Member Of Harvard’s 1st 2+2 Cohort Has Tons Of Advice For The MBA-Curious

A lot of people reading your guide might be dissuaded by some of the big hurdles with the MBA — the two-year time commitment, the lost salary, that sort of thing. What are your thoughts on part-time MBAs or online MBAs? Are those alternatives as valuable?

Well, that was my motivation for going into the bundling and un-bundling argument: What does it look like to break down the MBA experience and figure out what parts of it really matter to you? Because there are certain things that, if your goal is to inject a bunch of new information into your life without straying from your true career trajectory, an online MBA could be a great solution. But if you’re not attending a residential program, there’s going to be less of that serendipity on the margins. And so the serendipity upside may be substantially lower. Meanwhile, if you’re getting an MBA because you perceive that it will advance your career in a meaningful way, and you’re maybe already working in technology, maybe you have a chip on your shoulder and you’re just trying to get rid of the chip on your shoulder.

If the market around you doesn’t correctly value that MBA, then it may be worse than having never done it in the first place, because we’ve spent all that time, which is marginal time. It’s the time that you might otherwise spend on being with your family or pursuing hobbies or making friends in other ways. You’re dedicating that to being on Zoom calls. And that means that you’ll get more information, but there’s always a tradeoff. And I think that just being really clear on the tradeoffs and thinking about, What am I trying to achieve with this MBA? And if what I’m trying to achieve is knocking a chip off my shoulder and increasing my confidence, let’s make sure that this degree will actually result in the perception shift that I think it will. Because that’s one of the tragedies of life and something that I really started to realize as I wrote the piece — that I can increase my own confidence by knocking chips off my shoulder. But that may not matter at all to the people who are evaluating you for various opportunities. They may be optimizing for something totally different. And so that’s fine, but you should know that before going into it. And there are ways to figure that out.

We don’t know what the long-term impact of coronavirus will be, but obviously it had a big impact in the last year on the full-time MBA, a big disruption. What do you think about the long-term viability of two-year residential MBA programs, as opposed to some of the other alternatives that are available?

With all the challenges post-pandemic, it’s really a reckoning they’ve all had to go through: what’s important to us in life and what really makes the difference? I think that all MBA programs will need to prove how transformative they can be in order to justify not just the monetary costs, but the time cost. I think the time cost is probably the biggest component, because this is very high-value time. You’re early in your career and you can go any number of directions and a two-year residential MBA takes you out of the fray for a period of time when you could be massively zooming forward.

I think that it’s these outlier outcomes that the best programs will optimize for. And that means creating environments where people can form really deep relationships, because at the end of the day, it’s deep relationships that lead to transformative outcomes, whether in changing your mind about something or opening your eyes to an opportunity you wouldn’t have otherwise — creating a friendship that lasts for the rest of your life, the person who speaks at your funeral. That happens at business school too, but that’s much more about the context for relationships and what it takes to get people to be real with each other and how a residential environment supports that. Then the specific content of business school classes.

Overall, what kind of feedback have you been getting since publishing the guide? Are you hearing what you thought you’d hear? What are people saying?

The feedback has been really remarkable and it makes me feel really glad that I didn’t give up on the piece when I was six weeks into writing it and still had nothing to show for it. This is a piece that I treated like a book, because I thought it was that important. I’m very passionate about supporting people and making the life choices that are right for them. I have a background as an executive coach in addition to my background as a product manager. And I think that this is an early-career decision that can really change people’s lives. So it’s something I really wanted to support.

What has been meaningful to me is hearing that people have said it’s as though I read their mind. “You just wrote out everything I’ve tortured myself with in this decision over the past 18 months.” “This one prompt you’ve shared caused me to think about it differently, and now I’m leaning toward school or leaning toward starting a company instead.” And so that gives me hope that this piece did end up helping people to be decisive. At the beginning of the piece, my question is, “Is it worth it? Is an MBA worth it?” I never really answered that. I just give you tools for answering it for you, but I’m getting feedback that says people are answering it for themselves with support from the piece.

I have heard from people who were in the process of making a go or no-go decision to business school in the past week and have decided differently because of the piece.

You touch on this in the guide, but your own career arc would be considerably different without an MBA. Where do you think you’d be without it?

My MBA experience helps me take a very long-term perspective about everything — about my career, about markets, about technology. And I think that the practice of having a long-term perspective day after day, class after class, case study after case study really anchored me on that as a zoom-out that I do reflexively 10 times a day. And that zoom-out is the primary skill I use as an investor. I think that product management, as a career, as a discipline, has much more zooming in, and maybe weekly you have to zoom out; but investing is an hourly zoom-out exercise. And so it’s about getting the practice and the reps in and zooming out consistently, as well as proving to myself that I enjoyed that;  but business school was a place I could find meaning and see patterns and connect the dots. That’s what my MBA experience gave.

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