When Carla Silvado is assigned to a project, she enjoys taking some time to get to know her clients outside of formal meetings. Whether it’s over dinner or during an after-meeting conversation, she appreciates having the chance to connect with the people with whom she’ll be working. Of course, COVID put a halt to those opportunities over the last year, as finite Zoom calls took the place of extended in-person gatherings. But something unexpected happened when Silvado, Senior Principal Customer Success Architect with Salesforce, started MIT Sloan’s Building Game-Changing Organizations: Aligning Purpose, Performance, and People course in April: she saw one of her client’s names on the class roster.
“I thought, ‘I know him!’ It was such a coincidence,” Silvado says of discovering that Hasan Agha, Chief Architect at a renowned engineering organization, was taking the same virtual MIT Sloan Executive Education course as she was. They had been paired only two months prior for a major digital transformation project and were just beginning to develop a working relationship. Agha also recognized Silvado’s name when he perused the participant roster, and the two sent direct messages to each other via the class’s Zoom portal. And while they never ended up in the same virtual breakout sessions during the class, the experience brought them together in a unique way.
An Applicable Education
“The Building Game-Changing Organizations course wasn’t about technology—it was more about processes, about people and how you connect the dots,” says Agha, who is one class away from achieving his Executive Certificate in Strategy and Innovation. “This applies to any company that needs to transform into a digital world and a digital future. Today, many implementations fail because they ‘lift and shift’ technology as a solution but don’t talk about the process reengineering first. We need to look at what we need to change, who we’re serving, and how we can build that. Those answers will drive the technology. Technology is the enabler, but it starts from people and processes. That’s what this course was all about.”
That’s the same perspective that Silvado garnered from the class, which helped her officially earn her Executive Certificate in Strategy and Innovation upon its completion. “You cannot just transform an organization by implementing technology,” she asserts. “Customers tend to buy a piece of software thinking that they’re going to solve their problems or they’re going to achieve a digital transformation, but they don’t reevaluate their processes first. You are moving from an old system, lifting and shifting and dumping a more expensive system onto those exact same old processes. For me, this course showed how you need to make sure that your company’s culture is ready for the change.”
"It’s rare to have a situation where a colleague is taking the same course at the same time, and you can bring two different perspectives into the broader conversation with your group."
Silvado and Agha took their conversations about the class offline in a private chat, and they shared their experiences and what they each took away from the training. They compared notes and provided wisdom imparted by other participants in each of their breakout groups, which helped broaden the overall experience for both of them because they interacted with so many different people It was highly enlightening, and their newfound shared frame of reference found its way into a meeting that took place between Hasan’s team and Salesforce right after Silvado and Agha finished the two-day course.
As the meeting got underway, Agha referenced concepts covered during the class, upon which Silvado elaborated. It took the conversation between Hasan’s development team and Salesforce in new and unexpected directions. Ultimately, Hasan’s organization decided to change some of the wording in its Business Digital Transformation (DX) strategic plan based on Silvado and Agha’s information gathered from the course. “That knowledge could be applied immediately,” Silvado observes. “It was a big realization that the information was not just something we learned—it was another tool in our toolbox that we could use in our day-to-day work.” Agha adds, “We were able to have a bigger discussion about how we could apply what we learned to what we are doing right now. It’s rare to have a situation where a colleague is taking the same course at the same time, and you can bring two different perspectives into the broader conversation with your group.”
In the Long Run
With Hasan and his team in the first phase of their digital transformation project, which will see their organization relaunch its Salesforce platform, it’s clear that Silvado and Agha will be working together for some time—and they are excited about the opportunity. For the pair, the chance to build a genuine rapport during the Building Game-Changing Organizations course has been invaluable as they move forward with the project, as it has allowed them to speak the same language when discussing how to proceed. “There is no better way of connecting with someone than when you are both vulnerable in there and learning something together,” Silvado says. “I just thought it was great from the long-term perspective of building a relationship with a customer. Sometimes it’s hard to build that one-on-one connection, but this experience helped both of us.”
It worked so well, in fact, that Silvado and Agha are considering doing a combined webinar presentation or customer roundtable for Salesforce, sharing what they learned from the course they both took and how it has led to success within their current project. What’s more, Agha looks forward to sharing his insights with outside organizations, bringing new knowledge to “sister societies” in industries like civil, electrical, mechanical, and chemical engineering. In the future, Silvado and Agha may even meet again in the MIT Sloan universe, as both plan to continue their education with the esteemed institute. While Agha plans to complete his Executive Certificate in June with the Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Business Strategy course, Silvado looks forward to taking additional courses to achieve the Advanced Certificate for Executives in Management, Innovation, and Technology (ACE). For both, the draws of MIT Sloan’s courses are as impressive as they are varied, from the opportunity to connect with people from different industries and major companies like Amazon and Google to the wide selection of courses available.
“I’m a big believer in continuing education. At MIT Sloan, there’s a real relationship between all of the courses, and they all make sense as they give you information from different lenses and different instructors. And for me, it’s just so applicable to my daily work with customers at Salesforce,” Silvado states. Agha agrees, concluding, “The beauty of this program is the content itself. The courses are amazing. They are so clear and applicable, and the interaction you get to have with other students is unbelievable. It definitely enriches your knowledge. Sharing your experience with others is truly an unspoken feature of these courses.”
Learn more about MIT Sloan Executive Certificates.