The CEO Of MBAxAmerica On Stories, Speeches, and Small Businesses

tractor Could you give an example of an entrepreneur?

Becca Stevens in Nashville, Tennessee, really epitomizes all three of these criteria. She founded a social enterprise called Thistle Farms, which is the social enterprise arm of a residential program for woman who survived lives on the street like prostitution, trafficking, and addiction. The farm not only gives them job training and skills to transition into the workforce, but it also makes sustainable bath and body products that are sold to provide revenue for the residential side of the program.

Our team from Harvard Business School is working with Becca this week to improve operations and to launch a global trade alliance with several organizations so that the goods have a global marketplace.

Why did you decide to pursue MBAs Across America over a more lucrative job in finance or consulting?

It was a very personal decision for me. I gave the graduate speech at HBS last month, and in it I spoke about the fact that when I got to business school I told myself, “Don’t work for another startup and don’t work at another nonprofit.” I did both.

We started MBAs Across America not as an idea for an organization but as an idea for our lives. Could we use our lives, careers, opportunities, and education not just to make a buck but to make a difference? I think that’s the question that a lot of folks at business school and in our generation are asking. How do we live a life and have a career of meaning? So this journey was one of exploration, and we went 8,000 miles across the country to baptize ourselves in the spirit of America, and that changed us forever because we saw people with a fraction of our opportunities solving some of the biggest challenges of our lifetime. I got to the point where I couldn’t imagine not doing this work.

In our lifetime business leaders and folks like MBAs from Harvard and elsewhere across the country and around the world are going to have to be a force for progress. I saw this as the most lucrative way to spend my life, knowing that when I die, I’m not going to be judged by what I piled up in my bank account, but by what I was able to give and willing to do for others. I’m fulfilled by this work, and I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

What was the inspiration for your commencement speech?

Two things: I had come across Marshall Ganz’s theory of the public narrative:  the story of self, the story of us, and the story of now. I thought it was an interesting framework for a commencement address: How does the particular life I have lived relate to the particular experience that a collective group has lived and then to the collective path that we all must pick up?

I also started thinking about the one moment that really set me on the course I’m now on. As I thought back on my life, there was no other movement that was as clarifying for me  as that near-death experience [Gerald was held at gunpoint during a home invasion]. Not all of us are lucky or unlucky enough to have a near-death experience that gives us clarity, but it was a powerful one for me.

Most commencement speeches give a collective phrase: “We have achieved so much. We have done so much. We have great things ahead of.” It’s  really a bit of a congratulatory exercise. I wanted to express a collective conviction that we had a moral responsibility to wade into the conflict of the biggest issues of our day. When I tried to come up with that, the  phrase “You have more work to do” really grabbed hold of me. That moment and the conviction formed the bookends of the message that I wanted to convey to my good friends at graduation.

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