Mind Without Fear

by Rajat Gupta

We were a diverse group—a Brazilian, a Jewish guy from Texas, a blue-blood American, an Alabama redneck, a Mexican American from Albuquerque, a Boston Brahmin, a New York Jew, and me. Harvard reflected the changing times—to a point. While international students were increasingly common, of our class of more than seven hundred and fifty students, there were only thirty women, and only four Indians. Brown faces were still a rarity in those days—although not as rare as they had been just a decade earlier.

  New Rules

  On my first day of classes, I made my way into the theater, found a seat, and waited for the lecture to start. I was taken aback when, without a word of introduction, the young professor called on a student a few rows ahead of me to begin the class. The student immediately began to expound upon a business case we’d been assigned to read for the class. I sank back in my seat, hoping I wouldn’t be called upon next.

  I would soon learn that this was common practice at HBS. Professors would “cold-call” students, and class participation was very much encouraged; it made up a significant part of one’s final grade. The teaching method was case-based, which meant that rather than learning rules and theories, we were expected to study real-life business cases and analyze the dilemmas and decisions they contained. I was accustomed to a very different approach that involved listening to lectures, writing papers, and sitting exams. The sheer volume of reading was overwhelming at first: there simply weren’t enough hours in the day to read all the cases we were given, and so we lived in fear of being called on to analyze a case we had not thoroughly reviewed or of flunking out before the end of the first semester. Later, I’d realize that this was a deliberate strategy on the school’s part, designed to throw students off balance. It was no fun, but in retrospect it was good training for life. After all, we’re always having to deal with more than is reasonable. I’m grateful I learned the skill so early.

  Despite the heavy workload, I found time for a new fascination: television. I’d hardly ever watched one before. Night after night, as I prepared my cases for the next day, I’d keep one eye on Johnny Carson, trying to figure out American humor. Equally puzzling, at first, was the strange game Americans called football. I’d always been active in sports during my high school and college years, but had never encountered the sport that my can-mates watched with such dedication. As they explained the rules to me, I soon became a fan, captivated by the passion, the pageantry, and the complex strategic layers of the game.

  At the end of every evening, when my case work was done, I would sit down and write a letter to Anita. My can-mates were both impressed and perplexed by my dedication to my faraway girlfriend. On Friday nights, when they were all out dating girls, I’d stay back at the dorm, sometimes with a guy called David Manly, who soon became my closest friend. He seemed ambivalent about dating, so I was grateful for his company. Later, he would come out as gay, but back then I’m not sure he was “out” even to himself.

  We were less than two months into our first semester when conversations turned to the upcoming Thanksgiving break. The brisk, beautiful fall days had given way to chillier weather and even a few flurries of snow. This was another novelty to me: I’d never seen snow before. Even at its coldest, Delhi rarely gets below freezing. I felt like I could never get warm, shivering in the lecture theaters and running across campus to my classes to escape the harsh wind. My can-mates, especially the East Coast natives, teased me.

  “This isn’t winter! You have no idea what’s coming!”

  “Better stock up on that hot pickle you like so much, you’re going to need it to keep warm!”

  David would paint vivid pictures of winters at his family home near Buffalo in upstate New York.

  “You think you’ve seen snow now, but you’ve not seen real snow. At home, we get snow so high you can’t see out of the downstairs windows. You come outside and your car is completely buried in a snowdrift. It’s so cold that even Lake Erie freezes, and it’s more than two hundred miles long.” During one such conversation, it dawned on him that while he would be with his family for Thanksgiving, I had no place to go.

  “Come home with me,” he said. “My family would love for you to celebrate the holiday with us.” I gladly accepted, and packed every sweater I owned for the trip. This would turn out to be the first of many American holidays I celebrated with the warm, chaotic, delightful Manly family. They quickly made me feel like one of them, assigning me chores so I could pitch in like everyone else, initiating me into family traditions and games. David’s stepmother, Anne, cooked enough food for a small army. His father, Doug, who was president of a manufacturing company that made jams and jellies, loved football, and enjoyed teaching me more nuances of the game.

  Back at school, I fell into a routine. I’d taken a campus job, known as a “concession,” to earn a little extra pocket money. By the time I applied, only one job remained: delivering newspapers around campus each morning. I soon discovered why this job was unpopular—it meant getting up at four thirty every frigid morning to collect the papers, and trudging up and down endless flights of stairs to deliver them to each student’s door. It was hard work, and I’d never had a job like that before. In India, it was uncommon for middle-class children to work odd jobs, unlike our American counterparts. But I appreciated the extra money to supplement my limited funds. The executive education students were my favorite customers, because they always ordered all three papers—the New York Times, Boston Globe, and Wall Street Journal—and they had mailboxes on the first floor. Plus, they tipped well when they graduated.

  I soon made friends with the other three Indian students on campus, particularly a guy named Prafulla Gupta (who has remained a friend to this day). Bonding over our disdain for the blandness of American food, we would share an occasional spicy Indian meal that he would cook in the dorm room before walking over to the neighboring MIT campus to watch Hindi movies. Another guy, Mithilesh, was married, and would sometimes invite me over for his wife Pratima’s home-cooked meals. The fiery flavors temporarily eased my homesickness, but I missed Anita and my siblings intensely. We rarely spoke on the phone, since international calls were expensive and difficult to schedule, I kept up my daily letter-writing throughout my two years at HBS. Later, she told me that she had been prepared for me to drift away, to get caught up in American life and forget her. But not a day went by when she wasn’t on my mind. I couldn’t wait for the two years to be done so we could marry and start our life together.

  Deal-making

  My time at Harvard was deeply formative, both personally and professionally. Once I became accustomed to the learning style, I realized that it was in fact much less demanding than IIT. The cases we were dealing with didn’t involve complex engineering and math—from a certain perspective, they were just applied common sense. I’d known relatively little about business before I arrived—I didn’t even know what a stock market was—but I found that I had a natural aptitude for the topic. I was able to effectively analyze the dilemmas described in the cases and often see more effective solutions than the ones presented.

  However, I continued to struggle with the requirement for classroom participation. Back home, I’d been quite comfortable speaking in public on stage when I’d had a script to follow. But my confidence deserted me in the midst of this unstructured free-for-all. My American classmates were so competitive—vying to get the professors’ attention and be heard. They would ramble on and on, taking up airtime with superfluous comments. What am I supposed to learn from this, I wondered? Indian students didn’t speak unless called upon. My father and my teachers in school had always taught me that it befitted a man to be humble and self-effacing, not brash and assertive. If you worked hard and lived with integrity, you would be rewarded and recognized without having to push yourself in people’s faces. This opinionated game of classroom one-upmanship seemed crass and awkward to me. Plus, it puzzled me that Americans were always so confident even when what they were saying sometimes made little sense.


  Midway through my first semester, Earl Sasser, professor of manufacturing management, pulled me aside after class and told me I needed to speak up more or my grade would suffer. “You’re smart and hard-working,” he told me, “but you need to participate in the classroom.” So I swallowed my discomfort and made an effort to do so, speaking up in every class. After a few weeks, however, I noticed something strange: the professors in several of my classes had stopped calling on me, even when mine was the only hand raised.

  Puzzled, I finally asked Sasser what was going on: “You wanted me to speak up, but now you don’t ever give me a chance.”

  “You confuse the class,” was his reply. Seeing my crestfallen look, he quickly explained, “It’s not that your ideas are wrong. They’re just more complex and nuanced than the basic concepts I’m trying to get across.”

  I thought about this for a moment. Surely it wasn’t fair that I was disadvantaged for having a more advanced understanding of the subject matter. So I made a proposal to the professor: “Grade me only on my final exams and I’ll stay quiet in class.” To his credit, he agreed to my unconventional deal, and I ended up making the same agreement with a couple of other professors as well. This gave me a great advantage, because I could quickly skim the cases for those classes, knowing I didn’t have to worry about being called on, and concentrate on other topics. My can-mates could never figure out why I had so much time on my hands to watch television, when they were working through piles of cases. When the exams came around at the end of my first semester, I was one of only two people who got all “excellent” grades (at HBS, “E” comes above A, B, C, etc.). After that, both my professors and my classmates respected me and would carefully listen whenever I spoke. It was my first lesson in how to assert myself in a culturally unfamiliar environment—rather than trying to be like everyone else, I could focus on my strengths and use my difference to my advantage.

  Harvard’s teaching style, while less mentally challenging than IIT, was critical in broadening my worldview. Often, the problems we considered had no “right” answer and could be approached from several equally valid perspectives. In analyzing business cases, I learned the importance of gathering and presenting all the evidence possible before making a recommendation or decision—a practice that would serve me throughout my career (and make it all the more frustrating when, forty years later, a jury would pass judgment upon me without being allowed to review all the evidence). Although always reticent in the classroom, I enjoyed discussing and debating the cases with my can-mates, and quickly learned that in helping them with the course work I also deepened my own understanding. Our heated debates continued every evening as we walked the quarter-mile across campus through Harvard’s famous underground tunnels, and over dinner in the cafeteria.

  A Consultant in the Making

  As my first year drew to a close, I started looking for a summer job. Unfortunately, without US citizenship or a green card, most companies wouldn’t even consider me. I badly needed the work experience and the money, but it seemed hopeless. Frustrated, I considered returning to India for the summer, when David came to me with a proposition: “My father will give you a job at the factory. He needs someone to help him figure out how to make the production line more efficient.” Even better, his family would give me a place to stay. I happily accepted, and we agreed I would start in July, after a short visit to India to attend Didi’s wedding.

  I was a mechanical/industrial engineer by training, so the job at Red Wing, the jam and jelly manufacturer, turned out to be right up my alley. Their production line was not running efficiently, because they had to keep switching flavors of jam each time they got a new order from one of the many labels they supplied, and every time they switched, they had to wash the whole line, which took several hours. As a result, they were falling short on inventory and couldn’t fill orders promptly. For the first time, I was able to put my problem-solving ability to the test in a real business environment. Scheduling and inventory management dilemmas were simply a matter of linear programming, and I’d solved dozens of such problems in the abstract.

  During my eight weeks with the company, I designed a new system and tested it. Rather than making the jams in response to orders, they would produce each flavor for a certain time based on aggregate demand. They could store some of the jars unlabeled and then create a separate labeling line to label them for a specific brand when an order came in. And by progressing from lighter flavors to stronger flavors, we eliminated the need to wash the line every time the fruit changed—the first few jars would just “flush” the line and be discarded. The new system worked. Everyone was delighted, and Doug Manly asked me to come back every few weeks to check on the system, a welcome source of extra income during my final year. I was glad I’d done a good job for a man who’d been so welcoming to me. A decade later, I visited the factory and was amazed and gratified to see my faded, handwritten scheduling system still on the wall and still running the production line. “We call it the Rajat System,” Doug told me proudly.

  My summer job success gave my confidence a much-needed boost as I began my second year at HBS, and I continued to do well. As graduation approached, everyone was talking about their employment prospects, and recruiters were visiting campus every week. I wanted to stay in the US—Anita was talking about coming to an American college for her master’s and I was eager for us to make a life together here. However, few companies wanted to deal with the complexity of hiring an immigrant and sponsoring a green card application. Doug Manly offered me a permanent job at the factory, but while I’d enjoyed my summer there, I’d set my sights on something more.

  It seemed there was only one option for non-American MBAs: the consulting companies. These were a relatively recent emergence in the corporate world: a fast-growing new class of professional business experts who made their living providing advice. There were three major players in consulting at that time: McKinsey, Booz-Allen, and Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Of these, McKinsey was the oldest and most respected, and its values appealed to me. I didn’t know if I’d have much of a chance there: the firm had a reputation for being elitist, with a preference for pedigreed white male Ivy League graduates. But when I read up on Marvin Bower, who had taken over from the firm’s founder, James O. McKinsey, and led from 1950 to 1967, I was immediately inspired. Bower, whose vision shaped the firm, articulated what it truly meant to be a professional—he talked about serving clients, putting their interests above those of the firm, letting financial reward be a byproduct of providing an excellent service. I felt an immediate calling to what felt like a dignified, even noble, profession, and I set my sights on becoming a McKinsey consultant.

  All these companies conducted campus interviews, and those candidates who made a favorable impression would get an “ask back”—an invitation to attend a day of follow-up interviews at the firm’s offices. I thought I’d done well in my McKinsey interview, but at the end of our conversation, the recruiter told me I should go away for a few years, get another job and some experience under my belt, and then apply again. But how could I get experience when no American company would hire me? Feeling depressed, I made my way to class, wondering what this had all been for. Was I going to end up like those guys in Jersey City? Or would I be forced to return to India and take up the kind of job I’d walked away from?

  My teacher that day happened to be the marketing and retail guru Walter J. Salmon. I didn’t know him well, but I’d enjoyed his classes and had a great deal of respect for the brilliant, rather scruffy-looking red-haired professor. That day, however, the class was a blur. It seemed pointless to pay much attention or make the effort to join the discussion. As I was packing up my books and notes at the end of class, he approached my desk and sat down beside me.

  “Rajat, what’s going on?” he asked. I was taken aback—I didn’t think he’d been paying that much attention to me. We’d never had a one-on-one conversation before, or interacted outside of class. “I couldn’t h
elp but notice that you’re looking dejected,” he explained.

  “I didn’t get any ask-backs,” I told him, recounting what the McKinsey recruiter had told me. “What am I supposed to do? He wants me to go away and get some experience, but no one will hire me because I don’t have a green card.”

  Salmon shook his head. “Come with me,” he said, striding down the hall toward his office. He dictated a three-sentence note to McKinsey’s New York office manager, Ron Daniel, who happened to be a classmate and friend of his: “You’re making a mistake. Rajat is one of my best students. I would strongly encourage you to invite him for another interview.”

  Because of his kind gesture, I was indeed invited to McKinsey for a full day of interviews, and was subsequently offered a job. Now, I could return to India with my head held high and marry Anita.

  Monsoon Wedding

  Long before there was a movie by that name, Anita and I had our own “monsoon wedding.” Her father had chosen a date he considered auspicious, which happened to be August 5, at the height of the rainy season. We didn’t try to oppose him; we were just glad he seemed to have accepted our intention to marry. In a culture where engagements were still usually arrangements made between parents, Anita and I were unconventional. She came from a very traditional and well-known Kashmiri family, and I’m sure that her father would have preferred her to marry one of her own people.

  He and I had only just met for the first time, but she had told him about me and he had done his background research. Unfortunately, he couldn’t go and talk to my parents about it, since they were both dead. However, it turned out that Anita’s uncle, A.N. Dar, was a journalist who had known and respected my father, so that helped. Plus, I had a well-paying job and could clearly take care of his daughter.

  I didn’t see much of Anita in the month leading up to the wedding; she was busy with arrangements, shopping, dress fittings, and an extended trip to Kashmir where she had to invite all her family personally. Plus, we suddenly had to be chaperoned, something we’d never dealt with at IIT. The guest list kept expanding, until we had almost a thousand guests expected to join the week-long celebration. There were a series of traditional Kashmiri celebrations, and then we decided to do all the Bengali ones too.