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Colin MacDonald was a teacher’s pest. His mind wandered. He twitched in his chair. “I couldn’t take direction very well. Intuitively, I felt it was unnecessary to sit still for 15 minutes in absolute silence. I couldn’t see the sense in it.” His father found him so difficult that he often said his son would have “turned Christ away from the Last Supper”. Today that same young trouble maker is happily spending time in the classroom.
The CEO and president of Clearwater Seafoods is a keen student of the Harvard School of Business where he buries his head in the books, brushes up on his skills and builds partnerships to guarantee his company’s continued success in the world’s ever-changing marketplace. In short, MacDonald is leading by learning.
He’s not alone. Many of Atlantic Canada’s most successful CEOs regard executive education as a core business function. Among them is Bert Frizzell, president and CEO of The Shaw Group where executive education has been part of their corporate culture for more than 30 years. Frizzell credits this to “enlightened management” who recognized that professional development leads to better performance, higher productivity and greater profitability.
The company continues to see those results in the form of “improved earnings and sales growth”, as well as in the non-measurable results like motivated staff. “Employees come back (from courses) with an eagerness and a freshness for the roles they have,” Frizzell notes.
For this reason, Shaw makes a concerted effort to give employees the resources they need to build their skills and rise up the ranks. “Our corporate philosophy is to promote within,” Frizzell explains, noting that it is far more effective to develop its in-house talent, than to recruit from the outside.
Nurturing and cultivating Shaw’s talent takes place both internally and externally. The company has a custom-designed residential executive program that is delivered on-site by professors from Harvard, the University of Ottawa and Western. Plus, in the past five years, Shaw has sent several senior members of its management team to Harvard, INSEAD in Paris, Columbia, Duke, Queens and Western universities. Still others are working toward professional certifications or taking undergraduate and graduate courses with Shaw’s support. “We’re pretty much committed to doing these things,” Frizzell states modestly. “We look at it as developing our competitive advantage.”
Today’s business schools are described as thinking environments and training grounds for business leaders. As Shaw’s residential executive program illustrates, the institutions offer a wide mix of courses and delivery methods, but their core purpose is the same. The schools are geared to help companies address challenges in a volatile business climate; to help them capitalize on opportunities in the global economy; and to help them build their leadership capacity.
Consequently, executive education is serious stuff and it doesn’t come cheap. In fact, the cost of a three-week course can often exceed an undergraduate’s full-year tuition.
That steep price doesn’t come with any extra amenities or pampering either. Take Clearwater Seafoods CEO Colin MacDonald for example. He has regularly attended the Harvard School of Business for the past 22 years. He sleeps in a dormitory room that has barely enough room to stand up in and eats all his meals at the school’s cafeteria. Until just recently, there was only one bathroom on his dorm floor for eight to 10 men. “We called ourselves the ‘Can Group’ because we shared a can.”
MacDonald admits Harvard’s executive management program is a “mentally and physically demanding week of study.” Still, he considers this a necessary cost of doing business, as do the other CEOs interviewed for this article. More significantly, they like the returns on their investment: the recruitment and retention of their top tier talent; the relationships they form with classmates from all corners of the globe; having the most up-to-date research and information available; not to mention the monetary rewards.
In Rob Sobey’s opinion, the pursuit of higher learning should be a “normal process” for CEOs. “It should be built into a leader’s annual planning.” The president and CEO of Lawton Drugs Ltd. was recently accredited by the Institute of Corporate Development (ICD) through the University of Toronto’s Directors Education Program. The focus of his studies was on governance, which will serve him well in his capacity as chairman and director of various corporate and volunteer boards. To maintain his professional designation, he will have to continue taking accelerated courses in executive development – a stipulation he welcomes. “As soon as you stop academic learning you stagnate and that’s a competitive disadvantage.”
Sobey cautions CEOs who don’t develop their companies’ human capital: “The risks will mount on the other side if you don’t. A company should invest in the professional development of its people, hands down.”
