■INTRODUCTION: THE MBA TRAP
Money sometimes costs too much.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, poet
MBAs are focused, driven, thoughtful people who typically choose one of two career paths. The first, the more common, is the one I took. I call it the conflicted achiever path, expressed as “I’ll make some money now, pay off my debts, build a little nest egg, and then… who knows? But business school will give me the skills and cachet I need to change careers, move up, and make more money, after which I’ll do what I’m passionate about and contribute to society.”
The other path is the passionate striver path: “I want to do something meaningful now. I already know the kind of work that I find fulfilling. Business school will give me the skills I need to be more effective in my work and a network to draw on for help along the way so that I can advance faster in my career.” Both paths are fine as long as you don’t get stuck in the wrong job or see your passion frustrated and fade.
The reality is that most MBAs take jobs in management consulting or investment banking. After all, that’s what business school does best: train students to be market or financial analysts. Nothing wrong with that. Just remember that few of you grew up dreaming of selling another strategic plan or making another business deal.
The challenge is to use that job in ways that will help you seek and find your unique contribution—which may very well be in consulting or banking. Those professions have also evolved with your interests in mind, offering MBAs work in nonprofit divisions of the most respected consulting firms as others work in “bottom of the pyramid” microfinance at top-tier investment banking companies.
MBAs want to make a contribution through their work, whether it’s in the workplace, the marketplace, or the community. This was not as true in my day, but today it’s true of the vast majority. You’re different, and the world you’re inhabiting is different. Even my venerable school, staid Harvard Business School, changed its mission in the twenty-first century to “educating leaders who make a difference in the world.”
What I’ve seen at the business schools is, as I like to say, “You’ve got the religion. You just don’t know how to get to church.” Regardless of which of the two initial career paths you choose—or some combination of the two—the work of this book is to help you get to a place where you’re appreciated and can make a contribution to others that’s worth more than money.
In that spirit, the book’s central argument is that if you put contribution — crucial to a meaningful life—on an equal footing with money, what you perceive as your safest career choices may actually be your riskiest, and vice versa. That is, if you assess risk with the career goal of a meaningful life (which includes making money), you’ll make different choices or at least be more aware of the risk-reward trade-offs of your choices and choose a job that is more likely to be on your destiny path.
Whether you are searching more for money or meaning initially, each path has its negative externalities. However, you often recognize the externalities of choosing more satisfying work but overlook them when you choose the employer who shows you the money.
That’s the MBA trap: improperly assessing the risk-reward ratio in your career choices by not including all the externalities. This trap occurs when you measure success just by money rather than including the desire to make a contribution as part of a meaningful life. With a meaningful life as your goal instead of money, your definitions of safe and risky change: you now recognize that a “safe” job choice is one that you believe is on your destiny path, and a “risky” choice is one that is not.
To explain, I’d like to share a parable that resonates with MBAs more than any other story I know. I believe it gets you to reconsider what constitutes a successful life.