Leadership seminar with Mark Pigott

Before coming to Cambridge, I had not heard about a company called PACCAR. I guess it was way below the radar in comparison to companies like Dell or Starbucks.

PACCAR is a 100+ year old company that manufactures trucks under the band names Kenworth, Peterbilt and DAF. It had acquired Leyland Trucks in the UK in 1998 (as part of the Operations Management tour, I had a chance to visit the Leyland factory). It had a revenue of about $15 billion in 2007 and made a profit of $1.2 billion. The most amazing thing is that it is one of the very few companies that has made a profit for 69 consecutive years.

Mark Piggot the CEO of PACCAR held a leadership seminar at JBS this week. He represents the 4th generation of this family owned business. The longest serving CEOs in the automobile industry.

What I was most impressed about Mark was his passion what what he does and the simplicity with which he puts his point across.

A few key take aways from his talk were
1) Education - Get all the education you can and continue to learn. Mark is currently working on his 4th degree.
2) Common Sense - Always look for people who bring in 'common sense'. It is the rarest and most valuable commodity in the business world.
3) Benchmark against the best in diverse industries - PACCAR benchmarks itself with Dell, Walmart, Wells Fargo to name a few.
4) Old paradigms may be useful - The world still works on factors like producing a product or rendering a service. This is never going to change. The most important aspect is to to do this with the customer and employees at the heart of it.
5) Give back - Make sure to give back.
6) Think long term - Successful CEOs and people thing long-term. This is the essence of doing the right thing every time.

Mark also talked about the dynamics of a family business and he feels that the CEO should not necessarily be from within the family, but should be the best person who can do the job done

I really enjoyed the talk.

Nearing end of second term

The last few weeks were quite hectic and I attended a number of interesting talks (a few of them are listed below)

1) Lecture and formal dinner hosted at Wolfson College - commemorating the life of Sir Vivian Fuchs (100th anniversary of his birth and the 50th anniversary of the first land crossing of the Antarctic continent). The talk was made by Professor Nichloas Owens, the current Director of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).
2) Talk by Lord Karan Bilimoria - This was as part of the case-study we had done about Cobra Beer. Lord Bilimoria is one of the best speakers I have listen to during my term in Cambridge.
3) Enterprise Tuesday - Building a Dream Team with Lousia Fletcher of Property Price Advice fame
4) Enterprise Tuesday -Making It Happen with Prof Sir Richard Friend and Stuart Evans, CEO of Plastic Logic
5) Enterprise Tuesday -Avoiding Big Mistakes with Dr Hermann Hauser CBE, Co-Founder of Amadeus Capital Partners
6) Strategy implementation session with Bradley Fried, CEO of Investec UK
7) "High Performance in a Multi-Polar World" with Mark Spelman, Global Head of Strategy at Accenture
8) Issues of Corporate Governance and Valued Talent with Sean O'Hare, Partner in the Human Resource Services Practice at PWC

We will finish this term on the 14th of March and will start on the Global Consulting Project (GCP). Our team (of 5 souls) is heading to Portugal to work on market entry strategy for a Solar Energy turnkey equipment manufacturer. We will be spending about 6 weeks working on this project. Can't wait to finish the exams and head to Portugal and enjoy the sun :)