Ahead of the Curve (16 page)

She said she had long ago given up trying to be perfect in every facet of her life—the perfect wife, mother, and hostess and the perfect CEO. There was no balance, no wisdom, just an unremitting set of personal choices about what would work for her. Every day, every weekend, every living moment, she asked herself what was most important at that time. “Remember this. And this is something that I have not been particularly good at,” she said. “You probably won’t look back and wish that you’d worked harder . . . In the end your family and your friends are the most important thing. And just remember that as you think about what you’re going to do.” As I listened to her speak, I wanted to know if she actually regretted her choices. Would she have given up any of her business success to recoup what she had lost in personal life? I imagined her being more explicit: “You know, all this money, all this praise, frankly I could do without it if I could have back those years when I spent more time working than with my family and friends. In fact, I would give up my fortune in return for those years.” What then? Almost everyone in the room was contemplating a future of ninety-hour work weeks, personal sacrifice in return for professional success. Could Whitman have done more to change their minds?

The day before the 2004 presidential election, I spoke to a woman in our section who I thought might care about the result. She had earned a political science degree and worked for a senator before spending four years in investment banking and private equity. Would she be watching the results come in? “No,” she told me emphatically. “I’ve given up thinking about politics and elections. I can’t change them, and they don’t impact me directly. So they’re not worth my time.” A poll in the student newspaper showed that among the American students at HBS, 8.3 percent described themselves as “politically indifferent” (a high number, I thought, for a graduate school focused on leadership), 49.4 percent claimed to be Democrats (15.4 percent strong Democrats, 34.0 percent moderate), 34.8 percent Republicans (9.5 percent strong, 25.3 percent moderate), and 7.5 percent Other. A week after the election,
The Harbus,
the student newspaper, carried a grudging report of the result: “HBS alumnus prevails in second cliff-hanger election. George W. Bush, arguably HBS’ most famous alumnus (HBS ’75) eked out a victory earlier this month over Democratic challenger John F. Kerry.”

The first half of the TOM course had been heavy on numbers. We learned to calculate the cycle times and output rate of complicated manufacturing processes and studied the benefits of job shops versus assembly lines. The mind-bending climax was the National Cranberry Corporation case, in which we had to calculate the rates at which cranberries were delivered to a plant and then sorted, cleaned, and packaged. Thankfully, after the midterms we broke into clear water with a class about the Toyota Production System. Early in its history, Toyota had established a goal of delivering an affordable range of cars in as efficient a way as possible. The Toyota Production System was designed to eliminate waste of every kind, be it overproduction, mistakes by employees, or an excess inventory of parts. One aspect of this was Just-In-Time production, a method of producing what was needed, when it was needed, and nothing more. Another was called
jidoka
, a means of making any problems immediately obvious and stopping production to resolve them. Anything that deviated from the correct process, including a mistake by a worker, was considered waste.

To implement
jidoka,
Toyota had to eliminate any sense of stigma for an employee who halted the production process. Above each station along the production line, the company installed a pull, an
andon
, which the worker was encouraged to pull whenever he spotted a problem. Lights would flash and loud music would blare and the team leader on the assembly line would rush over. After diagnosing the problem, the leader would then lead his team in the Five Whys, a means of getting to the root of any problem. If you just asked why, you would get the immediate cause of a problem. If you asked it four more times, you would get to the bottom of the problem. The company encouraged workers never to assume any process was set in stone and to seek constant improvement. This was known as
kaizen
, change for the better. It was the power of process, Zeynep said. Toyota was such a success because it considered nothing too small. The company was constantly seeking to improve even the minutest details of its operation, and every employee was involved. Coming from the world of factory floors and production, these lessons resonated more loudly than if they had come from a organizational behavior course. I owned a Toyota. It was ten years old and drove beautifully.
Kaizen
worked. That evening, I saw Bo running across the street to the local grocery store to pick up dinner. “PDB,” he shouted, raising one enormous hand in the air. “I’m never going to buy in bulk again. It’s going to be Just-In-Time all the way.
Kaizen
,
kaizen
. I love it!”

Shortly before the Thanksgiving break, the school organized Thanksgiving dinners for all the sections and their professors. I arrived late and found a seat next to Ruback. We steered clear of finance and spoke instead about his role as head of the RC. Most of his time, he said, was spent trying to improve the experience. He wished there was less fear of missing out (FOMO) and that students felt less obligation to conform. Married students, he said, tended to have a much better time at the school than unmarried ones. “Maybe they’re just more ready to commit.” He was worried that the younger students went out drinking too much. “We had one of those section lunches recently with Kim Clark, and he was standing there giving his talk about the learning experience and humility and the mission of the school, and I looked up and written on the board behind him in huge letters was ‘Happy Hour at 9:00 P.M.’ It was a Wednesday.” To better understand and improve the student experience, Ruback said, the school had started a longitudinal survey in which around fifty students were chosen to come in every couple of weeks and spend two hours describing their lives at the school. They would do this throughout their two years at HBS and continue on a less frequent basis once they had graduated. However frustrated I was at times with the school, I could not fault it for taking its methods and aims seriously.

A weird moment occurred in LEAD during a discussion of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, “I have a dream” speech. After we had read it and watched a video of King speaking on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Podolny asked the class for comments. What was there to say? It seemed an outrageous leap to apply our observations of office politics and corporate leadership to King. There was a long silence. Salvation came from an unexpected quarter, the front row on the right. There sat Benny, the heir to a large African oil fortune. Up until then, Benny had never said a word until called upon. He spent most of the classes hiding beneath the brim of a baseball cap, sleeping off the night before. But here he was at this sensitive moment to break the silence.

“I was thinking that in presenting his facts, King might have used a few more numbers.” No one put up their hand.

“What kind of numbers do you have in mind, Benny?” Podolny said, straining not to smile.

“You know, the scale of suffering of African Americans. The number of lynchings, for example.”

“Does anyone else think King’s speech could have been improved with more numbers and less rhetoric?” Podolny asked. The laughter started in the skydeck with Annette, and soon billowed across the room.

Later in the semester, Podolny gave us the profiles of six members of the class of 1976, written for their tenth and twentieth reunions. Just before each five-year reunion, the members of each class were asked to write a few paragraphs about what had happened in their lives since HBS. These were collected in a book and distributed only to members of that class. Among the six profiles there was a man who had devoted himself to the restaurant business only to have his daughter chase him down the street crying because he was working for the forty-second day in a row; a woman who had divorced her husband and rarely saw their daughter, who had a chromosomal defect; and a self-described “entrepreneurial maverick” who moved tirelessly around the country setting up businesses and who had remained single by avoiding “several near Mrs.” By far the most contented person was a man who went to Wall Street right after graduation and stayed with the same firm. He had a home in New York, a country house in Connecticut, and a private life that revolved around family and community. He considered his main career objective as “making it through the day” and defined a good place to work as a “place to have fun and make money.”

These were our futures. A mixture of success and failure. Work stress and family struggles. The ceaseless tussle between wanting to make money and following your heart.

Podolny made the point that HBS never fêtes those alumni who have gone out into the world and just made it work, those who achieved happiness in their lives, a balance between family and work and friendships. The ones invited to speak at Burden to audiences of nine hundred were those who ran huge companies or who made colossal fortunes. The very ones who told us “you have to get the balance right in your lives” often admitted, as Meg Whitman had, that they had not done so themselves.

One of the Mormons in the class, a man in his mid-twenties with three children, spoke emotionally about the pressure to succeed according to the HBS template: “Why has it taken until now for us to read about this guy who takes a banking job and likes it? We never hear about the HBS grads who say, ‘I’m not in this for the money. I’m going to open a small firm in my hometown, be home every day at five P.M. to see my children, and take four weeks of vacation each year.’ ” I agreed. We patted these people on the head and said, “Bravo,” but seemed not to take their success as seriously as that of hyperactive wing nuts like Jack Welch. In order to live the life of quiet, personal fulfillment, Podolny said, you could expect thanks or admiration from only a very limited audience. And for many people, especially Harvard MBAs who had spent their entire lives being applauded and coming first and winning contests and being praised for everything they did— whether it was mathematics or community service or gymnastics—the idea of private, discreet fulfillment being of equal worth to public success was nearly impossible to grasp.

Or perhaps it was just impossible to value, said Cedric, a West African and former banker. “I think MBAs struggle to make these comparisons,” he said. “We’re so into putting values or numbers on things, that if we can’t value something, we just sweep it away. How do you compare the value of a healthy relationship with one’s child when the alternative has a distinct value, say, a million-dollar bonus.” For those in the market for the $1-million bonus, he was saying, the notion of “priceless” did not imply “beyond price and therefore the most important thing in the world” but rather “impossible to price and therefore not worth arguing about when the alternative is so tangible.”

In the last fifteen minutes of the class, we were all asked to write down what we imagined we would submit for our tenth-year HBS anniversary book. I wrote that I was now living in a comfortable house outside New York, working from an office in my garden. I was still married to Margret, and our children were growing up in a clean, healthy place. I owned a handful of media properties and had a small group of like-minded and enthusiastic employees. I set my own schedule, took vacations when I liked, and yet loved my work. In fact, there was no division between my life and my work. Podolny instructed us to swap what we had written with a neighbor, and he then called on a Japanese woman to read the one she had been given. It had been written by a Chinese American man who had been a management consultant before HBS. “I am still struggling,” his profile began. “I’m working far more than I’d like, often ninety hours a week, and not finding enough time to see my wife. I enjoy the work while I’m doing it, but I can’t see ever getting the work-life balance thing right. We have a decent house and are making decent money, but we’d like to have kids someday and can’t see how that’s going to happen. One of us is going to have to step back, but we don’t know who. It is a burden carrying the expectations of an immigrant family, but one I am proud of.”

At the end of each course, each professor gave a brief personal speech. Eddie Riedl put up a slide on which he had written, “Why I do what I do. My motivation for this course is the thought that during your careers, you will collectively make decisions that will affect the flow of billions of dollars worth of resources and the lives of countless individuals, and that the quality of these decisions can be improved, in part, by what you learn in this course.” He was immediately challenged by a man in the skydeck. “You need to change that word
billions,
” the man said. Riedl looked non-plussed. “It should say
trillions.
” “You’re right,” Riedl replied. “It’s ridiculous how much financial muscle Harvard MBAs wield.” Podolny wrote the word
serendipity
on the blackboard. You start looking for one thing, he said, and you find another. He spoke about the twists his career had taken to land him here with Section A for the past four months. He told us he had found teaching us meaningful and satisfying.

Steenburgh told us the story of his father, a paunchy man who was underestimated on the softball field. Opposing teams would always bring in their fielders when he came to bat, and he would smack the ball over their heads and round the bases chuckling. When Steenburgh had left his job at Xerox to return to academia, many of his friends wondered what he was doing. But he said he found a joy in teaching he had not found elsewhere.

Zeynep said she was too young to have any great wisdom to impart. So she gave us another case to read instead. It was about an HBS professor called Jai Jaikumar. He was an Indian who loved climbing in the Himalayas. But as an undergraduate in India he had suffered a terrible fall, tumbling thousands of feet over rocks and trees, snow and ice. He was badly injured and lost his climbing companion. After walking for twenty-four hours in acute pain, he stumbled across a small hut in a clearing. A shepherdess took him in, fed him, and tended to his wounds. Then she carried him on her back for three days to the nearest village, from where he traveled for two more days on a donkey to the nearest hospital. When he recovered, he resumed his academic career, which brought him to America and eventually Harvard, where he specialized in manufacturing science. But he never forgot the shepherdess, and when he could afford to, he built a school in her village and raised money to pay for teachers and supplies. He always encouraged his students to enjoy and celebrate their lives instead of becoming stressed out. Success, he taught them, was the result of good fortune, and this brought obligations to others. He died at the age of fifty-three while mountain climbing in Ecuador.