulatively on their achievements, and continually generate new modalities as previous ways of doing things become outdated.”

Although that introspective walk along the Charles River is now more than 30 years past, Annan’s experience at MIT still informs his decisions. “As a Sloan Fellow, I learned management skills that I could draw on in refashioning the United Nations for the new century.”

Richard Resnick is a genetics pioneer, a serial entrepreneur, and a music innovator, but a more accurate characterization might be high-tech explorer. Resnick has planted so many flags on so many tech mountain peaks, it’s dizzying. Today, he’s channeling everything he’s learned in those many pursuits into his role as CEO of GenomeQuest.

The possibilities inherent in the study of the human genome first became clear to Resnick right out of college when he worked as a computer scientist on Eric Lander’s Human Genome Project at MIT. Now, he is at the front lines of the business of genomes, helping to advance the use of the genome as a universal and affordable diagnostic tool. And he is drawing on his MIT education—and network—to move forward on that frontier.

Read Richard Resnick’s blog at GenomeQuest.

Ron Williams has his head in the clouds, and that’s exactly where he intends to keep it. “One of the basic principles of successful leadership is to keep your head in the clouds and your feet on the ground. You have to start with a large-scale, long-range vision and then operationalize strategies that deliver real value to stakeholders.”

As President of Aetna, Williams stands as powerful proof of his theory. He oversees the bulk of Aetna’s $25 billion business and has been named one of the “50 Most Powerful Black Executives” by Fortune magazine. He credits the MIT Sloan Fellows Program as a major force in shaping his ideas about leadership.

“I went to Sloan to turn myself into a generalist with a wider view of business. I wasn’t alone. At the start of the program, all the participants tended to define a problem in terms of their specialty. By the end of the program, we’d moved beyond our respective functional disciplines and learned to match the right discipline, or combination of disciplines, to the problem at hand.”

Williams looks back on this collaborative experience as a fundamental step in his evolution as an executive. “Working with a world-class faculty and high-performing classmates, I was able to take everything I knew about business and raise it to the next level.”