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Charles Thomas
Senior Director: Global Strategy & Transformation/Integrated Planning Lead
PepsiCo
Program/Concentration: Jack Welch MBA
TELL US ABOUT YOUR JOB RESPONSIBILITIES AT PepsiCo
In my current role, As a critical part of making PepsiCo Faster, Stronger, and Better, I am responsible for PepsiCo’s future state design of Integrated Planning across our Short, Medium, and Long term Planning Horizon. This includes rolling out transformational planning processes and guiding digitilizing and delivery of domains by incorporating relevant commercial, demand, supply, and financial aspects to achieve optimal integrated business results across sales and operations functions.
WHY WERE YOU LOOKING TO GET AN MBA?:
As part of my learning and development plan, I had developmental opportunities identified to improve my understanding of the business concepts across the verticals of Sales, Marketing, Finance, and Strategy. In addition, I wanted to gain a holistic view of priorities and interdependencies within a business from a CEO’s lens.
HOW HAS THE JWMI CURRICULUM HELPED YOU IN YOUR CAREER?:
My most significant growth area since JWMI has been as a Leader. I have been able to inspire and motivate my team by setting a clear vision. In addition, my communication within the team and across the organization has improved significantly as I have an understanding of business fundamentals and a new ability to link our team’s priorities to that of the organization. Last year I was promoted to Senior Director—Supply Chain Strategy from Director—Network Strategy. I am looking to use the learnings from the Jack Welch MBA program to further my career even more.
DID YOU FIND THE CURRICULUM WAS IMMEDIATELY APPLICABLE? PLEASE EXPLAIN.:
I use almost all my learnings in the last three years from this program at my job.
a. Marketing: I speak to the marketing colleagues in their language (i.e., customer segmentation, target audience, buying behaviors, etc.)
b. Finance: The concepts of IRR, NPV, payback are now super clear. I have also made some personal investments in stocks as a result of insights gained from this course.
c. Leadership: Building high-performance teams, overcoming challenges, winning, and Jack’s eight essential rules for leaders are my key takeaways.
Applying these learnings to my current role at PepsiCo has helped me manage my teams better and achieve outstanding results against KPIs.
PLEASE SHARE ANY ADVICE FOR NEW STUDENTS EMBARKING ON THE MBA JOURNEY.:
This is the best real-life MBA program!
You learn what you need to succeed in business. This MBA cuts out who said what in the management books to what needs to be done to be successful.
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