Lessons on Living: Reflections on the First Semester of Harvard Business School
Lilly Deng, a first year MBA at Harvard Business School, shares her experience studying at one of the best schools in the world.
Each Friday, Ive taken a few minutes to look back on the prior week and jot down lessons learned at business school.
Reflection is a big part of the HBS experience, from formal weekly reflections for a class on Leadership and Corporate Accountability to talks weve attended on heavy-hitting topics like Exercising Professional Judgment. Built into the curriculum is an assignment on reading profiles from the Class of 1976 and writing our own update for our future version of the life we hope to share at our 10th Year Reunion, an exercise that has prompted further reflections about what we want to gain out of our business education and the life we aspire to lead. I've iPhone noted, gmailed, and scribbled in notebooks learnings to add to my quote wall (pictured below).
Sometimes theyre wise sayings from a sectionmates grandmother such as With lies, you can get ahead but you can never go back or questions guest speakers have posed, What do you want Fortune to write in 15 years?
Sometimes theyre aphorisms on business, my two favorites being Vision without execution is hallucination and Operations is about enabling ordinary people to do extraordinary things.
And sometimes, theyre just good reminders on whats important in life: Everybody needs Tuesday date night!
Ive learned too much at business school to cover it all in a single blog post, but hope to impart the key takeaways from my first semester at HBS.
#1 To those whom much is given, much is expected.
With HBS mission that we educate leaders who make a difference in the world, its no surprise weve been asked from day one: What is the difference you are going to make in the world?
Of course weve thought about this before business school, at the very least through our admissions essays if not, in many cases, a broader question and discovery process, but the idea of the responsibility to make a difference permeates through every facet of business school life.
On the first day of school, for example, we participated in a photo project where we read recent graduates 250-word reflections in response to Mary Olivers poem, One Summer Day. In that poem, she asks, Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? The answer is almost never I want to start a billion dollar hedge fund and make the Forbes 400. If theyre focused on business at all, theyre often to the tune of, I want to build a company that changes healthcare as we know it, or I want to start a company that honors the values my parents taught me. More often than not, the graduates talk about finding the right partner for life, pursuing wide-ranging passions from biking cross country to publishing a book, and returning to their hometown to alleviate poverty and address unmet needs. Or course they want to be successful in business...but its equally important to be successful in the business of life.
The other thing that has impressed upon me is not only do we have a great responsibility to make a difference, we can, in fact, actually do so. Many of our classroom cases are about HBS graduates who have gone on to start organizations to distribute water filters in Tanzania or have changed the ethical culture of a large corporation theyve worked in. In a class on corruption, for example, our professor discussed the wide-ranging implications of corruption, and noted that the single best way to combat corruption is for the most senior people to take a 100% anti-corruption stance. He finished the class simply by saying, You can change the world.
The message has stuck.
#2 Just do it, try it, test it.
The entrepreneurship attitude and community on campus is incredible and infectious. From the newly opened Harvard Innovation Lab (i-lab) to StartupTribe, theres a great sense that now is the time we can take smart risks.
In our new experiential-learning course, FIELD, for example, weve been tasked to originate a business and launch it with a Minimum Viable Product within two months. The central idea is to test hypotheses at a much lower cost than normally possible. (A very cool startup, Birchbox, was founded by two HBS students who started out by sending a sample beauty product to 200 friends and family. They are now one of the hottest startups in the space.)
Beyond that, weve heard a speaker tell us Dont follow the crowd, no one goes there anymore because its getting too crowded and others caution us about following the herd mentality into traditional paths like banking and consulting. Weve been asked What would you do if you werent afraid? Weve been told to get out of our HBS way of thinking, because A systematic way to do original things is self-defeating.
#3 Its never too late or early to be who you want to be.
Its very easy to say When I get to be x, then I will do y. Why not start doing y today? Why not start adopting the practices, belief systems, and attitudes of the leaders we admire today, instead of waiting until tomorrow?
During business school, many of us read HBS Professor Clay Christensens article, How Will You Measure Your Life? One part of the article is about the allocation of resources: how will you spend your precious time to achieve the life you want? Hes worth quoting in full:
People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careerseven though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness. If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over youll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification. If you look at personal lives through that lens, youll see the same stunning and sobering pattern: people allocating fewer and fewer resources to the things they would have once said mattered most.
His lessons, and so many others from many others from my first semester of business school, have enriched, expanded, and enforced my personal ethos on leading a fulfilling life:
- Your toughest management job is managing yourself.
- Add value before you take credit.
- Get over yourself.
- Seek out people who care about you enough to tell you things you dont want to hear.
- What got you here wont get you there.
- You get in the game with your numbers. You get promoted based on your values.
Finally, my favorite from this semester: Just get in and if youre good youll get there.
Lilly Deng is a first-year student at Harvard Business School. At HBS, she is Director of Marketing for the TechMedia and Retail & Luxury Goods clubs and blogs for the Women's Student Association. She occasionally updates a hobbyist art website, posts poetry, and blogs about her fabulous food finds. She graduated from Harvard College and was an associate at the Boston Consulting Group. Following business school, she plans to pursue careers in consumer/retail and media/tech.