CAN YOU DISCUSS YOUR TRINITY EXPERIENCE, WHAT YOU MAJORED IN AND SOME OF THE ACTIVITIES YOU PARTICIPATED IN?
I majored in Political Science, and thought early on that I was going to pursue some career in government. I went to Rome for a semester, and participated on some administrative committees that was composed of faculty, administrators, and a few students - I was one of two students on that committee. I was also a Senior interviewer my Senior year for the admissions office. I taught SAT classes on the side, and I was in the chorus.

WHAT ARE THE PERSONAL PATHS THAT YOU HAVE TAKEN FROM TRINITY?
The company that sponsored my scholarship to Trinity was Cigna, an insurance and financial service company, headquarted in Bloomfield, CT. At the time, they were trying to attract people from the greater Hartford area to come to Trinity. Because Cigna sponsored my scholarship, I ended up working for Cigna in the summers. The first summer I had a job in the underwriting department, and it was kind of an analytical project. I didn't like it very much, but did look around and found that the job that was interesting to me was the intern that was responsible for running the rest of the summer internship programs. So the next year I asked if I could be considered for that job, and ended up getting it, which happened to be in Human Resources. When I did that job, I ended up meeting people in the field and understanding what it was about. I ended up being asked to apply for the full time position in their Human Resources rotational program.

WHAT EXACTLY DOES BMS DO?
Bristol Myers Squibb is a global pharmaceutical company. We also have beauty and nutritional care businesses as well as medical devices businesses. I work in the Pharmaceutical part of BIVIS. We sell primarily ethical or prescribed medicines, but also have an over the counter medicines business. The group that I support is all of the sales and marketing people who sell our products in Latin America.

WHAT ARE THE MAJOR TRENDS AFFECTING THIS INDUSTRY?
The major issues for us are, from a business and international standpoint, are the laws around patent protection. These are a big issue for us, because in the US we have well done but also clearly applied and upheld patent protection laws, which enable the intense investment that we make in searching for drugs. We pursue this because then we are guaranteed to be able to sell them exclusively for a certain amount of time, but in other countries that we try to do business, there aren't those kinds of patent protections. In Argentina, for example, in the past strong patent protection laws did not exist. We are more like a branded generic company there. The way that we compete is very different. We can't assume that our products and our formulas are going to be protected as in the US market. Working in a global economy and a global labor force for us, and for me, from a HR standpoint is becoming a new challenge. We need to find ways to help people learn how to operate in different cultures and help move people from country to country so we can develop leaders that are ready to run businesses across the world.

WHAT DOES A HR DIRECTOR DO? WHAT WOULD A TYPICAL DAY BE LIKE FOR A HR DIRECTOR?
It depends on where you work, but for Human Resources Generalists, especially in large companies, it's a combination of managing administration responsibilities but also some strategic responsibilities. Administratively, we're responsible for managing our compensation plans, benefit plans for employees, and managing our staffing and recruitment processes. Those are the 3 basic human resources functions that people understand to be HR functions. In addition to that, we're responsible for helping the people who run the business think through our business strategy and how it's going to impact our need for talent. In Latin America for example, we have an older product portfolio and we're trying to transition it to a much more innovative, higher technology portfolio of products; which means we need to train our marketers differently, train our sales people differently, and we need to look for people with different skill sets. Much of what the business does is help identify what are our business needs and what are the individual skills and competencies and backgrounds that we're going to need for the future. We formalize that in terms of profiles and position descriptions and performance management systems and feedback systems; therefore we can make sure that we are looking for the right people, picking the right people, managing them properly, and building them into the talent that we need to run the business.

For me, a typical day has variety. For example, yesterday morning, I started with a meeting with our International Compensation people and my manager. We have an issue with someone just named for an important position, and he had been paid on a US expatriate package, but then had been paid in Columbia as a Colombian national because he's Colombian. Now his new job is as an expatriate again, and there was a discussion about what is the proper rate to be paying him, because of his new job he needs to be paid as a US expatriate, and given the devaluation of currency, the US equivalent of his Colombian pay really deteriorated; we had to review what the best thing was to do from an internal organizational justice perspective. This includes thinking about what's the right thing to do from a labor market perspective, what does the market data say for Colombian nationals versus US expatriates, and what's the right end salary to provide.

The second discussion was with one of our high-potential but inexperienced managers whose working in one of the markets where we plan to do some downsizing. We've already told him we're probably going to close the office down, but we want to help him identify other jobs across Latin America where he's willing to move because we really think highly of him. I spent some time with him talking about what his interests are, where he would prefer to live, what are his constraints, what jobs will he or won't he consider, so that I can work with him to see if we can help keep him within BMS. I then had a planning meeting with one of my colleagues who supports us with running leadership development training programs in the region. We spent time talking about what her plans for the year 2000 are and how that fits in with our overall HR plans for the division. I asked her to put together a memo and calendar of how she sees that rolling out. I had to deal with training and development issues. We then spent some time doing some succession planning for one of our big markets. The general manager has very quietly told us his plans to retire in a year and a half so we're starting now to look at whom we have who will be ready for that job in a year, and what does our slate of candidates look like. We're planning with my boss who is the president of Latin America and Canada, and my second boss, who is the president of Human Resources. On the one hand, we're dealing with individual issues for executives like the person's salary in Venezuela, and on the other hand I'm working with bigger picture planning issues like training and development for the whole region for 2000, what I would consider work force planning. This is a key position we must be ready for when it opens up, and we have to be looking at the actual talent pool and how we can best fill that gap in advance.

DESCRIBE ONE EXPERIENCE WHICH KEEPS YOU HAPPY WITH WHERE YOU ARE.
BMS has decided that in order to grow as progressively as the company wants to grow, leadership development should be our number one priority. The chairman of the company and the executive committee have a list of 12 or 13 growth priorities and many of them are product specific. At one point leadership development was number 11 or 12 on the list. Sometime last year when were convening again they realized that nothing right happens unless you have the right people in the organization, so they made leadership development the number one priority for the company. For the human resource professional, you couldn't ask for a better platform to do our work. The line managers of the organization have declared that paying attention to people development is the most important thing we can do for our business. As a result we have pulled together a series of training programs, which are actually culture change initiatives, that in my mind are ways of communicating the philosophies that the company believes in. All of our managers will exchange and debate ideas and try and figure out whether they are going to buy into this stuff or not. I went to Brazil to participate in one of these courses with the Brazilian leadership team. In was in Portuguese, but I understood it all. There were 30 managers, and it was taught by our general manager in Brazil and our general manager in Mexico, and they did it all in Portuguese. It was so exiting to see the younger and older experienced managers being really open about what their concerns and doubts were, but then to see them being inspired and really motivated by the Brazilian and Mexican general managers, because their leaders were showing the way. It's not a HR driven process, it's a line-driven process, and I was there as a participant, and I delivered part of the course in Spanish. It was very exiting. Seeing that kind of energy around doing the right thing from a people management gets me exited about coming to work each day.

On the other hand, we are downsizing and restructuring, because one of the dynamics in a pharmaceutical business is to invest very heavily in research and development. When you find products that look very promising, you need to put up a lot of money to make sure the product is launched successfully. There is probably a year and half of pre-product investment going on, but before that product is developed, you've got to make tough choices about where to get that money to invest for the future. What that means for us in the next year and a half, is that we are going to allocate our money where it's going to pay the most in the future. In terms of restructuring, we're going to pull back dramatically in some of our smaller markets, and from a HR standpoint, that's not the most fun part of my job, because the decisions we make are going to impact people's lives.

WHAT IS THE TYPICAL PROMOTION TRACK TO GET TO WHERE YOU ARE IN YOUR JOB?
My track was a little unusual- I started in a HR training program directly from an undergraduate degree that was not specifically human resources related. I actually was very fortunate to be able to get in the door. The reason I was able to do that was because of my Cigna relationship Looking back, I'd happen to do some things that were HR related, like interviewing for the admissions office and teaching classes, SAT prep-classes and that sort of thing. The more typical track would be to get an advanced degree or masters in organizational psychology, industrial or human relations, or a MBA focusing on management. From there, people usually start as human resources generalists, where they are responsible for supporting a business group in every aspect of HR which includes areas like management consulting and staff and compensation benefits. Then people will get some type of experience in a particular discipline, like they may be like a Staffing Specialist or Compensation Specialist or a Training and Development specialist. AT Cigna I worked in the human resources office rotating through working in their home office with more experienced, senior people on a number of projects. Then I moved to Chicago and I was a human resources generalist, supporting a group of 100 people, and moved around from there to a lot from different cities. After that, I went back to get my MBA, and ended up coming here to BMS. I was working on leadership development within the US medicines business at BMS in another job, and then I came here to do this job. The best plan for a career track would be the educational experience you need. The course work really is a combination of psychology, economics, and sociology. Some of the PS course were very relevant like group theory and group dynamics. Group dynamics in an organizational skill set is a very valuable thing to have learned. People with a liberal arts education at Trinity will be competing against people who have gone to more focused curriculums like Cornell, who have focused employee/labor relations curriculum, graduate and undergraduate.

WHAT DO YOU CONSIDER THE BEST WAY TO STAY CURRENT IN YOUR FIELD?
I just joined a Latin American Personnel association that meets twice a year and communicates electronically; that kind of professional organization is a great way to keep on top of what other industries and companies are doing and issues that they are facing in the same region. I also try and keep on top of some reading like the Harvard Business Review, which has very interesting management articles that are very applicable to my world. The Internet is also a very incredible resource now.

DO YOU SEE ANY BIG CHANGES IN THE WAY HR OPERATES COMING IN THE NEXT FEW YEARS THAT A STUDENT SHOULD KNOW ABOUT?
There are still many companies that think of Humans Resources as an administrative function that takes care of hiring and firing and keeping the company legal from a management standpoint and not really adding a whole lot of proactive value. The future of HR as a business partner really helps the business be successful by solving people issues. The best advice I could give to people that are thinking about getting into HR is to hone your people management and sociology and psychology skills, but also understand business because to be successful one needs to have both skills in HR.

DO YOU HAVE ANY RECOMMENDATIONS FOR STUDENTS ABOUT ACTIVITIES OR CERTAIN INTERNSHIPS THEY SHOULD DO OR EXPERIENCE THEY SHOULD TRY TO PURSUE?
Looking for summer assignments paid or unpaid is a great idea to get a feel for what the work is like day to day. Any job that helps you get interviewing skills up to speed will be helpful because you will be using those skills in HR. There are also a lot of summer jobs that would include interviewing skills, like being a reporter. Anything that gets you exposure into speaking in front of large groups helps. Being an RA is applicable, student teaching and volunteering in the local Hartford schools could help as well.

COULD YOU DESCRIBE THE TOP THREE STRONGEST QUALIFICATIONS OF A CANDIDATE?
First and foremost, outstanding interpersonal skills- someone who is able to articulate well and is an active listener and can build a quick report with different kinds of people and also flexible in dealing with many people. You need to be able to build credible relationships with many different people. Secondly, assessment skill and judgment are also important. It's not just assaying individuals, it's about matching people with roles. This includes good analytical skills of human behavior. Third, having shown some sort of aptitude for service. You have to be willing not to be in the limelight, and not being afraid to get your hands dirty. Also, confidence and willingness to push back when it's appropriate- you need to be able to speak with a much more senior person and engaged in discussion and debate and be willing to influence others over whom you don't have direct control.

DO YOU HAVE ANY LAST WORDS OF ADVICE FOR THOSE LOOKING AHEAD OR THOSE ABOUT TO LEAVE TRINITY?
Try to get some practical experience if you can, even if it means taking a job that doesn't pay really well to start, and I would encourage anyone to get an advance degree because you will be constantly be competing against people who are more qualified than you are.