Alumni Conference '03
LFM Holds Alumni Conference at MIT
By Lois Slavin
December 12, 2003
On October 23-24, over 130 alumni of MIT’s Leaders for Manufacturing (LFM) Program convened at the Tang Center for the annual LFM conference. The theme of the event was “Manufacturing and Beyond: Leadership, Innovation, and the Bottom Line.”
“Our goal was to reach out to the entire LFM community, which encompasses a very broad and diverse group of people with very different experiences,” explained Jim Lawton, LFM ’90 and co-chair of the event, along with Jeff Goldberg, LFM ’01. “From the mfg challenges of producing New Balance footwear to the real ways that a leader affects significant change to the twists and turns of a typical LFM career path, all LFMs share a common bond. LFM’s strength is in the diversity of its Big M experience *and* in its inclusiveness.”
Conference coordinators used the Voice of the Customer technique taught in the LFM program to poll alums on what they wanted to see in the conference. “Over 100 alums provided input.,” said Goldberg. “This helped us design an agenda that incorporated areas that were of interest to the entire LFM community, including new technologies, research and business models as well as leading-edge speakers. We also built in plenty of time for networking.”
It worked. This year’s event boasted the largest alumni conference attendance in LFM history.
Keynote speakers included Paul Levy, President and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and David Marsing, retired vice president of Intel Corporation. Other speakers and panelists included Harvard Business School Professor and LFM co-founder Kent Bowen; Founder and Director of the Whitehead Institute Eric Lander; Professor Moungi Bawendi; AI Lab Director Rodney Brooks; Professor Rebecca Henderson; LFM ’90 alum and General Partner of Doll Capital Peter Moran; Director of the LFM Fellows Program Don Rosenfield; ESD Co-Director Dan Roos; and Professor Lester Thurow. Attendees also had the opportunity to tour the Big Dig, New Balance, and Genzyme, as well as several MIT labs, including the AI lab and Whitehead Center for Genome Sequencing.
Levy’s main message was that careers can’t be planned. “Don’t even try,” he advised. “Relax and enjoy what comes.”
To illustrate, he recounted his own career path. Some highlights: after graduating from MIT with advanced degrees in economics and planning, he worked in the Massachusetts energy department, became commissioner of public utilities, went for his PhD, became energy secretary of Arkansas, consulted in the telecom industry, ran the Massachusetts department of public utilities then the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, became the dean of administration at Harvard Medical School, and then began his current job as president and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Levy described the process of merging these “two leaky lifeboats” (BI and Deaconess – which were separate institutions until recently) each with dramatically different histories and cultures. He began by creating a sense of urgency and discomfort by telling staff at both hospitals about the severity of the financial situation. The entities also worked with a consulting group that rigorously analyzed the existing situation and made several proposals for improvement.
Levy had these suggestions posted on the organization’s web site. “Within 24 hours, there were 18,000 hits and we only had 6,000 employees,” he recalled.
Levy also invited the staff to come up with their own proposals, if they didn’t like the consulting firm’s suggestions. Subsequently, cross-functional teams were formed to attack a number of problems, some yielding dramatic results:
- A decrease in days to receivables from 72 to 58 in one year, generating $52 million.
- A reduction in cycle time for doctors’ billing was reduced, resulting in an extra month’s revenue for the MDs within the first year.
- A reduction in the $100 m loss rate to break even in 2.5 years.
Levy concluded with what he believes are the most important lessons for any leader. Among them: communicate with your people because they need to know what is going on; figure out what values characterize your organization, then frame everything around them; and involve everyone. “A leader’s job is to have empathy with employees – to know where they are at, to create interest, then to let them enjoy the pleasure of helping to improve the organization. This strategy is transferable to any type of organization.”
The second keynote speaker, David Marsing is a former Intel VP of manufacturing and technology. As a member of the partnership that created LFM and later the LFM internship and the System Design and Management program, Marsing began his presentation by focusing on the context in which Intel decided to become a partner.
In a nutshell, it offered the possibility for large-scale systemic change. “We felt that it would give us the opportunity to help develop and hire people with the multi-disciplinary experience needed to run companies like Intel,” he explained. “We needed people who could take risks for the right reasons.”
Marsing then segued into a brief history of his own awakening into systems thinking, which began when he noticed that underlying the broken processes and late shipments were people issues. “Often this was the causal factor for a huge systemic blow-up, “he observed.
He described the hard lessons through which Intel learned what kind of people were needed to lead the company. Initially several new hires hailed from special military operations teams, however this experience worked against them in the corporate world. “They operated so well as a group that they were like lemmings,“ said Marsing. “Later we learned that there was a 60% fatality rate in special operations team members in Viet Nam.”
The company brought in people who demonstrated the value of social influencing – i.e., they knew how to effectively leverage the environment. Over time, Intel acquired a new set of learnings that helped them identify the complex rules inherent in their organizational culture and how to address them. These included:
- The difficulty in implementing change unless there was a crisis,
- The triggering of the “corporate immune system” whenever any change – good or bad – was introduced.
- The need to intentionally hire and place employees with certain personality types, in addition to certain types of skills, in order to optimize teamwork and production, while driving decision-making downward.
- The need to be mindful about choosing language that would both “brand” a change yet be neutral enough to allow people to get behind it.
Marsing added that seeking guidance from senior leaders is essential. “They help calibrate the risk level from their perspective and can also help fly cover.”
“It’s useful to think of training a team to behave like a musical ensemble,” advised Marsing. “They’ll learn that it’s boring to have only trumpets, that other instruments are needed.”
Thanks to all who attended the MIT Leaders for Manufacturing Conference 2003. “In the end,” notes Jim Lawton, “active participation of many alumni is the benchmark of a truly successful conference and continuation of the LFM experience.”