More Than Money: Questions Every MBA Needs to Answer (BK Life) - Hardcover

Albion, Mark

 
9781576756560: More Than Money: Questions Every MBA Needs to Answer (BK Life)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1576756564 ISBN 13: 9781576756560
Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

The New York Times-bestselling author “offers some practical tools for finding a more holistic return on an MBA investment” (David Wood, Fisher Graduate School, Monterey Institute, MBA, 1993).

As an MBA graduate, you can’t risk wasting that expensive education, so it’s time to reach for as much money and status as you can. It’s the safe thing to do. Isn’t it?

Not necessarily. Mark Albion doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, but his unique perspective can help you find yours. There are other ways to look at potential risks and rewards, even when you have thousands of dollars of student loans to pay back. Money is important but it’s not the key to fulfillment. The “safe” choice, the most monetarily rewarding one, can carry enormous psychological and spiritual pain. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “Sometimes money costs too much.”

In More Than Money, Albion redefines the typical way the risk/reward equation is written, using his own life story and those of the many entrepreneurs, executives and MBAs he’s met as both cautionary and inspirational tales. He introduces a framework of four crucial questions to consider when thinking about your career choices, as well as “lifelines,” principles that can help you answer these questions and guide you to construct your personal, strategic destiny plan.

A consciousness-raising book as well as a career guide, More Than Money encourages MBA students to give themselves permission to be who they really want to be and find their path of service. For, as Albion says, in the end “we won’t remember you for the size of your wallet as much as the size of your heart.”

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mark Albion is a social entrepreneur and author. He spent eighteen years as a student and professor at Harvard University and Harvard Business School and was profiled on 60 Minutes as one of the top young business professors in the United States. He has served as a board member and consultant to major retailers and consumer product giants such as Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble and has written three award- winning marketing books. He left Harvard to develop a community of service-minded MBAs and cofounded Net Impact in 1993. He has since spoken at more than 125 business schools on five continents, for which Business Week called him “the savior of b-school souls.”

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Money sometimes costs too much.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, poet


MBAs are focused, driven, thoughtful people who typically choose one of two career paths. The first, the more common, is the one I took. I call it the conflicted achiever path, expressed as “I’ll make some money now, pay off my debts, build a little nest egg, and then… who knows? But business school will give me the skills and cachet I need to change careers, move up, and make more money, after which I’ll do what I’m passionate about and contribute to society.”

The other path is the passionate striver path: “I want to do something meaningful now. I already know the kind of work that I find fulfilling. Business school will give me the skills I need to be more effective in my work and a network to draw on for help along the way so that I can advance faster in my career.” Both paths are fine as long as you don’t get stuck in the wrong job or see your passion frustrated and fade.

The reality is that most MBAs take jobs in management consulting or investment banking. After all, that’s what business school does best: train students to be market or financial analysts. Nothing wrong with that. Just remember that few of you grew up dreaming of selling another strategic plan or making another business deal.

The challenge is to use that job in ways that will help you seek and find your unique contribution—which may very well be in consulting or banking. Those professions have also evolved with your 2interests in mind, offering MBAs work in nonprofit divisions of the most respected consulting firms as others work in “bottom of the pyramid” microfinance at top-tier investment banking companies.

MBAs want to make a contribution through their work, whether it’s in the workplace, the marketplace, or the community. This was not as true in my day, but today it’s true of the vast majority. You’re different, and the world you’re inhabiting is different. Even my venerable school, staid Harvard Business School, changed its mission in the twenty-first century to “educating leaders who make a difference in the world.”

What I’ve seen at the business schools is, as I like to say, “You’ve got the religion. You just don’t know how to get to church.” Regardless of which of the two initial career paths you choose—or some combination of the two—the work of this book is to help you get to a place where you’re appreciated and can make a contribution to others that’s worth more than money.

In that spirit, the book’s central argument is that if you put contribution — crucial to a meaningful life—on an equal footing with money, what you perceive as your safest career choices may actually be your riskiest, and vice versa. That is, if you assess risk with the career goal of a meaningful life (which includes making money), you’ll make different choices or at least be more aware of the risk-reward trade-offs of your choices and choose a job that is more likely to be on your destiny path.

Whether you are searching more for money or meaning initially, each path has its negative externalities. However, you often recognize the externalities of choosing more satisfying work but overlook them when you choose the employer who shows you the money.

That’s the MBA trap: improperly assessing the risk-reward ratio in your career choices by not including all the externalities. This trap occurs when you measure success just by money rather than including the desire to make a contribution as part of a meaningful life. With a meaningful life as your goal instead of money, your definitions of safe and risky change: you now recognize that a “safe” job choice is one that you believe is on your destiny path, and a “risky” choice is one that is not.

3
To explain, I’d like to share a parable that resonates with MBAs more than any other story I know. I believe it gets you to reconsider what constitutes a successful life.


The Good Life: A Parable

The career perspective of the MBA environment may be best expressed in a parable you won’t find in business school. It has received the most responses from MBAs in all my years of writing. I first published it over a decade ago after returning from an idyllic week on an island of just seventy people. I spent my days diving with local dive master Ollie Bean and imagined what it would be like if he met up with the Harvard Business School student in me.

My purpose is to show how your higher education and the values and expectations that often go with it might lead you away from a life path that is enjoyable, rewarding, and contributory. With minor editing,1 here’s “The Good Life”:

An American businessman was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with a lone fisherman docked. Inside the boat were several large yellowfin tuna. He complimented the fisherman on the quality of fish and asked how long it took to catch them. “Only a little while,” the fisherman replied.

The businessman then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish. The fisherman said he had enough to support his family’s needs. The businessman asked, “What do you do with the rest of your time?” The fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, Maria, and then teach children how to fish before I stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my friends. I have a full and busy life.”

The businessman laughed at him. “I am an MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds buy a bigger boat. With 4the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats. Eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor. Eventually you could open your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution.”

“And then what would I do?” the fisherman wondered.

“You would then, of course, need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then probably Los Angeles, and eventually locate in New York City, where you would run your expanding enterprise.”

The fisherman asked, “How long will this all take?” “Ten to fifteen years,” the MBA replied. “But what then, señor?” The MBA laughed, saying that’s the best part: “When the time is right, you would announce an IPO [initial public offering] and sell your company stock to the public. You would become very rich, making millions of dollars.”

“Millions? Then what?”

The MBA businessman concluded, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, and then teach children how to fish before you stroll into the village each evening where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your friends.”

A simple parable worth reading again, “The Good Life” is about values often taken for granted as the material world and its partner “greed” pull you away from yourself, magnified in most business school settings.


Your Business School Environment

Business schools have a culture that narrows your perceived options and can often direct your behavior as a businessperson, at least early in your career, by the values espoused. What are those values? 2

In the 1970s, the elite business schools were organized...

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Verlag
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Erscheinungsdatum
2008
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1576756564
ISBN 13 
9781576756560
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
144
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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Tallinn
11317
Estland

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