Head of the class: toys and games maker Hasbro Inc. is infusing skills and knowledge at the top ranks in partnership with the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth

HR Magazine, Jan, 2005 by Ann Pomeroy

Five years ago, Hasbro Inc., the Pawtucket, R.I.-based toy company founded in 1923 by the Hassenfeld brothers, was floundering. After decades of success with such well-known brands as Mr. Potato Head, G.I. Joe, Monopoly and Scrabble, the company had suffered financial losses and experienced high turnover among a group of executives brought in from outside the organization. Executive bench strength was down, and recruiting, once easy for the family-owned company, had become increasingly difficult.

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In 2000, then-CEO Alan Hassenfeld, a grandson of one of the founders, asked Hasbro veteran Al Verrecchia to take on the role of president and chief operating officer and help him turn the company around; in 2003, Verrecchia was promoted to CEO while Hassenfeld continued as chairman.

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Both men recognized that "Hasbro's key skill is our ability to design and make great games and toys," says Verrecchia. "We develop intellectual property, so it's important to develop the creativity and skills of our people."

And that included the creativity and skills of the people at the very top of the organization. Hasbro recognized something that is increasingly overlooked in the halls of corporate America: While companies turn their focus to developing middle managers for future posts, development of current top leaders often slips.

Over the past few years, David Silverstein, president and CEO of Breakthrough Management Group, a Longmont, Colo.-based business performance improvement and training consulting firm, has seen a "generation gap" among different levels of management when it comes to training. While the executive education market is big today, he says it tends to target employees who are being groomed to become executives. Those already in the top ranks "aren't accepting the need to refresh their own education," Silverstein says. "Executives need to develop their own skills by getting into a classroom."

As Hassenfeld and Verrecchia set out to rebuild the senior management team, they reflected back on the company's roots. For decades, the family atmosphere and nurturing environment had kept executives loyal to Hasbro. It was time to return to the original model of "Hassenfeld Brothers," the small textile remnant company built by Hassenfeld's Russian immigrant ancestors, and invest in the talent of its internal leaders.

HR Leads the Charge

In 2002, Verrecchia asked Bob Carniaux, senior vice president of human resources, and his HR staff to make recommendations for a multiyear program that would train Hasbro's leaders as part of the company's succession plan.

Carniaux, along with Kim Janson, vice president for organizational effectiveness and diversity, and Jackie Boucher, senior manager of people development, organizational effectiveness and diversity, spent months developing a detailed plan for Hasbro. "We knew we only had one shot at getting it right," Janson says.

Getting it right meant finding a custom approach to designing a program that would be built from the ground up to suit Hasbro's specific needs. Using the employee attitude survey, the HR team established that the program should include 360-degree performance assessments and a practical application component and should be well respected "so people would be clamoring to get in." (For more information on the program's elements, see "Coaching Executives for Success" on page 57.) Janson and Boucher then examined 50 executive education programs at top business schools, gradually narrowing that number down to a dozen and then to the top four programs.

Among the finalists was the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. "The service orientation of Tuck surpassed other groups," says Janson, "and the faculty quality is truly amazing. As big as we are [about 7,000 employees worldwide, with markets in 40 countries], we're very much a boutique organization," she says, "and Tuck [which is small] was a great fit." In January 2003, Hasbro chose Tuck to be its executive education partner.

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Hasbro, with its family feel, was a great fit for Tuck as well, according to associate dean Jim Danko, who had arrived at Tuck in 2000 with an interest in overhauling the school's executive education programs. Danko--who came with a background as a successful entrepreneur as well as an academic--believed in linking education with company strategy. He wanted to provide a customized "high-impact" executive education model as opposed to the traditional faculty-as-expert open enrollment model that had been common at Tuck and at many other top business schools for years. Instead of "taking the suit and altering it," Danko advocated a build-from-the-ground-up approach.

Tuck professor Vijay "V.G." Govindarajan, who serves as faculty director for the Hasbro program, worked closely with Janson and the Hasbro team to develop a Hasbro-specific curriculum. After identifying Hasbro's "skill gaps"--through employee attitude surveys and by plotting where the company needed to go and the skills needed to get there--they planned five modules for the curriculum: global strategy and competitive advantage; personal leadership; brand building; emerging markets; and ethics.