Moving Ahead, from Factory to Boardroom - Moving Ahead, from Factory to Boardroom

by Martha Lagace, Staff Writer, HBS Working Knowledge

HBS professor Janice H. Hammond

How is a woman executive to know whether operations management is really her thing?

For Anne Stevens, an executive director at Ford Motor Company — with responsibility "for every single vehicle produced in North America" and 100,000 employees — the attraction began when she was in grade school. While the other kids in the Junior Scientists Club enjoyed visits to various and sundry points of interest in her Pennsylvania hometown, Stevens recalled she was happiest during trips to factories and foundries.

"I was the only girl in the club," she said at HBS recently, in a panel discussion on manufacturing. "But it never sunk in that that was strange." As a child, Stevens also harbored a triple threat: a microscope, a telescope, and a chemistry set. "I once set my uncle's basement on fire," she recalled fondly.

The three other panelists and moderator Janice Hammond (an HBS professor and head of the School's unit in technology and operations management) all agreed that such youthful foibles were a worthy side effect on the path to acquiring necessary technical skills.

	I didn't beat them up, and I certainly wasn't going to hug them.
	Jody L. Blakeway

For Hammond, for instance, the fascination with operations began with an early effort to tie her shoes with the aid of electricity; her parents' wall still bears a substantial burn mark from this experiment. Jody Blakeway (HBS MBA '90), now a vice president for AT&T Broadband, noted that she was the only panelist in the group to lack an engineering education. She started her career as a dietician. "If I'd had my druthers, I'd have studied industrial engineering," Blakeway stated.

Reading the subtle cues
Some lessons, panelists cautioned, cannot be learned at engineering school or acquired on the factory floor. Asked what kind of learning they'd gained "at a visceral level" through their careers in manufacturing, panelists offered a variety of sobering professional experiences.

Jody L. Blakeway

Blakeway stressed the importance, for example, of executives understanding the culture of the companies they join. In her own case, she accepted a general manager position leading a division of UPS in Latin America. "I was the sole expat and the only woman," she told the group. "I didn't understand how everyone was watching me."

Part of the culture that had been encouraged by her predecessors in that country, she related, was a kind of "beat 'em up, hug 'em" method of motivating employees; her staff expected the same stern commands and pandering rewards from her, too. "I didn't beat them up, and I certainly wasn't going to hug them.

"They did no work for my first two weeks," Blakeway recalled exasperatedly. Finally, she had to tell her staff point blank, "'There's one thing I have to tell you. Just because I have a soft voice, don't ever underestimate me.'"

Stevens concurred with Blakeway's description of crossing a cultural divide. Her own epiphany resulted from a similar observation, though from the flip side of corporate life: navigating not employees' expectations, but those of her superiors.

"Corporate politics are not taught at engineering school," Stevens said. "I didn't realize there was an art to saying what you thought, and that there's a time to really not say what you think. As a very young engineer, that was the hardest lesson for me."

She recounted a dinner party she attended with her upper-echelon colleagues where one of them, a male vice president, started waxing prolific to all assembled about how wonderful things were for women at the company. Then he turned to Stevens and asked if she didn't agree. "Frankly, no," was her honest response.

At the HBS panel, Stevens winced when she recalled that exchange. "It wasn't the right time to say something like that," she told the HBS group. "How I got back on track is that I went back in, for a one-on-one with the vice president, to express my concerns and also offer suggestions on what could be done about it within the corporation."

"You have to navigate egos as people go higher," she said. "You have to manage the substance of what's being discussed; and you have to manage egos as well. Even though I had told him the truth, in this case, I had very destructively attacked his ego."

Technology's limits
Though the panelists collectively manage thousands of employees and multimillion-dollar budgets, and wield any number of technological devices — from cell phones to personal organizers — the management of their own personal time, they said at HBS, remains a constant challenge.

Technology has certainly changed the way people "capture and massage" information, mused Rena Clark (HBS MBA '90), chair and CEO of QVS, Inc., a company that makes specialty chemicals and detergents. But even though technology has changed the way people do business, she believes women still have control over how they spend their time. "I've learned how to say no to demands on my time," she said. "You have to be able to draw boundaries."

And Stevens, ever the scientist, finds that technology provides a fine assistant in this goal. Every six months, she runs a calendar analysis of how she spends her personal time. Even so, she conceded, technology only goes so far. "You really have to stay in touch with your inner gut," she said. "I have two granddaughters. Every Sunday I have a granddaughter fix." Where your own time is concerned, she concluded (borrowing a note from her Ford tenure in Britain), "Be bloody-minded about protecting it."

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