An MIT MBA Pulls Back The Curtain: 3 Ways You Really Learn In B-School

Learning via gossip

It was my 2nd year of business school — fall 2017. A company had just started sponsoring a slew of student-run events — think free drinks, free food, the whole shebang.

Awesome! … Or so we initially thought.

The problem was that this company was emerging from a major sexual harassment scandal. The CEO founder had just been forced out. And while the company seemed to have atoned for its misdeeds, fall 2017 was the height of the #metoo movement — and this was a very sensitive topic.

Yishi Zuo, standing third from right, and his colleagues in entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan in 2018. Poets&Quants wrote about their efforts in March of that year. Courtesy photo

Seeing the company’s name plastered all over emails and Facebook invites rubbed some of my classmates the wrong way. The boiling point came when this company sponsored an event ran by our “Women in Management” student club.

After that, the grumbling started to louden.

WTF, they are trying to use our school’s brand to rehabilitate their own!

This issue became the topic du jour for a couple of weeks — in the hallways, on WhatsApp groups, and at parties. Everyone had an opinion, some stronger than others. The two sides essentially boiled down to:

Whatever, let’s just take advantage of the free stuff!

No way! Our brand is worth more than a few beers!

What was especially interesting to me was how hard it was to predict how individuals would feel. There were men and women on both sides. It didn’t matter what industry they came from or where they grew up. There was no pattern as far as I could tell.

Eventually, the drama fizzled out – either the funding ran out, or the semester ended, or something else. My biggest learning came from watching the story unfold.

Prior to business school — lacking the volume of diverse peers, I was more narrow-minded.

Up close and personal, I could see that many of my peers thought very differently from me and from each other. I had close friends, whom I greatly respected, on opposite sides of the debate. This experience was one of many during my MBA program that broadened my perspectives and increased my maturity.

And my learnings were compounded by starting a company during business school.

Learning via starting a company

In my very first blog article from nearly 4 years ago — I talked about all the resources that my school provided that helped me get my last company off the ground.

More recently, I had the chance to look back, and I summarized a few of my bigger mistakes on the business front.

The result was that we pivoted 2x. We almost ran out of money 3x. I had 4 different co-founders depart during 4 years. I hired people too quickly, fired people too slowly. You name it, I did it wrong.

Despite all the mistakes I made, and the stresses we endured, the company is now thriving! Most importantly, while I was the CEO, I experienced a 10x improvement from a communication and emotional maturity perspective.

Here is a concrete example: Honing my negotiating skills with $400,000 and a lawsuit on the line.

One challenge I faced was that unlike in business school, I had few true peers to learn from at the start-up. It was lonely. This was when I first started receiving professional coaching. That has been very helpful for my personal growth, and I will talk about it next time!


Yishi Zuo is a 2018 MIT Sloan MBA who transitioned from finance into tech entrepreneurship. He is the founder of Listening Gym, a peer-to-peer coaching community that helps mid-career professionals find their next level.

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