Rochelle Rollins looks around the classroom and smiles. “I hope the month goes by slowly,” she says.

Rollins is attending the June session of the Senior Executive Fellows program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. For a month, she’ll leave behind her job as a special assistant to the deputy director of the National Canc

Student Rochelle Rollins of the National Cancer Institute (Image: Carl Walsh)

er Institute and study management and government in Cambridge, Mass., with representatives of 19 federal agencies and several foreign countries.

Rollins and her classmates are quiet but alert. They are mostly upper-level managers, civil servants and military staff, representing a wide slice of federal agencies ranging from NASA to NOAA to the Navy. They are submarine commanders, geologists, policy analysts and rocket scientists. All are here for a month of intense study at Harvard, to learn more about government, leadership, management and themselves.

Peter Zimmerman, faculty chair of the Senior Executive

	Steve Kelman, professor of public management (Image: Carl Walsh)

Fellows program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, leads the first class, a discussion on lessons learned from the Cuban Missile Crisis.

“What grade would you give the American government on how they handled the crisis?” Zimmerman asks. He pauses, then “cold calls” on a student to his left, who looks anxious for a moment, then takes a breath and says “I give it an A-minus.”

With his sandy hair and easygoing preppy style, Zimmerman seems far more Mr. Chips than Professor Kingsfield, the intimidating Harvard law professor portrayed by John Houseman in the 1973 movie “The Paper Chase.” Although there’s a podium, the class is by no means straight lecture. Zimmerman mixes up the 90 minutes with discussion, slides and video clips from an old “Candid Camera” TV show to illustrate the perils of “groupthink.”

Zimmerman seems more interested in eternal verities than the latest acronym-soaked management fad; he is much more likely to quote Demosthenes than Peter Drucker. The program centers on the use of case studies, Zimmerman said. “People say, ‘Been there, done that.’ It’s never true, of course. It reminds us of the paradox of learning. Our learning is anchored in the past, yet tomorrow will be different from yesterday,” he said.

The reading list is massive. Just two days’ worth of assigned reading is enough to strain the seams in a fairly sturdy backpack.

“It was two to three hours of reading a night,” said Navy Cmdr. Mark Pyle, a recent graduate of the program. “And I did every single bit of it.” Pyle, a military assistant to the undersecretary of Defense, is slated to command a submarine next year.

Each student is assigned to a small study group with six or seven other students. Each of them brings to the group a specific problem from their jobs to work on. Over the course of the month, they apply what they’re learning in the classroom to their real-life concern.

The give-and-take of the classroom dynamic is one of the cornerstones of the program. The main focus is on the students and their interactions, which explains the lack of pontificating professors.

“You guys know how to run your ships or planes or offices,” Zimmerman tells his class. Gesturing toward a student, he says, “If I came to your ship and tried to tell you how to handle your crew, I’d be overboard in a flash.”

“We all had different learning styles,” Rollins said. Some felt more at ease in small groups, while others liked the structure of the classroom.

According to Christine Letts, associate dean for executive education at the Kennedy School, the program’s large class size provides “a good intellectual learning space.”

With a larger group, “you have more people in the top 25 percent or so intellectually. Those are the people who will raise the water level of the group and raise everybody’s performance,” she said. “With a smaller group, the smartest 25 percent might feel marginalized. Everybody is like, ‘There goes Joe again.’ It’s too easy for people in small groups to fall into roles.”

Students said they valued the chance to escape the working world for a month and learn in the total immersion of a true campus environment.

Manny Rodriguez, director of facilities and engineering for the Homeland Security Department’s U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology program, attended the program in October 2002. “My experience was extraordinary,” he said. “I can’t say enough how helpful it was to be in and around other students, and the energy you draw from them. It brought me back to the youthful days of my own curiosity. In a long federal career, the curiosity and the willingness to ask why and how questions gets muted.”

Just walking around the Harvard’s historic campus, bathed in the October sunlight, invigorated Rodriguez. “Most training I’ve taken has been in a hotel or an office, which doesn’t give you that true learning environment,” he said.

Rollins, like the other students, is no newcomer to the classroom. With a Ph.D. in health policy from Brandeis University’s Heller School, Rollins works with a $5 billion budget at the National Cancer Institute in Rockville, Md. Most of her training experiences have been with people from other health agencies. “To be the only person in the room from a [federal] health agency ... is bliss,” Rollins sighs.

“You don’t want to dominate a program with too many people from one agency,” Letts said. “In our state and local programs, for example, we don’t want too many fire chiefs.”

This June session was particularly diverse, as it included representatives from several Asian governments: Australia, China, Taiwan and Singapore. “It’s a gift to have that broad perspective across government,” Rollins said. “But it’s also a responsibility. It takes you out of your comfort zone.”

The program is hardly an afternoon stroll along the Charles, although there are some opportunities for those. It requires some sacrifices, too. Like most of the students, Rollins has a family, which she had to leave for a month. Her son got a phone call every evening. Even though she had to miss his performance in a school concert, “he was old enough to understand that this was to help Mommy do better at work,” she said.

A month later, Rollins said she is still learning from the program. It significantly changed the way she did her job. Now back at NCI, she said she’s “much more deliberate in how I solve problems.” Rollins took 33 pages of notes at Harvard. “I’m not a note-taker, but it was such a rich learning experience, I said, ‘I have to get this down.’ So I use these notes as a journal,” she said.

Rollins uses some of the tools she learned in the Harvard program every day in her job. For example, she sometimes uses the concept of “getting out on the balcony.” “That’s when you’re in a situation, and you’re able to remove yourself from the scene, and look down and see yourself and others,” as if from a balcony, Rollins said. “Too often, we just go with the flow.”

The program spent considerable time on how to lead teams, Rollins said. “At Harvard, we were taught the importance of the midpoint. That’s the point in the life span of a team where you can still reverse course,” she said. “Last week I was giving a presentation before the assistant secretary of health for HHS, and I could say, ‘We’re at the midpoint—we can still change course.’”

The month is packed with classes, study groups, guest speakers, movies such as “12 Angry Men” and the heavy reading load. Eleven Harvard faculty members present classes on topics such as negotiation, decision-making, persuasion and dealing with the media.

Michael Audino, who supervises 22 people as a branch chief for the Army’s Benét Laboratories near Albany, N.Y., described his experience as a senior executive fellow as “intense, but it’s a good intense.”

Audino was especially impressed by the ease with which the program blended the ivy-covered world of academia with the grittier world of government.

“The teachers have all done what they’re talking about,” he said. “Some have worked in the White House, some in the Pentagon.” His experience at Harvard was very different from other training he’s had, “where some training specialist is brought in and talks about something he hasn’t had experience in,” Audino said. “These guys have walked that walk.”

Take, for example, Steve Kelman, a professor of public management, who teaches sessions on performance measurement for the program. Although he’s taught at Harvard for 25 years, he was also the administrator of the Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Federal Procurement Policy from 1993 through 1997, where he spearheaded the Clinton administration’s efforts to reinvent government. He also worked as a GS-15 for the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.

Even though it’s the 2 o’clock session after lunch—”the class they usually give to visiting lecturers and new associate professors,” Kelman says—there’s no sign of drooping eyelids among the students. Kelman keeps the class engaged by his quick-paced, animated teaching style.

The class is discussing a case study about AT&T Universal Card Services Corp., the Jacksonville, Fla., company’s program to market credit cards in the 1990s. “Yeah, just what America needs, another credit card,” Kelman said.

The AT&T Universal Card program had won a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award for customer service, but it still had its shortcoming. Students discussed some of the problems that arose when AT&T relied too much on performance measures.

“They used performance metrics to control people,” one student said. “They must have driven their people batty,” said another.

The lesson, one student concluded, is that problems arise when performance measurement becomes a religion unto itself. “Is there a disease we can call the Baldrige disease?” he added.

This was one of many cases that students would study over the month, ranging from the political management of the Job Corps program to the organizational design of the Forest Service to lessons learned from the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

Class is over for the day, and students take an hour or so to regroup before they go to dinner together. They stay in graduate housing, a short walk away.

Michael Audino appreciated the sense of community the program fostered. “At this stage in my career—I’m 45—you’re not going to go off site for training,” he said. “There was camaraderie. People would go out and talk over a beer about problems parallel to yours.”

After Mark Pyle was back at the Pentagon for a week, he was already putting what he learned in the Harvard program to good use.

“I’m too junior to be a big decision-maker here in the Pentagon,” he said. “Commanders are a dime a dozen. But I’ve found other ways to influence the decision-makers. I’m more of a coalition builder now.”

At the program’s closing ceremony, students talked about what they had gotten out of the program. “I think people changed during those four weeks,” Rollins said. “You learned tools that you can take beyond work, into your relationships, into your marriage, into the community.”

By the end of June, the white graduation tents have long been folded up and put away. But with every graduation comes a new beginning. Rollins and her classmates pack their bags and head back to their lives in Washington and elsewhere, armed with a fresh perspective and new tools to apply to improving public service.