Meet Sam Kim

Sam is a second-year EMTM student, attending the program full-time.

Background

Sam has worked for HP for 15 years in IT and R&D. He has increasingly served in client-oriented roles, focusing on enhancing the user experience with HP printers. Sam has an undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering and an MBA degree, and was being encouraged by HP to further develop his skills in the management of technology to improve printer development processes, time to market, customer experience and quality.

Why EMTM?

Sam first looked at other executive programs in areas like product development, but became interested in the EMTM program for several reasons. He liked the every-other-weekend format and was confident in the quality of the education he would receive, given the Penn Engineering/Wharton combination. He also believed that the University of Pennsylvania degree would add credibility to his overall academic and professional record within HP.

Benefits to Hewlett-Packard

Sam has been delighted with the content in the program. He notes that "there are more electives that I want to take than I can possibly take in the two-year program." More important, he has been able to capitalize on the insights and perspectives he's gained from the management and the technology sides of the program and apply them on the job at HP.

Sam describes the Foundations of Leadership course as "the best class I have ever taken. It has shaped the entire EMTM experience for me." The faculty member (Dwight Jaggard, from the School of Engineering) relates to us as engineers." Sam also took the Leadership II elective and credits it with "transforming me, my family, and my work team. It made me more courageous as a leader and encouraged me to consider the risks I should be taking."

Coursework in innovation helped crystallize Sam's focus on speed to market and the need for continuous product develop-ment. He started internalizing "what would happen if we didn't change as a company." Sam found the variety of technology electives also enabled him to start thinking of the "new technology applications within markets we were already serving" based on advances in the underlying technologies. "I started seeing business opportunities to leverage what we already had."

"The course on Marketing Models gave me a blend of marketing frameworks with lots of methodologies in market research. I gained such valuable tools with which to assess product enhancements we are considering. ...We were previously paying consultants who had these tools to come in and be tutored by us on our businesses. They were costing us a small fortune. I was able to combine my knowledge from EMTM with my knowledge of the industry to generate successful new approaches to improve our product development processes."

In fact, Sam was able to take a very junior software develop-ment team and turn it into one of the most productive and satisfied, as measured by HP's most recent employee survey. Furthermore, this team produced the most reliable SW solution ever as indicated by recent customer call rate data. According to a peer co-manager at HP: "His MOT [EMTM] program demanded a lot of him, but he leveraged that into immediate benefits for HP, and our team enjoyed [EMTM] pass-downs during and outside of regular staff meetings."

Additional Benefits

Although Sam commuted across country from the State of Washington to attend EMTM on Penn's campus in Philadelphia, there were several additional aspects of the program that made the trip worthwhile. "The program is so flexible. I was allowed to audit a class that I just couldn't fit into my schedule. The faculty member allowed me access to the web-based materials for the course. My classmates briefed me on lectures I had missed."

That was typical of the "unique fellowship" Sam felt with his classmates. "The quality of their experiences and their willingness to collaborate were unexpected benefits. This was a totally satisfying learning environment. In each class, you could get 12 different ideas from the faculty and from your fellow students on how to attack a problem that you were facing back at work. I can't imagine going to school any other way."

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