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DECEMBER 2003 MBA JOURNAL: SUMMER INTERNSHIP Jeff Pillet-Shore: Learning in the Real World Classroom "Once you've worked past midnight in a converted warehouse without heat and insulation, the perks of a big company are a welcome touch." I'd spent the better part of the last year working hard for an opportunity to call myself a part of the Nestlé team. I hadn't doubted that I would love working at Nestlé, but I could have been wrong. It could have been a bureaucratic, tense, and frustrating place. It wasn't. In my time studying it from the outside, I thought that I'd developed a pretty sharp understanding of the way Nestlé operated. But I had only skimmed the surface. Once I actually joined the team, I entered my personal worker's paradise: The people were smart, and nice. The group used good processes, and respected experience and intelligence. There was also an inexpensive, gourmet cafeteria right downstairs (macadamia crusted mahi-mahi! butternut squash puree!). Once you've worked past midnight in a converted warehouse without heat and insulation, the perks of a big company are a welcome touch. If I seem overly enthusiastic about Nestlé, I assure you it's not because I'm naive. Rather, I've seen too much of the "other way" of doing things -- pettiness, disrespect for planning, and fear of wisdom. But by joining Nestlé, I was welcomed into an amazing network of managers who shared a similar passion, regardless of how long they'd worked at the company. Over the summer, I essentially learned two things: how Nestlé works, and what a brand manager does. INSIDE THE NEST. The internship at Nestlé is respected at the highest levels of the company's management. The executive team seems to feel that their future leaders will likely come from this process. Countless presentations are scheduled, giving us the opportunity to meet, talk, and eat with everyone from the CEO down. The top marketing managers approve intern projects, and interns are expected to make final presentations to top-ranking executives. I gave my final presentation to the president of the Nutrition division and the vice president of marketing. (A former student told me that when he interned at a Los Angeles-based consumer goods company, his manager prevented him from making a final presentation to upper management; at Nestlé such an action is unimaginable.) Perhaps an even more immediate reason that interns are welcomed so warmly: Everyone understands what you are going through. To arrive at their current positions, virtually all my co-workers had gone to business school and had followed the same path I was on. They understood from personal experience how hard the interns had to work to get in the company door. Along with four other interns (another from USC, and one each from UCLA, Wharton, and Yale), I juggled a blur of lunch meetings and Outlook requests. We'd been advised by past interns to lunch with as many people as possible. Mission accomplished. I was scheduling lunches two months out, and toward the end of my 12 weeks couldn't even fit my mentor into my schedule. Of course, all this schmoozing had a purpose. Nestlé USA is just too big to understand from one perspective. Meeting with many people outside my own team and division allowed me to better grasp the interdependence and cross-functionality of the company as a whole. It was an opportunity to learn about the company from the inside out -- at a depth strategy consultants would drool over. WHAT DID I DO? Oh right, work. What I learned in school, I used in my internship. (Yeah, I know, that surprised me too.) My first-year marketing class ended about two weeks before I began work. For weeks, I was astonished at how much marketing really was "by the book." Conditioned by my years of dot-com experience, I was surprised to see that people in the real world actually do use the 3C's and the 4P's. So many of the decisions I made (or watched others make) found their grounding in some fundamental, consumer-centric concept covered in the most basic marketing lessons. (Note to pre-MBA folks: The 3C's stand for Company, Consumer, and Competitors, and the 4P's stand for Product, Price, Promotion, and Place. These form the bedrock of marketing analysis.)
 
BW MALL
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