Network: HBS Clubs and Associations
Clubs Offer Popular Management Programs
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| Robert Brady (MBA ’66) , CEO of Moog Aerospace, opens his factory to students in the course organized by Bing Sherrill, right. Photo by Phil Matt |
For thirteen weeks last year, Kelli Socarras got a taste of life as an HBS student. She read two case studies each week, debated management solutions in class, and learned from top executives in a wide range of industries. She accomplished all this without ever having to leave her hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina, where Socarras is vice president for sales and marketing at Afton Village, a mixed-use real estate development company.
“It was a pretty intense course, a lot of work, but I invested in something I really value,” says Socarras. She was one of a small group of Charlotte-area executives who participated in the Management Development Program, a course offered for the first time in the fall of 2003 by the HBS Alumni Association of Charlotte.
Taught by volunteer HBS alumni — local leaders in their respective industries — the course gave mid- to high-level managers a sample of HBS management training without a trip to Boston to get it.
The Charlotte club is the second to offer a management course. The HBS Club of Buffalo pioneered the idea in 1951 when it developed a case-based management course for local businesses. While the course has evolved over the years, the Manage-ment Development Course remains popular and attracts between 18 and 35 students each fall.
“There were no MBA courses in our area,” says Richard (“Bing”) Sherrill (MBA ’62), director of Buffalo’s program. “Several HBS graduates felt that they could put together a management program that would help both their own companies and others in the area.” In addition to the program’s value for local companies and managers, the revenue generated supports gifts to area nonprofits and has funded scholarships for Harvard MBA students from Western New York and for area nonprofit leaders attending HBS Executive Education courses.
The Charlotte program is similarly motivated, offering the course as a benefit to local companies and using proceeds to support nonprofits in the community. “We basically took the Buffalo program and used it as a model to set up ours,” says Charlotte program director Jack Burke (MBA ’65), who taught in the Buffalo program before moving to Charlotte and spearheading the effort there. “We’ve had a tremendous response from alumni who want to teach a case, or even two cases,” says Burke.
Both clubs offer the courses in the evenings each fall for thirteen weeks. The Buffalo program also includes class tours to local businesses and factories.
For Mark Celmer, president of Multisorb Tech-nologies International in Buffalo, the Management Development Course gave him the chance to sharpen his management skills while learning from seasoned executives of multimillion-dollar companies. “The case-study approach allowed me to reinvent my management perspective,” notes Celmer, who took the course last year. “The teachers are the top people in Western New York. It was just a great opportunity.”
Burke says that the course is popular because it offers something that local business schools can’t — the HBS experience, through its alumni teachers and its use of the case method. “The case method and the exposure to some pretty high-level executives” distinguish the course from other classes, Burke says. “It’s also a fairly low-cost general management course.”
The opportunity for exposure to the case method made all the difference to Socarras, back in Charlotte. “Every week, I’d try to come up with the solution to each case before class,” she recalls. “But the course showed me that there’s no one right way to get to a solution; there may be several ways to solve a problem. It was helpful to see how people dealt with the same management issues in very different industries.”
— MARGIE KELLEY
