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Road to CEO Begins with Right Skills, Connections

Robert Lane, ’74, and William Conway Jr., ’74, have more in common than earning their MBAs in the same year and launching their careers at First National Bank of Chicago. Each became a CEO because he was able to utilize his best skills and connect with people, Lane and Conway said during the inaugural panel of the Charles M. Harper Road to CEO Series during Alumni Celebration 2007 at the Fairmont Chicago November 2.

“I was able to get into a situation where I could be myself and do what I did well,” said Lane, chairman and CEO of Deere & Company. “It’s very hard to be something that you aren’t.” Two other keys were developing a “world view” of how business fits into global society and getting the necessary “brain power” from the GSB, he said.

Conway, cofounder and president of the Carlyle Group, said he was able to identify the “right things” on which to focus, both in business and in working with people. “I think there are a lot of people who work on the wrong things,” he said. “They do the most insignificant first. I was able to figure out what the most important things were.”

With people Conway tried to determine what they could do, rather than what they couldn’t do, he said. “A lot of times you focus on a person’s weakness,” Conway said. “When you put people in a job they can’t do, it’s your fault when they fail. I tried to find jobs people can do and I put them in those jobs.”

Conway’s MBA studies taught him the fundamental principles of business and provided him the general guidelines for his future, he said. “If you have those principles by which you’re going to try to face situations,  that helps a lot,” Conway said. “You can’t prepare for 9/11 or the internet. You have to have the ability to react and act. Business, most of the time, is a lot more like a hockey game than a ballet. People are hitting and shoving you and pointing a stick at you.”

The definition of a great education is continuing to ponder what has been learned with a sufficient depth of concepts, Lane said. “It should allow you to learn concepts and principles that you will be thinking about your entire life,” he said. “As you’re trying to determine where that puck is going to go in this game, you have to be able to persuade others -  even if they do not report directly to you. That’s where you learn how to lead.”

To become CEOs, people must know themselves very well and know what they do well, Lane said. “You must love what you’re doing,” he said. “It’s very hard to do something well over a long period of time, if you really don’t love it. People ask me, ‘Should I start out in accounting?” I say, ‘I don’t know. Do you love it?’ Because if you don’t love it, you probably won’t do really well. If you don’t do really well, you probably won’t blossom.”

“I wouldn’t add anything to that,” Conway said.

Charles M. Harper, ’51, former CEO of ConAgra, said he was delighted to sponsor the Road to CEO series, after unsuccessfully lobbying three different universities to use proven business leaders to teach MBA students. “The track record of these speakers is something else,” he said. “They have built business and they have flown like eagles. They know how to do it.”

The inaugural panel was moderated by Steve Kaplan, Neubauer Family Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance.

- Phil Rockrohr