This past week in my Designing and Managing International Organizations class, we took a field trip to a production plant of Baxter BioScience, located in Thousand Oaks California. On this tour, our class was able to speak with local managers and see the facilities of a major company. While reviews were mixed from the class... I’m going to try to give you an overview of the event from my perspective.
Choice of Company
Baxter BioScience is truly a global business. In 2008, more than 60% of Baxter’s employees and revenue sources were located outside the United States. While their headquarters are located in Illinois, Baxter has significant operations set up in Europe, Latin America and Asia/Pacific. The company is also a major player in its market, with almost 50,000 employees and 5.3 billion in revenue for the year 2008. The company invested $868 million in 2008 research and development. In Baxter’s own words, this is what they do:
“Baxter is a leading manufacturer of plasma-based and recombinant proteins used to treat hemophilia. Other biopharmaceutical products include plasma-based therapies to treat immune disorders, alpha 1 antitrypsin deficiency and other chronic blood-related conditions; biosurgery products for hemostasis, wound-sealing, and tissue regeneration; and vaccines. Baxter also is a leading manufacturer of manual and automated blood and blood-component separation and collection systems.” (Baxter Website)
Personally, I was very impressed with the company. It has a very strong international presence, is a large and growing company and appears to be very well managed. Prior to the plant tour, I was really looking forward to getting a great insight into how this large international science company operated on a global scale.
Positives
I would say that the main positive of the day was that we got to hear from several of the top managers who ran the plant in Thousand Oaks. They gave us a PowerPoint about the overall company and the history of Baxter. The managers were good presenters and were well prepared for our visit.
A second positive of the day was that we go to visit a large company’s facilities. I know this seems trivial to some, but many of the students in our class hadn’t ever been to a large corporate environment before. Some of our students came to Pepperdine straight out of their undergraduate college and hadn’t ever seen a plant before.
Negatives
The most common complaint from the class, was that way too much of our allotted time was spent on the very scientific process that Baxter uses to create its products. What we as MBA students wanted to learn about the company was how it is run, what is their organizational strategy is and the current/future management level issues they have had to deal with. While its important to know the industry and the particular products they produce, most of our students didn’t care as much about the science piece of the tour as they would have the management side. This caused many of the students to become bored and disinterested when they were learning about the fourth stage of synthetic protein dilution. To put it into perspective, on the tour one of the speakers wanted to confirm with us that we all had backgrounds in chemistry before she said her piece of the tour. When asked about our chemistry background, she was met with many blank stares...
When the tour was concluded and we finally got to sit down and speak with the managers, we had about 15 minutes left before we had to leave. If we could have taken an hour out of the tour and had gotten to spend more time with the managers, it would have added much more value to the experience. The time management looked something like this:
9:00 - 9:30 - Intro Presentation
9:30 - 11:30 - Science Based Tour
11:30 - 11:45 - Q&A with Managers
Conclusion
When I think about this day in perspective, I look at what I wanted to get out of it and what I got out of it. What I wanted to get out of it was international corporate management perspective. I wanted to hear out the challenges associated with cross-border communication, cultural differences and international business development in emerging markets. More specifically, I wanted to know about their global HR functions. How do they recruit, train and retain the world’s best talent? How do they manage their top performing employees and how do they improve their weak links?
What I got out of it was a lot of in depth scientific information about the very complicated production process of “plasma-based and recombinant proteins”. I’m trying to be as optimistic and positive as I can be here... but I’m still trying to think of a time in my professional future that is knowledge will be relevant.
