The biggest dis-service I can potentially do - to aspiring Harvard students, is to super-impose my experience, as THE experience you would have at HBS. At the cost of repetition, (Ya, I have a disclaimer with this exact same thing - somewhere on this blog), these are my learnings and my experiences, each of us goes through a completely different experience and thus your takeaway points will be very peculiarly different.
To illustrate my point, a story. This is about a student (not from our program but HBS) recounting how HBS changed him - when he did a short 7 day program, while he had just recovered from an aneurism. Due to the condition, he did not have time to read the case studies or to participate in the presentation much - due to his impaired vision during that time. It would have seemed, that he would not be able to take away much.
Surprisingly, he described the experience as immensely intense, something that pretty much altered his life. His learning was he sat and observed the class interaction. He learnt, how to ask the right question, in the right manner - that can direct a team towards a common goal. That was his great takeaway, that he believed has changed his life.
Later today, in the same class, we were asked on what we think our takeaway was and it was truly amazing to see so many different point of views. For some learning to contain ambition, and spend more time on ME (them) was important learning. Yet others, emphasized on the need to be ambitious and humble - both at the same time. Others wanted, to bring order in their professional day to day chaos that they go through. Each of us, had a our very own but different 30 second elevator speech, and all of them were right.
So, if you are indeed, reading this blog, to get a sense of what it is like in HBS, before you decide, take it with a underlying understanding that this is my experience, and your own learning may be (most likely will be) entirely different. You will have to hunt for your own values here.
Value chain (ah ! such a cliche... or not.)
The most important thing for a company is to understand the value you are creating for your customers. You need to get this component right. As long as you know exactly what value you are creating for your customer, you will be above water. Ofcourse, you also need to have a competitive differentiator, that forces the customer to choose you over your competition. As an executive, the value you create for the stake holders, as team member, value for manager and peer.
And quite importantly, you need to be sure, that you are creating value for the people and family that care about you, that you care about. In most cases, we take it for granted - but it is important to give it due thought.
Learning for the day
1. Creating value for people who you care for, is an important element of growth. Professional and personal.
2. Whatever, be our learning from HBS (however, diverse it may be), the one common thing that all of us agreed were, this was one life time experience, none of us want to trade for anything else.
Alok
To illustrate my point, a story. This is about a student (not from our program but HBS) recounting how HBS changed him - when he did a short 7 day program, while he had just recovered from an aneurism. Due to the condition, he did not have time to read the case studies or to participate in the presentation much - due to his impaired vision during that time. It would have seemed, that he would not be able to take away much.
Surprisingly, he described the experience as immensely intense, something that pretty much altered his life. His learning was he sat and observed the class interaction. He learnt, how to ask the right question, in the right manner - that can direct a team towards a common goal. That was his great takeaway, that he believed has changed his life.
Later today, in the same class, we were asked on what we think our takeaway was and it was truly amazing to see so many different point of views. For some learning to contain ambition, and spend more time on ME (them) was important learning. Yet others, emphasized on the need to be ambitious and humble - both at the same time. Others wanted, to bring order in their professional day to day chaos that they go through. Each of us, had a our very own but different 30 second elevator speech, and all of them were right.
So, if you are indeed, reading this blog, to get a sense of what it is like in HBS, before you decide, take it with a underlying understanding that this is my experience, and your own learning may be (most likely will be) entirely different. You will have to hunt for your own values here.
Value chain (ah ! such a cliche... or not.)
The most important thing for a company is to understand the value you are creating for your customers. You need to get this component right. As long as you know exactly what value you are creating for your customer, you will be above water. Ofcourse, you also need to have a competitive differentiator, that forces the customer to choose you over your competition. As an executive, the value you create for the stake holders, as team member, value for manager and peer.
And quite importantly, you need to be sure, that you are creating value for the people and family that care about you, that you care about. In most cases, we take it for granted - but it is important to give it due thought.
Learning for the day
1. Creating value for people who you care for, is an important element of growth. Professional and personal.
2. Whatever, be our learning from HBS (however, diverse it may be), the one common thing that all of us agreed were, this was one life time experience, none of us want to trade for anything else.
Alok
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