A weird moment occurred in LEAD during a discussion of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, “I have a dream” speech. After we had read it and watched a video of King speaking on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Podolny asked the class for comments. What was there to say? It seemed an outrageous leap to apply our observations of office politics and corporate leadership to King. There was a long silence. Salvation came from an unexpected quarter, the front row on the right. There sat Benny, the heir to a large African oil fortune. Up until then, Benny had never said a word until called upon. He spent most of the classes hiding beneath the brim of a baseball cap, sleeping off the night before. But here he was at this sensitive moment to break the silence.
“I was thinking that in presenting his facts, King might have used a few more numbers.” No one put up their hand.
“What kind of numbers do you have in mind, Benny?” Podolny said, straining not to smile.
“You know, the scale of suffering of African Americans. The number of lynchings, for example.”
“Does anyone else think King’s speech could have been improved with more numbers and less rhetoric?” Podolny asked. The laughter started in the skydeck with Annette, and soon billowed across the room.
Later in the semester, Podolny gave us the profiles of six members of the class of 1976, written for their tenth and twentieth reunions. Just before each five-year reunion, the members of each class were asked to write a few paragraphs about what had happened in their lives since HBS. These were collected in a book and distributed only to members of that class. Among the six profiles there was a man who had devoted himself to the restaurant business only to have his daughter chase him down the street crying because he was working for the forty-second day in a row; a woman who had divorced her husband and rarely saw their daughter, who had a chromosomal defect; and a self-described “entrepreneurial maverick” who moved tirelessly around the country setting up businesses and who had remained single by avoiding “several near Mrs.” By far the most contented person was a man who went to Wall Street right after graduation and stayed with the same firm. He had a home in New York, a country house in Connecticut, and a private life that revolved around family and community. He considered his main career objective as “making it through the day” and defined a good place to work as a “place to have fun and make money.”
These were our futures. A mixture of success and failure. Work stress and family struggles. The ceaseless tussle between wanting to make money and following your heart.
Podolny made the point that HBS never fêtes those alumni who have gone out into the world and just made it work, those who achieved happiness in their lives, a balance between family and work and friendships. The ones invited to speak at Burden to audiences of nine hundred were those who ran huge companies or who made colossal fortunes. The very ones who told us “you have to get the balance right in your lives” often admitted, as Meg Whitman had, that they had not done so themselves.
One of the Mormons in the class, a man in his mid-twenties with three children, spoke emotionally about the pressure to succeed according to the HBS template: “Why has it taken until now for us to read about this guy who takes a banking job and likes it? We never hear about the HBS grads who say, ‘I’m not in this for the money. I’m going to open a small firm in my hometown, be home every day at five P.M. to see my children, and take four weeks of vacation each year.’ ” I agreed. We patted these people on the head and said, “Bravo,” but seemed not to take their success as seriously as that of hyperactive wing nuts like Jack Welch. In order to live the life of quiet, personal fulfillment, Podolny said, you could expect thanks or admiration from only a very limited audience. And for many people, especially Harvard MBAs who had spent their entire lives being applauded and coming first and winning contests and being praised for everything they did— whether it was mathematics or community service or gymnastics—the idea of private, discreet fulfillment being of equal worth to public success was nearly impossible to grasp.
Or perhaps it was just impossible to value, said Cedric, a West African and former banker. “I think MBAs struggle to make these comparisons,” he said. “We’re so into putting values or numbers on things, that if we can’t value something, we just sweep it away. How do you compare the value of a healthy relationship with one’s child when the alternative has a distinct value, say, a million-dollar bonus.” For those in the market for the $1-million bonus, he was saying, the notion of “priceless” did not imply “beyond price and therefore the most important thing in the world” but rather “impossible to price and therefore not worth arguing about when the alternative is so tangible.”
In the last fifteen minutes of the class, we were all asked to write down what we imagined we would submit for our tenth-year HBS anniversary book. I wrote that I was now living in a comfortable house outside New York, working from an office in my garden. I was still married to Margret, and our children were growing up in a clean, healthy place. I owned a handful of media properties and had a small group of like-minded and enthusiastic employees. I set my own schedule, took vacations when I liked, and yet loved my work. In fact, there was no division between my life and my work. Podolny instructed us to swap what we had written with a neighbor, and he then called on a Japanese woman to read the one she had been given. It had been written by a Chinese American man who had been a management consultant before HBS. “I am still struggling,” his profile began. “I’m working far more than I’d like, often ninety hours a week, and not finding enough time to see my wife. I enjoy the work while I’m doing it, but I can’t see ever getting the work-life balance thing right. We have a decent house and are making decent money, but we’d like to have kids someday and can’t see how that’s going to happen. One of us is going to have to step back, but we don’t know who. It is a burden carrying the expectations of an immigrant family, but one I am proud of.”
At the end of each course, each professor gave a brief personal speech. Eddie Riedl put up a slide on which he had written, “Why I do what I do. My motivation for this course is the thought that during your careers, you will collectively make decisions that will affect the flow of billions of dollars worth of resources and the lives of countless individuals, and that the quality of these decisions can be improved, in part, by what you learn in this course.” He was immediately challenged by a man in the skydeck. “You need to change that word billions,” the man said. Riedl looked non-plussed. “It should say trillions.” “You’re right,” Riedl replied. “It’s ridiculous how much financial muscle Harvard MBAs wield.” Podolny wrote the word serendipity on the blackboard. You start looking for one thing, he said, and you find another. He spoke about the twists his career had taken to land him here with Section A for the past four months. He told us he had found teaching us meaningful and satisfying.
Steenburgh told us the story of his father, a paunchy man who was underestimated on the softball field. Opposing teams would always bring in their fielders when he came to bat, and he would smack the ball over their heads and round the bases chuckling. When Steenburgh had left his job at Xerox to return to academia, many of his friends wondered what he was doing. But he said he found a joy in teaching he had not found elsewhere.
Zeynep said she was too young to have any great wisdom to impart. So she gave us another case to read instead. It was about an HBS professor called Jai Jaikumar. He was an Indian who loved climbing in the Himalayas. But as an undergraduate in India he had suffered a terrible fall, tumbling thousands of feet over rocks and trees, snow and ice. He was badly injured and lost his climbing companion. After walking for twenty-four hours in acute pain, he stumbled across a small hut in a clearing. A shepherdess took him in, fed him, and tended to his wounds. Then she carried him on her back for three days to the nearest village, from where he traveled for two more days on a donkey to the nearest hospital. When he recovered, he resumed his academic career, which brought him to America and eventually Harvard, where he specialized in manuf
acturing science. But he never forgot the shepherdess, and when he could afford to, he built a school in her village and raised money to pay for teachers and supplies. He always encouraged his students to enjoy and celebrate their lives instead of becoming stressed out. Success, he taught them, was the result of good fortune, and this brought obligations to others. He died at the age of fifty-three while mountain climbing in Ecuador.
In between these classes and final exams, I had lunch with Luis, a half-French, half-Argentine entrepreneur and the striker on the HBS soccer team. He was one of the older members of the section and a Pied Piper for many of the international students. You could find him on campus chattering away in English, Spanish, French, or German or leading a gaggle of Latin American students to a bar in Boston. Before HBS, he had worked in consulting in Madrid and then cofounded an online shopping company. He had opened offices all around Europe in the late 1990s, before being forced to close them again when the Internet bubble collapsed in 2001. I often wondered why people like him, with so much business experience already, came to HBS.
“I’d gone through the whole process of starting a company, but I had a feeling that I needed to go back to the basics,” he told me, speaking quickly and intensely. “I’d learned by a trial of fire. In consulting, I’d learned a lot at the beginning, but then you start to repeat things again and again. At the start-up it had been crazy; I’d been on a steep learning curve, but there were a lot of things I felt I needed to sit back and learn properly.”
Once he had decided to go to business school, he knew it had to be a top school, because the network was vital for him. His brother-in-law had been to HBS and loved it. After what he thought was a poor interview with a “typical Spanish investment banker with cement in his hair,” Luis was elated to be accepted. Arriving on campus, he was surprised by the diversity of people but also by how young they seemed. “There are lots of people who are young. They are analytically and technically very sharp, but I can recognize the skills people have, and it was surprising to me that there was so little experience in the class. People spoke like they had experience, but often I’d be sitting in class thinking ‘practically, what you’re saying would never work.’ ” This had happened most often in LEAD. “People would often say, just fire the guy. But if you’ve never fired someone, you don’t know what it’s like and you can’t just imagine it. We should have a course on just that, hiring and firing. We all took the Myers-Briggs, but we’re not being taught how to use it in hiring people. I think there are some very pragmatic things missing from the course.”
I also met up with Vera, a Chinese woman who had emigrated with her husband to Silicon Valley and had worked for a large technology firm. During the semester, Bob had organized a “section buddy” system, whereby each of us monitored a classmate’s in-class comments and told that person how he or she was doing. Vera was my buddy. She spoke excellent English but with a heavy Chinese accent, and had to force herself to speak in class. It had been exasperating. “I hate all this stuff about the network and relationshipsand being able to bullshit in front of other people,” she said. “That’s what we’re being trained to do. That’s not what Chinese immigrants think business is. We think it’s about good ideas and hard work.” It was hard for her to accept that 50 percent of her grade was based on what she said in class, not just because she found public speaking so awkward but also because much of what she heard seemed so mediocre. She had resigned herself to taking what she could from the classes and filtering out the rest.
The term ended with written exams in each of the five subjects we had studied. The exams were open-book, but I spent a couple of days going over my notes from each course, trying to boil them down to just a few pages so I could work more quickly. The professors told us that if you showed up to class and prepared the cases, the exams held few surprises. They were simply reviews of the concepts we had encountered so far. Doing well in them, of course, was no proof you might be good at business, only that you were good at business school.
We were split into two classrooms for the exams, so we could each have a couple of desks’ worth of space. Some students wore headphones to block out the noise. Others arrived with piles of gum and candy as if about to go on a hike. Some came bleary-eyed, wearing their sweats, looking as if they had been studying all night. We all plugged in our laptops and waited until our exam supervisor said go. I felt the greatest trepidation with Finance, but when I turned over the exam sheet, I suddenly felt very calm. I began systematically working through the problem.
A cinema owner was trying to figure out whether or not to acquire new digital projectors. Was it worth it? I forecast the free cash flows and calculated the cost of capital. I found a present value for the investment. I made a recommendation and finally, after four and a half hours, printed out my spreadsheets and write-up and turned them in. It felt deeply satisfying. In FRC, TOM, Marketing, and LEAD, this sense of achievement was the same. After so much work, I felt I was finally speaking this new language. I was still far from fluent, but at least I was communicating. My grades were better than I had hoped that first night of Analytics: ones in TOM and LEAD, and twos in FIN 1, Marketing, and FRC. Academically, at least, I knew I could cut it.
Finishing the exams, I realized how much I had learned about business and myself during those first five months. It was strange no longer to have a professional identity. I had become used to thinking of myself as a journalist, and abandoning that had been harder than I had imagined. It also felt odd always to be one of the older people in the room. I worried when people said HBS was all about the network, and I spent so little time socializing. But then I had gotten to know people in the classroom, or over lunches or coffee, instead of standing in a room watching someone frozen to the booze luge, and this, overall, had led to some richer relationships.
Chapter Eight
THE RISK MASTER
During the vacations, HBS students set off around the world on treks to glamorous destinations such as India, China, Turkey, or Brazil, and more humdrum ones such as Chicago or Washington, D.C. Besides sightseeing, they met CEOs of companies, presidents, and prime ministers. At HBS you felt you were never more than two degrees of separation from the most powerful people in the world. There was always a classmate who knew the prime minister of India or who worked for the president of Mexico or whose father ran the largest construction business in Latin America. No one was out of reach. But the reports that came back from these treks tended to focus on other things. In India, there were murmurs of displeasure at students who wore dispensers of hand cleanser on their belts. Every time they boarded the buses ferrying them around, they would purify their hands, disinfecting themselves and antagonizing their hosts. The China trek was oversubscribed and ended up taking more than two hundred MBAs. The following account appeared in the the student newspaper, The Harbus:
“Drunken shrimp, midnight karaoke, rows of empty glasses of Chivas & green tea and venture capitalists—what do these all have in common? These were just a few of the highlights of this year’s China Trek.” The party had started in Beijing and moved on to Hong Kong and Shanghai. The trekkers were “treated like imperial royalty” and given access to the “hottest nightspots” and “senior corporate executives.” In Beijing, they ate drunken shrimp—“you thought MBAs were the only drunk ones on this trip!”—observed preparations for the 2008 Olympics, toured Lenovo’s manufacturing plant, and were courted by “executives from Motorola, real estate developers and local investment banks.” Finally they reached Hong Kong, “the land of Louis Vuitton stores and bright psychedelic neon lights.”
Reading stories like this, I felt two things. The first was how privileged we were to see the world as Harvard MBAs. The brand was stronger than I had ever imagined. The second was how weird this perspective was. To go to China and focus entirely on the clubs, booze, shops, and corporate entertainment seemed inane. The trekkers need not have spent all their time hearing tales of woe from displaced peasant farmers
or women wrenched from their families to work in garment factories supplying Western clothing, or human rights activists harassed for posting their thoughts on Yahoo! But it did feel like the pursuit of business goals allowed, or even required, a self-imposed ignorance. Instead of being part of society, the MBA überclass seemed to exist apart from the rest of the world, with its own set of standards. You needed to yank hard to get its attention.
Ben Esty, our section chair, had told us that when it came to these treks, we should take on more loans and seize the opportunities. The costs, running into thousands of dollars per trek, would be nothing but a “rounding error” on our future net worth. Bob and I, who were both supporting families on financial aid, agreed that while this might be true, it was also obnoxious.
The one exception I made was the Westrek to Silicon Valley at the end of the Christmas vacation. As a newspaper reporter, I had felt the gusts of change brought on by the Internet and had witnessed my colleagues and management flailing in the face of them. I knew the media would always be a part of my professional life, and I wanted to become literate in the language and business models of the technology companies now looming over the industry. Westrek promised access to the very biggest names in the valley: Google, eBay, Yahoo!, and the fabled venture capitalists at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers (KPCB).
About eighty of us, two thirds of whom were Chinese or Indian, checked into a hotel in the middle of a business park next to the headquarters of Oracle. I took a drive around the surrounding streets, past the glass-fronted buildings and rows of one-story homes stacked up against each other behind high wooden fences. I wondered why people at HBS kept harping on about the Silicon Valley lifestyle and the beauty of the Bay Area. Around here, it looked dreadful, like an engineering school campus squashed flat over several square miles. I turned onto Route 101, the drain of Silicon Valley, full of cheap restaurants, car repair shops, strip malls, and laundries. Up in the hills were towns such as Palo Alto, Woodside, and Atherton, where those with the real money lived and worked and rose early to go bicycling with one another.
Ahead of the Curve Page 13