A Mirror on MBA Decision Making

With the pressure of job interviews starting in early September (in my day, none were allowed until March), the driving determinant for most students remains money. You take time from work and pay tuition for which you expect a good return, a hefty ROI (return on investment).

Much has changed during my thirty-five years with MBAs, but career decision making has not changed measurably. Synthesizing what you’ve told me over the past five years in conversations and e-mails, your decisions are primarily driven by six factors:

• MBAs often don’t consider their own values very high on the list of motivations in making a career decision.
• MBAs are not usually encouraged to consult a personal compass to direct their goals when making career decisions.
• MBAs feel peer pressure to earn a lot of money when they enter the working world after graduation.
• MBAs are expected to measure success in money and public recognition rather than in personal fulfillment.
• MBAs are risk-averse, so they often choose to make career decisions that they’re supposed to make rather than the decisions their hearts would have them make.
• MBAs fear that taking a job that fulfills their heart’s desires will not provide enough money to live on.

You may not see yourself in this description of the “typical” MBA. Good for you! But most business schools reinforce this stereotype. To remain atypical, you need to be clear about your answers to the four chapter questions and stick to them. The questions and lifelines can help reaffirm your thinking and existing career goals and aspirations and turn them into a plan of action for your future, your personal destiny plan.

Let me illustrate these six factors in three pairs with examples to help deepen your understanding of how this kind of decision making can limit your options and pull you away from your destiny path.

• MBAs often don’t consider their own values very high on the list of motivations in making a career decision and are not usually encouraged to consult a personal compass to direct their goals when making career decisions.

MBA graduates have often told me that one of the most important determinants of their happiness and career success has been making the right choice of where they want to live and then looking at job possibilities. Finding the right place to live and work, however, is often considered a low priority in the business school environment.

Recruiters see most MBAs heading to corporate America, working as long as they can stand it, and then striking out for the “small time.” Small time? Why not start there? Why not stay with the good life, like the Mexican fisherman? Why not focus on achieving a life of working and living in a place you belong, doing work that matters with people you care about?

Instead, many MBAs may be destined to be ruled by the “Paul Principle.” Akin to the Peter Principle (“You are promoted until you reach a job at which you are incompetent”), it states, “You are promoted until your job is no longer fun.” Feel free to substitute career or life for job. And you can substitute moved (geographically) for promoted.

I take the recruiters’ insight personally. After just my first term teaching at Harvard Business School, I knew I was in the wrong place. I was not on my path and felt I had to leave my values at home. (it took me six more years to leave.) I was stunned. After all, I’d dreamed of a job like this. My income shot up well into the six figures; my time was my own; I had no direct boss and was surrounded by brilliant, diligent colleagues and students. The Harvard name opened every door imaginable, and the senior faculty could not have treated me better.

I found it hard to get out of bed each day and make it to school, but I persevered. I figured there was something wrong with me. And the results were obvious. My teaching was average at best, and my research stumbled along, though I received more credit than I deserved. I was blessed with the “appearance” of a Harvard Business School professor, the “carriage” of those times. I was afforded every advantage possible—to no avail.

I needed permission to reframe my thinking about what is important in life and how to measure success. I needed to use my personal compass. Instead, I had taken what I considered to be the safest path, the one with the most money and status, and yet I almost lost myself in it. Being a Harvard professor was a great job that offered me a great career. But it wasn’t the right one for me. I would eventually be supported by business students I met through Net Impact to rethink my career and the role of business.

• MBAs feel peer pressure to earn a lot of money when they enter the working world after graduation and are expected to measure success in money and public recognition rather than in personal fulfillment.

Most of you will feel that peer pressure to achieve a certain level of “success,” which includes a high salary but not necessarily happiness and fulfillment. And the business world reinforces it. For example, during her job search, Maureen Gilbert, a twenty-six-year old INSEAD MBA, wrote me about the “soul price” of financially remunerative work you don’t really like:

The more in touch your job is with your soul, the less your wage matters to you. Talk to anyone that isn’t happy with his or her job or that secretly dreams of doing something else and nine times out of ten, money will be the reason why they don’t leave. So, what is your soul price? How much do you need to be paid to do a job you really don’t love? [her italics].

Maybe you think you won’t make it without a “safety net.” Maybe you feel the timing isn’t right. It’s always more comfortable to go the “safe” route. But what if you never get on that other route?

You know that life is about more than making money and spending it. But on a practical daily basis, you can forget too easily, especially in business school. The result is that you make your alma mater (and possibly parents) happy by selling your soul to the highest bidder. There’s a price to be paid, however; a price perhaps unrecognized at first, to be paid years later. As the years increase, so does the soul price. Why do you sell your soul so easily, so cheaply, to the highest bidder without knowledge of the price?

• MBAs are risk-averse, so they often choose to make career decisions that they’re supposed to make rather than the decisions their hearts would have them make. MBAs fear that taking a job that fulfills their heart’s desires will not provide enough money to live on.

When I left Harvard to help MBAs find their path of service, I was concerned about my drop in income. I did well enough for years, but the last few years, my pro bono work has been out of balance.

When I was speaking to MBAs at Portland State in 2006, I heard a question that has yet to leave me. It was in response to a student’s statement about the need to make money first and then find fulfillment—if for no other reason than to pay off school loans. Work that was closer to his heart would clearly be sacrificed. Another student responded by asking him and the audience, “How far are you from the gutter?”

Think about that. You have many ways to get by: friends and family who will help you and work you could do if necessary. You need to let go of that excuse for not taking the road less traveled—your road, the road that’s made to fit one person at a time.