More global management for Ferrero

A customized training program for talented company employees, now being offered for the third time, with participants past and present totaling 101 and admission applications multiplying exponentially year by year. This is the Ferrero Master in International Management (MIM), a successful, long-standing partnership between Ferrero University and SDA Bocconi School of Management. Since 2016, the first year of the program, the Ferrero MIM has become an integral component of the training strategy of the Ferrero Group, with the participation of middle and senior managers from all over the globe. Designed for globally-minded Ferrero managers - international, fast paced, challenging - MIM is an 18-month program which allows Ferrerians to balance career development and executive education. With this innovative, blended, practice-oriented and advanced executive program, Ferrero’s managers acquire a global mindset while keeping a local focus.

Since the beginning, the MIM has had a clear, precise goal: to empower the Ferrero Group’s top talent, testing their ability to rise to the challenges facing the company and contend with the constant competitive pressure from the market. The ultimate aim is to pave the way for a growth path that would naturally culminate in a leadership position in the organization. This multifunctional journey, navigating the global aspects of the business, has enabled participants to enrich their wealth of management knowledge. What’s more, the Master Program has also laid the foundation for building a corporate structure on the excellence of the company’s human capital along with integration and interconnection among its future leaders. Act locally – that is, at both a country level and within the business segment -while taking on a global vision and approach: this is the main takeaway for master students.

The MIM continues to represent a highly engaging experience in which participants affirm their personal investment in the company and embrace the corporate culture, doing their part to develop a transnational strategy. In the words of Mary Jo Anderson, Head of Ferrero University: “This program is fully funded by Ferrero and offered specifically to our Ferrero professionals in an intact and focused way. MIM is a unique differentiator for us in our leadership development. Many companies support executive education and encourage the pursuit of a master’s degree, but very few offer a Master’s completely customized to the company with only the company’s professionals in the cohort. MIM is a rare opportunity for both the business and the Ferrero employee to experience content that is based in theory but directly applied to the Ferrero Way. The participants pursue this degree while also working full-time in their functional area. This program is a commitment by the individual and the company. And I feel that we are extremely fortunate to have the investment in this program and the interest from the managers in participating. We have also experienced great benefits from the managers who have graduated from the MIM in terms of their contributions to their function and their leadership in our organization.”

It was in the second half of 2014 when SDA Bocconi School of Management and Ferrero began to work on developing the Master. The aim was to design a program targeting high-potential Ferrero employees that would reinforce their strategic vision at a global level and shore up their familiarity with business processes at a local level. To reflect this aim, the original name of the program was Ferrero Glocal.

Through a virtuous process of co-design, SDA Bocconi and Ferrero then established the final architecture of the MIM. They began with certain cornerstones of Ferrero’s business identity and corporate culture: solidly anchored in a multi-domestic approach and a consolidated aptitude for adapting to local cultures and food consumption while increasingly integrating a capacity for global leadership at the same time. In fact, the training program was designed to incorporate this dual nature: participants are provided with a platform offering differentiated content and teaching methods, specially built to help them understand and meet the challenges of complexity in a sector experiencing major transformation processes on a global scale.

For every 18-month Master Program, talented managers from over 15 countries take part. They’re selected through an application process conducted by the Group’s HR department. From the outset, the basic idea was to realize a blended program making massive use of what was quite unusual at the time - distance learning technologies, both synchronous and asynchronous. The resulting program architecture consisted of three traditional modules, presented face-to-face in various company offices, and six distance learning modules. To achieve this result, ensuring that the training path was tailored to the needs of the company and guaranteeing effective learning, the Learning Lab (the SDA Bocconi organizational unit responsible for innovating learning processes) developed a dedicated platform: the MIM Learning Environment. This platform is actually a virtual, interactive classroom, integrated with video-lessons, webinars, forums and discussion boards, simulations, tests, and myriad other functionalities. The MIM Learning Environment also serves as a platform enabling interaction and communication between SDA Bocconi and Master students, and among the participants themselves.

The learning journey in the nine modules offers MIM participants an innovative, interactive immersion into basic and advanced topics, specifically concentrating on:

• Defining and actioning corporate strategies through an understanding of the global context;
• Sharing a common language with respect to both internal organizational processes as well as international development processes;
• Defining and assigning strategic objectives and linking them to corporate performances, to include economic-financial targets;
• Comprehending the behavioral dynamics of customers, with special focus on final customers; understanding the socio-economic dimension of managing a distribution channel and its future developments;
• Tapping into big data and understanding models for business analytics;
• Exploring leadership models and how they relate to: achieving business performance, managing human resources, continually developing personal skills, tackling challenges and managing change;
• Managing operations and supply chains specifically to make them more efficient and effective, also using real-life simulations;
• Learning about the diverse cultural contexts of consumers and issues relating to growth and innovation.

After the first MIM, the program partners immediately decided to launch a mentoring program, which embodies the natural continuation of the training program. The Master alumni, followed personally by their HR leaders, have the chance to participate in integrative workshops and periodic assessments to reinforce what they’ve learned along their training path.

Historically the Ferrero Group has been devoted to its product and to organic growth. But in recent years, thanks to investments of nearly five billion euro, the Group has decided to embark on a parallel path of external growth through acquisitions, diversified both in terms of geography and product segments.

So the partnership between SDA Bocconi and Ferrero University will need to place people at the center, and guide them through the new challenges emerging on the market, such as:

• Integrating the different business contexts of the Group;
• Managing corporate finance;
• Guaranteeing corporate social responsibility and sustainability, both at a global and local level;
• Casella di testoStrengthening the capacity to build and manage a cohesive Group with regard to strategies, organizational processes and managerial conduct.

The third iteration of the program, which is currently underway, has been recalibrated in light of these new entrepreneurial strategies adopted by the Group. Thanks to the Ferrero MIM the 32 candidates, who will graduate in May 2021, will be fully equipped to face the challenges tomorrow brings.

More global management for Ferrero