Ahead of the Curve (35 page)

Another visitor to the class was a graduate of the HBS class of 2005 who had gone to work at Morgan Stanley. He had been in the military before HBS and had decided that investment banking, at worst, would facilitate his transition from soldier to businessman. At best, it would be interesting, financially rewarding work. He told us that during his first year, he had once spent 127 hours in the office in a single week. Weeks had gone by when all he saw of his two children were their outlines under their blankets when he left in the morning and when he returned late at night. “I’ve been watching my children grow longer,” he said. His life was the reality for most MBA graduates. The degree enabled them to get jobs that robbed them of their private lives. The consolation was that the experiences and money they accumulated would eventually allow them to live the lives they wanted. But there was no fixed timetable for delaying satisfaction and living the life you wanted. Would there always be one more promotion, one more pay raise, one more bonus? When would be the right time?

Nanda and I finally crossed swords over another equation. I had been growing impatient with the course as it descended into a therapy session for future consultants. How will I find a mentor? How will I get any work-life balance? How do I make sure I don’t get sacked after two years? It was obvious that most of those choosing consulting as a career were doing so because they were not yet sure what they really wanted to do. Consulting, despite the punishing workload, gave them more time to consider their options.

One day we were grappling with the staffing requirements at a consulting firm. There were two tiers of consultant: associates and partners. Associates did most of the donkey work, while partners made presentations, managed existing clients, and solicited new ones. Most firms used a version of the forced curve, which they called “up or out.” Every few years, you were reviewed and either promoted or fired. This created a pyramid structure with associates at the bottom and partners at the top. One of the main challenges for these firms was having the right number of people to do the work. Too many, and they would cost too much and be bored. Too few, and the work suffered and you could not grow. Then what did you do in times of boom or bust? Did you hire dozens of people in boom times knowing you might have to lay them off when the bust came? Or try to keep an even hiring pattern, thereby missing out on the upside of a boom economy?

Nanda had applied himself to this problem and produced a formula: g = rp - δp + σλ. He wrote it on the blackboard with a flourish. From my seat in the back row, I squinted at it. G stood for the growth rate of the firm. Rp was the recruitment rate of partners and δp the attrition rate of partners. Sigma was the fraction of associates who made partner and λ was the ratio of associates to partners. All of which seemed a fussy way of saying that your ability to grow was determined by the number of partners and associates you had to do the work.

“Why are you making that face?” Nanda said, thundering up the steps of the classroom toward me.

“I’m trying to understand your equation,” I said.

“Tell me what it means.”

I went through the various terms, apparently to his satisfaction. But I was still clearly looking a bit funny.

“And what’s your problem with it?” he bellowed.

“I just don’t find it”—I rifled through my mind for the right term— “meaningful. I don’t find it meaningful.”

“What don’t you find meaningful about it?”

“It seems too self-evident. It’s like saying that when General Electric makes lightbulbs, it needs enough raw materials and production capacity to make the lightbulbs.”

“Well, perhaps we can find someone who does find it meaningful,” Nanda said, shooting me a filthy look and turning to the class.

A man who was sitting across the aisle from me, and who had served in the Special Forces in Afghanistan before HBS, gave me a thumbs-up and mouthed the words “this is a joke.” But there was no shortage of hands, and soon the discussion was back to familiar territory. Quite justifiably, Nanda gave me my worst grade, a three.

People are delighted to accept pensions and gratuities, for which they hire out their labor or their support or their services. But nobody works out the value of time: men use it lavishly as if it cost nothing.

—SENECA,
ON THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE

At the end of the final semester, Section A reunited for one last class. We voted for Felix to oversee it and our assigned reading was Peter Drucker’s article “Managing Oneself.” The main idea in the piece was that in a knowledge economy, we would have to do far more than previous generations to manage our own careers, education, and development. We should recognize our weaknesses, then focus on our strengths and develop them. We should work on our lives outside our careers in order to pursue a meaningful life even while our careers were sputtering. It was an idea that explained much of the personal development focus at HBS, the attention to “transforming” us into leaders. Earlier graduates could join a large company and stay there for their entire careers. We would have to take care of ourselves as individual assets, unique fragments within the business universe, moving from company to company, place to place, responsible for ourselves.

The question that prompted the sharpest debate, however, was on a different topic. It was posed by a student who would be returning to Wall Street to sell bonds: “How will we know how much is enough?” The benchmark for being truly rich while I was at HBS was having your own jet. This would probably require a net worth of over $100 million and separated you from the merely wealthy. Lisa, the ethical jihadist, said true wealth would come from having a work-life balance and a happy family. The skydeck strained to contain their smirks. A woman going to a New York hedge fund said that enough was knowing she could live comfortably without ever having to work again, which she intended to achieve long before the usual retirement age. The question encapsulated the fear to which all the cases and discussions had provided no answer. The world was still full of uncertainty. Sure, we were now better equipped to navigate that uncertainty, to weigh up a variety of choices. But the great existential questions remained unanswered. Who are we? And why are we doing this with our lives? How much will ever be enough?

Overall, the section reunion was flat. All the forced section bonding of the first year had forged friendships within small groups of people. But now we looked at each other for what we were: a random group of people brought together in an educational experiment and now being flung back into the world as individual atoms. The prospect of returning to work weighed on the room. The bankers and consultants were coming to the end of their two-year vacation. Those changing careers were nervous about what that change held in store. After two years of looking at the world as barons and generals and CEOs, most of us would be forced back into the trenches, where a LEAD or Strategy frameworks would be as much use as an ermine cloak. The HBS bubble had protected us. For two years we had been treated as people of extraordinary promise. Now we would have to perform.

The final weeks of HBS were an unsettling experience. I had achieved a status as the only person in my section without a job offer. The rest of the class was off to Google and Yahoo!, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers, McKinsey, Bain, and the Boston Consulting Group. Annette continued to resist the wads of money Wall Street waved at her and pressed ahead in the fashion industry. A couple were off to China and India—but surprisingly few, after all the noise made about the two countries over the past two years. Bankers who had vowed never to return to Wall Street were now doing so, incapable of resisting the pay. One woman was returning to her job with a West Coast private equity firm despite the fact she had spent most of HBS saying how miserable she had been there. But she had concluded that she had a rare talent for finance, and that in ten years, by her late thirties, she would have all the money she would ever need and could do something she liked. Her family was not rich, and she had the opportunity to make a serious amount of money. However wretched each hour and day might be, she was not going to throw it away. Justin had decided to spend more time in the belly of the beast and would be returning to the investment bank where he had spent the summer. Two years, he said. Then the conversion begun at HBS would be complete. He could then do anything he wanted to. Business and government alike would have to take him seriously after two years on Wall Street. Bo had bought a house in Kansas City, where he would be working for a foundation whose mission was to study and promote entrepreneurship through education programs and academic research. His job would involve touring universities, investigating how entrepreneurship was taught and how researchers and entrepreneurs collaborated to bring ideas from laboratories to the market. It was an ideal place from which to keep searching for that killer start-up opportunity. Cedric had accepted a job at a nonprofit that helped small enterprises in emerging markets, but he was already plotting to join an investment bank that would send him to Africa.

The careers service kept making announcements: “95% of the class of 2006 have accepted job offers!” One week later: “97.6% of the class of 2006 have now accepted jobs!” I was part of a very small and fast-dwindling group. I’d like to say I was cool about it. That I was sticking to my guns. That I had paid attention to what every single guest speaker had said. Do what you love. Don’t settle. Take risk now, because it will be much harder later in life. Your family is more important than your work. Don’t do anything for the money. If you love what you do, the money will follow. But I wasn’t cool. I was freaking out. As the end loomed, I felt like a man edging toward the end of a plank.

My biggest worry was that I had wasted the experience. And what greater proof was there than my looming joblessness? I knew people would think less of me. “You went to Harvard Business School and couldn’t find a job?” A clear hierarchy had also emerged within the class. At the top were those going to the private equity firms and hedge funds on salaries of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. People called them “studs,” as in “he’s a total finance stud, going to Blackstone.” Then there were those going into investment banking and consulting, cliquey groups all swapping notes on which office they would be heading to, which partners they would be working for. Five percent of the class was going to McKinsey, around forty-five students. Among those interested in technology, several had snagged jobs at the top venture capital firms in Silicon Valley and Boston. Seven more were off to Google, nine to Microsoft. Once you added them up, finance, consulting, and major technology firms had taken 69 percent of the class. Right at the bottom of this hierarchy were those without jobs or even offers: me.

The international students were split between those going straight home and those who wanted to spend more time in America. The Latin Americans tended to want to get a blue-chip American firm on their résumé before going home. A few years with Citibank or Goldman Sachs would not only help pay down those loans but give them even greater credibility. Most of the Europeans were heading straight back across the Atlantic, many to London. A new trend among the Indians was to go immediately back to India. One of the smartest finance students in our entire year gave up a place at Goldman Sachs’s top internal hedge fund in New York to set up a private equity fund in India. The Chinese were the same. The opportunities for them as HBS graduates in China were far greater than if they had become yet more MBAs scurrying around New York. Aside from the explosive economic opportunities, they would be special at home in a way they were not in the United States.

Whenever I started feeling the anxiety, I turned to Margret. She reassured me. I had not wasted my time. I had worked hard. Read every case. Never gone to class unprepared. Attended talks. Made time for the section. Tried my hand at a start-up. Gone for interviews. I just hadn’t found the right thing. But as the weeks slid by, she admitted that she, too, was getting anxious. We had two young sons. We needed an income. At some point, the agonizing was going to have to stop and I would have to choose. The loans I had accumulated were now starting to weigh on me. I had spent pretty much exactly what HBS told me my education would cost, including tuition and accommodation, health insurance and living costs for me and my family. The total bill was $175,000. Much of that I had borrowed, and the first payments would come due six months after graduation. Max, the German entrepreneur, told me not to worry. “They’re all flexible, and you can delay and reduce the amounts. Think of it as easy credit, debt on your balance sheet. You’re leveraged. It’s what we’ve been taught to do.” I was not consoled.

The evening after the Managing Oneself class, I went around to Bo’s house for dinner. When I arrived he was busy inserting a Budweiser can up a raw chicken, which he then rested on top of his grill. “We’re having beer chicken,” he explained. “Real juicy.” When I told him of my anxiety, he threw himself down in one of his large recliners and ruffled the hair of his two dogs.

“PDBizzle,” he said, using his, and only his, nickname for me. “When are you going to stop thinking of these people as your peer group? They’re this weird, self-selected group of people. Most of them want to be bankers and consultants. They are not like everyone else in the world. I know this, so listen to me: you would hate working with them. You would hate working at a large company. You might think that because you enjoyed a few courses here, you would enjoy it. But you would not. Business and business school are totally different things.”

And yet, it required more inner strength than I could muster that March and April not to measure myself against my business school peers. Every company that came to campus seemed to want candidates with “two years of management consulting or investment banking.” Still I applied and was frustrated when I was rejected. I imagined that an MBA would be proof enough of my interest in business and of some basic competence. But for big companies with a number of MBA résumés to choose from, HBS alone was not enough. You needed to have been following the path to these companies long before. Whenever I called an HBS alumnus for help or advice, he was invariably interested and helpful. He’d pass on names of other people to call, suggest ways into companies or sources of finance for ideas. Many alumni told me that it was far better to take a great job in September than one I would hate just to have something at graduation. My deeper problem was that I still didn’t know what I wanted to do, and I was starting to feel pretty pathetic about it.