BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
HBS Students’ Leadership in COVID-19
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Professor Kevin Sharer’s Farewell Column
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From the Editor’s Desk - page 02
THE HARBUS
Spring Semester, 2020
Bringing news to Harvard Business School since 1937
May Edition
An Open Letter to Business Leaders from MBA Students HBS Fights Back against COVID-19 Tanishq Bhalla (MBA ’21) reflects on the “Perspectives on the COVID-19 Pandemic” symposium and shares key takeaways from the day. Tanishq Bhalla, Contributor
“This is really a horrific time we are in.” Ken Chenault (JD ’76), former CEO of American Express, quickly set the stage for Harvard Business School’s “Perspectives on the COVID-19 Pandemic” Symposium. He confirmed a sobering reality: the world is facing a crisis unlike any. There has been a strong sense of confusion and helplessness amongst us students. Our lives as students of HBS have changed more than we could have ever guessed from just a short while ago. Amidst the chaos, HBS administration has done its best to stay true to its mission of “educating leaders who make a difference in the world.” With this mission in mind, the decision was made to set aside the case studies for a day and host a full-day symposium dedicated to COVID-19 and its global effects. Of course, hosting this symposium in our beloved Klarman Hall was not an option, but the school quickly leveraged its new-found expertise with Zoom to orchestrate a virtual symposium. COVID-19 has become not only a public health problem but also an economic and ethical problem. With the diversity of the challenges our society faces in mind, HBS designed six sessions with six experts to educate and discuss topics including the global economy, public health, crisis management, and supply chain. Given the importance of these knowledge domains, HBS recorded the symposium and made it available for public viewing. Here are some of the main
lessons from the symposium. Business leaders do not need to be health experts in order to have an impact Ashish Jha (MD ’97, MPH ’04), the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, jumped at the opportunity to be a presenter for this symposium. He, and many of his public health colleagues, have felt vilified by economists for leading the public recommendations to continue shelter-in place policies. However, he believes this is the necessary struggle we need to go through in order to prevent cases from rising uncontrollably again, causing another long shutdown with even further economic consequences. Dr. Jha believes business leaders and the private sector need to play a significant role in helping fight COVID-19. “How are we going to implement 500,000 tests per day?” (Many have touted that this is the number of tests we need before reopening the economy.) He emphasizes that these are the types of things that we need the expertise from the business sector to help implement because the government does not have the capability to do so on its own. Furthermore, you do not need to be a healthcare company to help with such initiatives; for example, Hilton is providing housing to health care workers so that they can keep themselves isolated from their families and better run testing centers. Our country is experiencing an “all-hands-ondeck” roll call with this crisis, and leaders running companies big or small have the ability to help—whether by innovating, supporting, or sympathizing in ways unseen before. It is time to set aside rivalries and work together
All New York hospital systems have in effect become one operating system with many different locations. Apple and Google are partnering on COVID-19 contact tracing technology. General Motors and Ford share plans on how to convert manufacturing plants to focus on building ventilators. These are just a few examples of all sorts of unexpected collaborations that have popped up amongst “rivals” during the pandemic. But according to Chenault, this is still not enough. “We need more of a collective focus and more partnerships to be formed. I would like to see even more innovation through partnerships from corporations.” As the country shifts its efforts to reopening and preventing a second wave, these partnerships will become even more important to adjust to the new normal. As business leaders, there is a lot of value we can provide by connecting diverse groups of individuals to facilitate change. Chenault articulated his own efforts from co-founding Stop the Spread (STS) which has rallied over 1,500 business leaders across 300 companies to drive efforts around COVID-19. Chenault described one unlikely partnership that had formed from this coalition—Ventec Life Systems and General Motors. Even with no manufacturing or healthcare experience, Chenault brought relentless passion to get involved in the COVID-19 fight, leading to these two companies building ventilators at one of GM’s facilities. Our skillset as general managers may have no greater value then it does today to bring together and lead more groups to fuel the change needed to fight this pandemic. Continued on page 08
MBA students issue a sincere plea to Fortune 500 CEOs: “Your decisions today matter.” Sarika Mendu, Contributor
Steve Moore, Contributor
Amy Villaseñor, Contributor As the COVID-19 crisis developed, we began hearing stories from front-line workers in
our communities about the fear they felt when going to work. Many of these workers are our grandmothers, neighbors, and friends. What saddened us most was that their voice was not being heard. For better or worse, we—as MBA students—do have a platform and an opportunity to lift their voice. We wrote this letter because we wanted corporate leaders to know that, as MBA students, we cared about their leadership during the present COVID-19 crisis. We will send this letter to the CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies to show our collective Continued on page 08
IN THIS ISSUE
Interview with Startup Corner: RTR Co-founder Dwelling Jenny Fleiss - page 05
Family Life during COVID-19 - pages 10-11
- page 06
Outsiders Fund’s Investment Theory - page 15
Mental Health Commencement Awareness Messages Month Special - page 16
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©Harvard Business School
From the Editor’s Desk Congratulations to the Class of 2020
Upoma Dutta, Editor-in-Chief
It’s that bittersweet month of the year, when we are caught between goodbyes and new beginnings. The RCs are wrapping up their first (roller coaster ride of a) year at HBS and hopefully planning to take a few weeks of break before their (virtual) internships over the summer. While understandably disappointed that their time at Aldrich was cut short, the ECs are hopefully excited about stepping back into the real world and becoming “leaders who make a difference in the world.” The COVID-19 crisis has brought an unprecedented level of challenge and confusion to our lives: a bleak job market, uncertainty over the format of
Fall classes, and constant health risks for us and our loved ones, to name just a few. However, if there is anything that our FIN1 and FIN2 classes have taught us, it is that risks are an inherent part of the world, and our true value is determined by our performance over a very longterm horizon (not just a few odd years). This issue presents many uplifting stories that make us see the silver linings from the crisis. Poorvi Vijay reports on the acts of leadership from HBS students to help the community around them deal with the crisis. Asha Tanwar shares insights from HBS alum and Rent the Runway co-founder Jennifer Fleiss on how graduating into a recession provided several of her classmates with the catalyst to their entrepreneurial pursuits. Tanishq Bhalla and Chuck Nadd explore different perspectives leading to the same conclusion:
the crisis presents an incredible opportunity for us to become better leaders. Lastly, this issue is special because it presents the final column from Professor Kevin Sharer. As Professor Sharer notes in his final column, writing over 50 columns for the Harbus was among the highlights of his time at HBS. Thank you, Professor Sharer, for educating and inspiring the community through your words over the years. We also want to thank our predecessor team, led by Gabriel Ellsworth and Ryo Takahashi, for exemplifying what the Harbus stands for: quality, integrity, teamwork, and openness to new ideas. The real world will definitely be a better place with these leaders. Going back to my point on long-term vision and perseverance, I leave you with Robert Frost’s poem, “Stopping
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by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year. He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound’s the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.
Congratulations, Class of 2020!
MBA
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PA G E T H R E E
LEADERSHIP IN COVID-19
Turning Crisis into an Opportunity HBS students rise up to lead the fight against COVID-19. Poorvi Vijay, Technology & Social Impact Editor The novel coronavirus pandemic may be the largest test of any leadership the world has ever witnessed. Every leader on the planet is facing the same potential threat. Every leader is reacting differently, in his or her own way. The students at Harvard Business School faced the same dilemma. For the first time in the history of the school, HBS switched to virtual learning and our ways of working changed the course. There was chaos, uncertainty and a future that seemed bleak in the near term. But crisis also tests our character, especially when there is no clear roadmap or tried-and-tested leadership principle but there is just an itch to contribute. Once a crisis is in motion, turning it into an opportunity requires new ways of seeing, thinking and responding—something we saw many of our classmates do. When the HBS MBA community was disappointed about the move to virtual classes, two former seatmates in New Section C—Raquel Schreiber and Brendan Lind (MBAs ’21)—immediately started planning adventures to bring smiles back to their classmates’ faces, from baking pancakes in Aldrich 109 to trying to organize a section quarantine commune. “But the world was hurting way more than we felt we were at HBS, and we knew our brain power and energy could be better spent focusing on helping rather than on pancakes,” the duo say. “We also knew our classmates are uniquely positioned to help.” The duo then started Community V COVID-19, a volunteer initiative empowering everyone in need or looking to give with the ability to get help, give help, and effectively donate money. They amplify high-quality resources by aggregating them on their website, use targeted digital advertising to get the right resources to the right people, and build solutions for communities when one does not already exist. Raquel’s hometown community was one of the first impacted by COVID-19 in the NYC area and she felt strongly about impending school closures. She knew many students did not have internet at home, so she spent the days before spring break
trying to get thousands of hotspots from major providers prior to the Boston and NYC public school closures. A more sustainable solution emerged: major providers like Comcast and Spectrum started offering free internet installations, but they realized that the people who needed the help often did not know where to look; the internet was too noisy. Brendan, who runs a digital agency called Human Agency, brought
matching platform built in partnership with Catalant, a Boston technology company led by Rob Biederman and Pat Petitti (MBAs ’14), that connects MBA students with projects that need MBA skills. “It has been inspiring to see how ready HBS students are to help others, especially because many students are facing personal challenges themselves,” the duo says. “We currently have more than 150 MBA students working
part of his team on board, volunteering to run targeted digital ads to the hard-to-reach people in communities that needed resources the most. “Growing fast, the platform has over 500 vetted resources, organized in a searchable, findable way across six needcategories across all 50 US states. We have deployed nearly $10,000 in donated and granted ad spend over the last four weeks to reach over 12,000 people who came to the site specifically to get help, volunteer, or donate,” the duo said. “We have about 25 student and professional volunteers dedicating real time to the effort, many of whom are HBS students.” This swift change to the community and campus experience left many other students wondering how they might be able to help. Two second-year MBA students, Amina Edwards and Sarika Mendu (MBAs ’20), felt that there had to be a way to put the talent and resources at HBS to use in a meaningful way. As a result, they created MBAs Fight COVID-19, a
on more than 30 projects, both here in Massachusetts and around the country.” Inspired by a series of COVID-19 conversations with Professor Mitch Weiss (AB ’99, MBA ’04) and their Public Entrepreneurship classmates, Becca Milian and Carmi Medoff (MBAs ’20) wanted to do something. Immediately after hearing about the stimulus program, they realized that many of their classmates would qualify and recognized an opportunity to connect their classmates with those most in need in the local Cambridge/ Boston community. Along with Chelsea Celistan (MBA ’20) and Kirsten Soong (MBA ’21), they launched the The MBA 1200, a fundraising campaign for students and others to support local residents, small business, and charitable organizations during these uncertain times. Initially inspired by the CARES Act, this initiative encourages students across the country to donate portions of their stimulus checks (or some monetary equivalent) to the cause they feel most
connected to. “This campaign is about positivity, inclusivity and the spirit of giving,” the team says. “What we’re trying to push people to do is to think about whether they can give $1 or $1,200 to something or someone they care about, whether that’s Boston Impact Initiative, their local food bank, or their grandparent.” To date, they have raised over $66,000 and recorded donations from students and faculty at HBS, Georgetown, Kellogg, Ross, and Wharton. Seeing the economic crises faced by local businesses, Rahim Noormohamed (MBA ’21) wanted to help. He started GIFTforward to help independent businesses survive the economic impact from the COVID-19 shutdown. Many small businesses and restaurants, in particular, are hit extremely hard right now. Due to the shutdown, many have zero revenue but still have bills to pay and people to employ. Rahim’s organization has the mission to help these businesses make it through this crisis by selling gift cards. “Today we are supporting over 70 businesses and have sold hundreds of gift cards, valued at roughly $30,000 in aggregate, for small business owners,” Rahim informs. “Most of our businesses are in Toronto, but we also have some in the US and Australia.” Personal experience and a desire to contribute to the fight against COVID-19 led to the formation of Livelyhood.io. “I posted to Facebook asking if friends from my hometown in hard-hit Bergen County, New Jersey, would be willing to do a grocery run so my father, who is in his 70s, would not have to,” Merrill Anovick (MBA ’21), one of the cofounders, recalls. “Another classmate’s mom shared how upset she was that our local town’s community center was ending its daily food service for the elderly. She wondered how these vulnerable people would get food. She thought there must be a better way. Over the course of a week, they assembled a team of other students, designers, and engineers to build a potential solution to the problem.” LivelyHood is a safe and simple platform that automatically connects healthy, young volunteers with elderly and immunocompromised individuals who need help running errands. “Our mission is to help diminish the impact of the pandemic by enabling the most vulnerable among us to stay safe in their homes,” the team says. “Today LivelyHood.io is live in Boston and open for volunteers to sign-up. Thus far we have had
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around 85 volunteers sign-up to complete errands for at-risk individuals. As we approach 100 volunteers, we plan to launch the second half of the platform to begin processing errand requests.” Seeing frontline staff struggle during this pandemic, Eric Slesinger (MBA ’21) wanted to help solve a critical problem. Working together with a team of engineers, doctors and designers, he launched hfdc.us—which aims to fill the gap in hospital shortages during COVID-19 by producing disposable face shields for standalone use and disposable visors for Powered Air Purifying Respirators (PAPR’s). “We’re using domestic material supply and manufacturers to make face shields and PAPR replacement lenses,” Eric informs. “We work with manufacturers for our day jobs, where we have learned how to speak their language, engineer for quick manufacturability, and find critical materials. We are fulfilling our second large order of face shields and are making weekly deliveries of PAPR replacement lenses to a handful of hospitals. We completed these deliveries thanks to generous support from early donors, including donations and advice from HBS classmates and professors.” In a matter of weeks, COVID-19 crisis has changed the way we live, work or think about the world. Coming to business school, none of us knew that we would be living in such unprecedented times. But they say, “MBA is what you make out of it,” and I am glad to see that many HBS students are leading with perseverance and trying to make the best of this situation—not just for themselves but for many around them. All these initiatives are always looking for volunteers—please reach out if you want to help.
Poorvi Vijay (MBA ’21) is an international student from India. She is a part of the Tech Club and was the CFO for WesTrek 2020. Prior to HBS, she worked at Amazon for four years across India and the UK. Her work at Amazon spanned across retail and international expansion in India to building voice experiences for Alexa in multiple geographies. An alum of IIT Guwahati, she has a background in UX design and product management, and she loves to talk about all things creative.
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ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Startup Corner: Lending a Virtual Hand to Homeowners Who Need a Fix
A technology-enabled service platform, Dwelling, is delivering free remote maintenance guidance for homeowners stuck at home during the current crisis. Nick Ornitz, Contributor
Shannon Kay, Contributor
Tell us more about your background and what inspired you to be an entrepreneur. Nick Ornitz (MBA ’21): For me, my first stint of “entrepreneurship” involved selling homemade bracelets in elementary school and later selling (and eating) dutch stroopwafel cookies for a family startup, American Pressed Bakery, in high school. Later as an engineering student at Cornell University, I was first introduced to the construction industry when I interned for Gilbane Building Company in New York. After graduation, I spent a few years at McKinsey where I focused on commercial topics for building solution businesses ranging from HVAC [Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning] to paint manufacturers. Through that experience, I came to see the challenges that both homeowners and service professionals face. Being surrounded by the entrepreneurial environment at HBS, I have been inspired to take action and leverage my past experience to solve a problem that faces society at large. Shannon Kay (MS/ MBA ’21): I grew up outside of Charlotte, NC and attended Clemson University where I majored in Industrial Engineering and fell in love with college football. Go Tigers! I spent a few years in Washington, DC as a technology consultant for Deloitte before moving to Boston to work on supply chain analytics at Wayfair. I loved the transition from a large- to midsized company and came to business school in part to explore entrepreneurship. I, too, always loved building things from a young age. My first “company” as a young child was selling homemade duct tape flip flops. What is the problem that you are trying to solve? Ask any homeowner what their biggest home-induced headaches have been, and the
answer will overwhelmingly be a sigh and a story involving anything from a leaky faucet to a flooded basement with some miscommunication with a contractor. It is no secret that homeowners have been frustrated with unexpected maintenance costs for years. Similarly, contractors will regale you with stories about how homeowners just don’t speak their language and how hard it is to find good leads. Dwelling aims to streamline the dual-sided home maintenance marketplace connecting homeowners with the services they need and equipping contractors with all the information they need to finish the job on the first visit. In our research, we found that more than 18% of new homeowners felt buyer’s remorse due to maintenance costs being more than expected and more than 42% of millennials are embarrassed by their lack of maintenance knowledge. You are not the only one if you relate to this! Ultimately, for homeowners the pain points boil down to (1) uncertainty over quality and price when finding a contractor due to information asymmetry and (2) a lack of time for finding, scheduling, and managing home maintenance. On the other side of the market, service professionals (1) suffer from the administrative burden of finding and scheduling jobs and (2) are dissatisfied with existing aggregators because they charge high fees for lowquality leads. In fact, more than 69% of reviews below three stars from service professionals cite increasingly expensive and low-quality lead-based fee structures as the primary reason for discontent. In context of the current pandemic, homeowners now face the added challenge of not being able to have contractors visit their home, and contractors are struggling to safely maintain income. What is your solution? Dwelling is a technologyenabled service platform that delivers automated and reliable home care through (1) remote maintenance diagnosis, and (2) a dedicated home manager. Remote diagnosis helps the homeowner solve simple repairs without a contractor, and when a professional is needed, diagnosis helps to mitigate the number of visits that contractors must make. All remote diagnosis takes is a
couple photos (or a video) as well as brief description and our network of experienced service professionals will provide the DIY steps to resolve an issue. For more complex issues that cannot be solved remotely, the dedicated home manager coordinates maintenance jobs end-toend, addressing homeowner information asymmetry and helping with logistical tasks. Given the current environment, we are offering free remote diagnosis as many homeowners cannot or do not want contractors entering their home. We hope this can help homeowners in need while also providing gig-economy sources of income to contractors. What was the inspiration behind your company/idea? Nick: I witnessed the need for a product like Dwelling in my own family growing up. My family was supported by a handyman, Angelo, who would take care of all home needs or find the right person for the job, much like Dwelling provides. Angelo became more than just a handyman. He became the go-to person for any home maintenance request and a mainstay in the household. I distinctly remember Angelo always saying “Sugar Honey Ice Tea” rather than “shit” around the house when I was a kid. Unfortunately, when Angelo retired, my mom endured the stress of finding various contractors for different home needs. Shannon: My dad works in textiles. During the 2008 recession, big furniture companies stopped buying as much fabric, and he had no other outlet through which to sell. Today, he continues to sell not only to big furniture companies but also direct-to-consumer through www.revolutionfabrics. com and on two-sided marketplaces like Wayfair, diversifying his business and minimizing his future downside risk. Through this, I came to see the value that marketplaces can provide for small business owners and independents. As we are surrounded by friends and family who are faced with the challenges of home maintenance, we hope to provide an “Angelo” to every homeowner struggling with home maintenance and a better marketplace opportunity for contractors looking for a way to earn a living.
Who is the team behind your startup? The founding team includes us as the co-founders, as well as Erik Ornitz [MBA ’18] in an advisory role. Erik provides years of entrepreneurial experience from his time as a two-time founder, a venture capital investor, and now Director of New Ventures at Tripadvisor. We also have Alina Clough and Brandon Audette who have been helping with website and product design. This summer we are excited to be working with Trevor Faulk as an operations intern. Providing valuable expertise, we have partnered with a small network of service professionals in Massachusetts. For advice, the team has had help from an incredible set of entrepreneurial advisors, Harvard faculty and other mentors through Harvard Rock Center and iLab. How did you get started? Nick had originally looked into starting up a related but slightly different idea in the past; at HBS, he picked up this idea by conducting numerous customer interviews ranging from homeowners to brokers to service professionals. Our philosophy from the start has been to truly understand the challenges both sides of the market face by hearing directly from the different stakeholders. As our market research expanded, we began to form Dwelling with a focus on alleviating challenges of home maintenance. Formally, we began working together in earnest in our second semester after getting to work together on class projects during the Fall.
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What’s next? We are rolling out Free Remote Diagnosis to all homeowners that could benefit from this during the current crisis. We are also beginning to grow our team and to operationalize the business with additional homeowners throughout the Spring and Summer of 2020. If you or someone you know could benefit from remote home diagnosis and would be willing to help us as a beta customer, please sign up on the Dwelling’s website at www.hellodwelling. com.
Nick Ornitz (MBA ’21) came to HBS after spending three years at McKinsey working with an array of building solution companies. He grew up in Connecticut and studied Chemical Engineering at Cornell. Whether it is a block tower that reached his childhood bedroom ceiling or his work on Dwelling, Nick has always had a passion for building. Shannon Kay (MS/MBA ’21) came to HBS after several years in technology consulting and analytics roles at Deloitte and Wayfair, respectively. Shannon grew up outside of Charlotte, NC and remains an avid Clemson football fan after obtaining her BS in Industrial Engineering there. She has a passion for technology, often experimenting through home projects to hone her technical skill set.
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ENTREPRENEURSHIP
The Silver Lining of Graduating from Business School during a Recession
Rent the Runway and Jetblack co-founder Jenny Fleiss (MBA ’09) talks with Asha Tanwar (MBA ’21) about starting a business in a recession, incubating businesses within a larger organization and why business school is the perfect opportunity to innovate. Asha Tanwar, Entrepreneurship Editor
Jenny Fleiss (MBA ’09) knows what it’s like to see friends’ and classmates’ job offers getting rescinded in the run-up to graduation date and a wary job market awaiting those looking to step into traditional Harvard Business School career paths. But despite all the doom and gloom of the last recession, it was also the moment in which Rent the Runway was born and as Fleiss notes in her recent blog post, the 2009 graduating class “set off a wave of entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School, with more students seeking to disrupt industries and pursue entrepreneurial dreams than ever before.” Much has been written about her time at Rent the Runway and how Fleiss, her co-founder Jenn Hyman (MBA ’09), and her team have taken the idea from campus trunk sales to its unicorn status (over $1 billion in valuation). So, in our recent chat, I decided to focus our time on Fleiss’ journey beyond Rent the Runway and where she hopes to go next as well as any advice and tips she has for aspiring fashion-tech entrepreneurs. “Rent the Runway was a dream opportunity and a perfect business-fit for me, but I had been there for eight-and-a-half years and was feeling ready for the next adventure,” Fleiss remarks regarding her decision to leave Rent the Runway in 2017 to join Walmart’s Store No. 8 incubator. “There certainly remain several opportunities to scale and expand the existing Rent the Runway business, including within supply chain and logistics, as well as international expansion and category expansion. You can always use a builder and innovator skillset in an existing business, but I knew my interest and passion lay in starting over and building new things from scratch.”
So, when Marc Lore, who had previously founded baby products retailer Diapers.com as well as e-commerce platform Jet.com, which Walmart bought for $3 billion in August 2016, approached Fleiss with a novel idea, she jumped at the chance. “I loved the idea of working with him and also the prospect of working within Walmart. Driving innovation within a huge retailer was a completely new challenge and I knew the impact it would have on Studio No. 8’s strategy for incubating subsequent businesses,” Fleiss says of her decision to build the Jetblack team alongside Lore.
In some ways, Jetblack, a $50-a-month subscription program, which combined human and artificial intelligence to offer product recommendations, was a template-project for future Studio No.8 ventures. “We were very focused on what the Jetblack experience would mean for the template Walmart launched in the future and how start-ups could plug into the wider Walmart ecosystem,” Fleiss explains. Starting a company within an incubator is a challenge very different from the scrappy Rent the Runway start-up story and Fleiss agrees that the parameters for defining success between the two start-ups were very different. “Defining success for Jetblack was not only about revenue and profit but also about landing on a core strategy for scaling incubated start-ups,” Fleiss notes. “The Walmart
team were always keen to adopt the key learnings from the Jetblack model into their future endeavours.” Reflecting on the challenges and the differences between her time at Rent the Runway and Jetblack, Fleiss highlights the importance of keeping the broader corporation in mind as an ‘in-house’ entrepreneur. “You have to integrate within the broader culture of the company as you need to be cognizant of what the organization requires to see in terms of progress and what that means for how you grow the business.” Fleiss elaborates on the key challenges she faced at Jetblack, including the intentional speed of growth. “Sometimes things move slower because you have to validate and be able to show the path you intend to take to senior management. There are often more milestones and deliverables as tangible results are critical to taking the organization with you through each stage of business development.” “It is vital to understand who you need to get buy-in from,” Fleiss adds. “You have to be able to consistently satisfy the larger organization’s definition of success.” That said, there are also benefits that come from being funded by one of the biggest companies in the US and Fleiss admits that, even though the timing was a taxing constraint, the capital was not. Jetblack was absorbed back into Walmart earlier this year and Walmart company spokesperson Ravi Jariwala informed CNBC that “58 of Jetblack’s 350 employees will be integrated into the retailer’s conversational commerce technology team”. “The three-year journey at Jetblack added a lot more to my skillset in terms of data and machine-learning,” Fleiss reflects. “I loved the ‘new-ness’ of the challenge and still advise the team as they continue their integration into Walmart.” Fleiss is strongly positive when I ask about her experience with two very different co-
founders at Rent the Runway and Jetblack, respectively, and how she would compare them. “Marc and Jenn are both really big strategic thinkers and can rally people around them in support of their vision,” Fleiss says. “I can execute and my strength lies in taking things from A to B, and so the skills I bring to the table are very complementary to theirs.” “I learnt so much more from being around them and learning as a partner rather than as a boss—that is, the ‘learn by doing’ part, which has been very important to me,” Fleiss adds. Fleiss wrote about how the “optimist and introvert in [her] has come to appreciate aspects of the Corona Craze” and “with the many things off-limits, life is simpler giving [her the] time to process and think about the bigger picture” in her blog post. I am very interested in finding out more about what she’s been exploring and we move on to discuss her plans going forward. Firstly, Fleiss asserts that despite the move to Jetblack, she remains heavily involved with Rent the Runway as an advisor and admits that the business is “very much a part of [her] heart and soul”. “I still want to take time off,” Fleiss says of her plans. “Business school was once that valuable white space where I was intellectually stimulated and had time to look into the things happening in the world, to then pursue the next thing with focused and directed awareness.” In the meantime, Fleiss is supporting start-ups and focusing on giving back by advising both entrepreneurs and selected funds. “I want to leverage my experience and support the next wave of industry disruptors and entrepreneurs—there are more opportunities now than ever and I am excited to see how the retail market develops.” I ask Fleiss for the advice she would like to share with aspiring entrepreneurs, especially as we are all stuck indoors with limited opportunities to interact with would-be consumers in person. “There are still many
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different ways to test ideas,” Fleiss insists. “I am looking forward to seeing the transition that excellent entrepreneurs make in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis or existing businesses that can successfully pivot despite the challenges.” As many other entrepreneurs I have had the privilege of interviewing have highlighted, Fleiss also emphasizes the importance of making the most of your time at business school. “Business school is an opportunity to extend the time you spend with people. As a student, you have more white space than you otherwise would to connect with people, so take the moment to think about interesting concepts to debate and use the time and experience during quarantine to make it a more authentic and valuable experience.” One thing we both agree on is that the crisis would certainly separate the entrepreneurial people from others. “There are more than enough problems out there to solve, it’s about being scrappy enough to test which ones are worth pursuing,” Fleiss agrees. I, for one, am very excited to see what innovations emerge during and after the COVID-19 crisis and how we leverage our collective action going forward, and as Fleiss eloquently concludes in her blog post, “I am hopeful for this chapter in history and our generation of creative problem solvers who will be put to the test to trail blaze how to make lemons into lemon tea.”
Asha Tanwar (MBA ’21) is from London. Prior to HBS, she worked in investment banking before switching to a supply-chain logistics startup in London. She was once training to become a professional ballerina, but changed her mind on that pointe.
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SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT
Winning off the Court In a virtual fireside chat with the Business of Sports Club, Boston Celtics President Rich Gotham shares how smart business decisions helped the franchise find its way back to prominence. Upoma Dutta, Editor-in-Chief
To say that the 1990s were disappointing for the Boston Celtics fans would be an understatement. While the Celtics bagged 16 championships—the highest of any NBA team— up to 1986, the 1990s were the first decade when the team walked away without a single championship. The streak of losses on court had started to exhaust the patience of even the most ardent Celtics fans, hurting attendance in home games in a town still dominated by the Red Sox. In professional sports, home-game attendance and franchise revenue were often correlated with team success; so, the Celtics’ losses on the court limited the franchise’s ability to spend on players, perpetuating a vicious cycle of losing. In a couple of years after the turn of the century, a group of private equity veterans, led by Wyc Grousbeck, bought the Celtics for $350 million and soon brought in Rich Gotham, a tech industry veteran, to run business operations. The Celtics’ new owners and executives were united by their common vision of tapping into the franchise’s “very under-managed, under-leveraged assets.” Since joining the Celtics in 2003 and becoming its President in 2006, Gotham spearheaded a series of business initiatives that increased the franchise revenue by over 300 percent. As of 2020, Forbes estimates that the franchise value has increased roughly 10 times to $3.1 billion. Under Gotham’s leadership, the Celtics also set new records for attendance ticket sales, sponsorship, merchandise sales, and television ratings during the team’s first NBA championship in 22 years in 2008. How Gotham and the Boston Celtics broke the vicious cycle of losing was as much a result of smart business decisions as a result of on-court team performance. “From the onset, our goal was to build a recession-proof business—a business that will be profitable regardless of whether the team was winning or losing,” says Gotham, in a Zoom fireside chat with roughly 100 Business of Sports Club members at HBS. “By positioning ourselves well on the business side, we were able to add roughly $150 million to our team’s player payroll and acquire star players like Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, and Ray Allen. This wasn’t something losing teams did at that time.” This iconoclast attitude was a fundamental tenet of Gotham’s turnaround plan. Contrary to how NBA franchises were run at the time, Gotham invested in building data architecture and customer relationship management (CRM) systems to gain market
insights. “The Celtics had no real understanding of who was sitting in the stadium and what that person really wanted from the fan experience. So, one of the ‘aha’ moments was when we sent out a simple survey to our fans to understand the importance of winning to the overall fan experience. You would think that winning was the most important thing for a fan in Boston but the survey results showed that winning actually ranked sixth or seventh on the list of things that fans cared most about. “What mattered most to fans was the overall entertainment value of going to the games, and so we invested time and resources to improve fans’ driveway-todriveway experience. We reevaluated every small factor— from the scoreboard video technology to the concession menu—that impacted the fans’ experience, and we made smart decisions by relying on data.” Now big data is used to not only optimize player performance but also inform major business decisions. One such application has been in yield management and dynamic pricing. “When you are running a sports business, you only have a finite amount of
assets. You have only 82 games a year, about 19,000 seats and only so many sponsorship spots. So, you really have to maximize yield against finite assets in order to grow. “We were one of the early adopters of dynamic pricing. Our ticket pricing now is based on a real-time algorithm that allows us to set the right price for the right customer for the right game against the right opponent. In this way, we are able to balance supply and demand and maximize our yield.” Gotham also attributes part of his success with the business turnaround to the team culture at the Celtics. “The NBA franchises can have vastly different cultures. In many franchises, the business and basketball operations have little overlap, and this separation of the church and the state can lead to suboptimal results. I was lucky to be part of a team where the owners understood that the business and basketball operations [led by Celtics GM Danny Ainge] should work closely together—such as in marketing—to deliver the best possible results.” While the coronavirus has led to a prolonged off-season for
all sports franchises, Gotham and his team remain busy preparing for a comeback whenever that might be. “We want to keep our players ready for the competition when games resume. At the same time, we are planning out different scenarios of what the rest of this season might look like, what form we are coming back in and whether we are playing in front of fans or not. If we have to put 19,000 people back into the arena, we may need to re-imagine the way we operate, in order to make it safe for fans to come back.” Despite the challenges posed by coronavirus, Gotham thinks that these uncertain times could fuel resourcefulness and creativity in different operational areas. “Due to the lockdown, our scouts have not been able to travel; we cannot bring in players for workouts; the NCAA tournament got cancelled. But it’s incredible how much video data our scouts have at their fingertips today. To some extent, the video data allows us to prepare for opponents and prepare for the draft even during a lockdown. “Also, if we resume games but not in front of fans, we might see interesting experimentation
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with new broadcast formats and camera angles. The appetite for experimentation has been limited since we have to forgo revenuegenerating seats to provide room for a number of cameras to capture different angles. So, an empty arena could lead to more innovation on those fronts.”
Upoma Dutta (MBA ’21) came to HBS after spending roughly four years in the media and entertainment industry in New York, where she helped two media companies (HBO and Disney) transition into the streaming era and build on new strategic growth opportunities. Originally from Bangladesh, she also worked for the International Finance Corporation (World Bank Group) early in her career to promote financial inclusion and financial sector stability in South Asia. She holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from The Institute of Business Administration, University of Dhaka.
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SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT
Joe Maddon Shares Leadership Lessons with HBS MBAs
In a virtual visit, the World Series Champion manager reflects on baseball, art in the game, the Respect 90 foundation, and more.
Billy Tabrizi, SA Chief Strategy Officer When the planning began in January, the Harvard Business School Student Association and Respect 90 could hardly imagine the circumstances under which the virtual visit would take place. Months later, it would turn out that the virtual visits Joe Maddon pioneered in Major League Baseball would become the norm for almost all of society. Students at HBS know the best leadership lessons come not only from academic literature but also from real-world experience in a variety of fields. Hearing from Joe Maddon, an MLB manager who has competed— and won-—at the highest level of sports gave MBAs a rare glimpse into the process and mindset it takes to excel. On a Friday afternoon in late April, Joe Maddon, Manager of
the Los Angeles Angels spoke with about 150 HBS MBAs, taking on almost 90 minutes of Q&A. Students learned how he thought about big picture topics, such as the balance of art and analytics, and more tactical leadership lessons, like resolving differences. On the latter, Maddon shared simple, yet powerful leadership advice, such as getting to know the individual on a personal basis, rather than just about baseball. Trevor Hill (MBA ’20) shared, “It was a special opportunity to hear from one of Major League Baseball’s most respected managers. Two things really stood out to me from what he shared about his leadership philosophy—that the foundation for leadership is building strong relationships with everyone on your team and that diversity is truly a source of strength.” Maddon also answered fun speed-round questions, like what wine he would drink if he were only allowed one type of wine
for the rest of his life. “It would have to be something in the $50$75 range so I could have it every day.” His selection? Chappellet Signature Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon 2015. Don’t buy it all at once! Maddon talked in depth about his Respect 90 foundation, led by Executive Director Rick Vaughn. He shared some of the inspiration for the organization, along with his thoughts on giving back and the importance of someone assuming a leadership role. The foundation itself focuses on helping children and families, and MLB fans will love its two great baseball references. First, the slogan “respect begins at home” is an obvious nod to the home plate in baseball. Additionally, the name “Respect 90” itself is a reference to the 90 feet between bases. Maddon has previously said, “Respect 90 represents the 90 feet from home plate to first base. I want my players to run hard all the time to first place.”
Looking forward, many MBAs felt there was a lot to learn even though they may not be MLB managers themselves. Mike Sobolewski (MBA ’20) shared, “There are surprisingly a lot of experiences that Joe has had on the baseball field that we can apply to our own careers moving forward.” Jesse Bendit (MBA ’20) shared, “Joe was incredibly generous with his time, even seeming willing to do it again, which I’m sure we would all welcome. No surprise he has been so generous with his time helping children and families build confidence and communities through Respect 90. It was great to hear about Joe’s view of the joy of baseball, the role of data analytics, his career turns, and his part in iconic moments—from Evan Longoria taking TB to the playoffs and to, of course, the end of a 108-year-old Chicago curse.” After the interview, Maddon shared final reflections on
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Twitter, reiterating his ageold (and important) lesson to trust the process, saying, “Hey Harvard Business ....thanks for the invite....had great time with our exchange....looking forward to getting back to Fenway...always eventful, fun, exhilarating ....hope to actually visit on Campus at some point.....#TheProcessIsFearless” Let’s hope Fenway is open to welcome Joe Maddon and the rest of the Angels soon enough.
Billy Tabrizi (MBA ’20) is Co-Editor of Satire for the Harbus. He co-runs the “Dear Harby” Instagram account and satire-related events on campus. Sometimes (albeit rarely) he can be serious, as shown here. Billy serves as Chief Strategy Officer for the SA and CFO of Tech Club. He’s a proud, loud Chicagoan too!
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LEADERSHIP IN COVID-19
HBS Fights Back against COVID-19 Continued from cover Never let a good crisis go to waste Even though COVID-19 is new, crisis management is not. Juliette Kayyem (AB ’91, JD ’95), Professor at Harvard Kennedy School, walked us through the five stages of crisis management: protection, prevention, (the crisis), response, adaptive recovery, and resiliency. Currently, most nations around the world find themselves in the response stage with eyes on how to move towards adaptive recovery. As we may have to live through this cycle multiple times due to the threat of multiple waves, nations like the USA have much to learn around protection and prevention from nations that have thus far been more successful in stopping the spread of the virus. Multinational companies are already leveraging lessons from their operations that were hard hit in China to best prepare for the virus as it reaches other countries they operate in. Revathi Advaithi, CEO of Flex, spoke to this firsthand since she dealt with the virus’s effects on Flex’s Chinese operations in January. Through the process of reopening these factories, she and her team created a comprehensive re-opening and prevention playbook that detailed steps each
facility should incorporate to reopen and best contain the spread of the virus. This playbook has helped her organization get 90% of their Chinese workforce back and working in as safe an environment as possible with measures such as regular temperature scans and PPE (personal protective equipment) available for all employees. Now, they turn to leveraging this playbook to get them back up and running in Italy. The new world will look different Dani Rodrik (AB ’79), Economist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, speculates that this crisis will lead to many economic and fiscal policies being revisited and changed. There has already been an unprecedented monetary and fiscal response of trillions of dollars, including actions like sending checks directly to Americans. Now after this first wave of checks sent, policies like Universal Basic Income will start to see more light among many others. Healthcare is also in for a major change. Robert Huckman (PhD ’01), Faculty Chair of the Health Care Initiative, hopes that the urgency of the crisis will lead to a more flexible U.S. health care system in the future. This could involve quicker adoption of new
technologies like telemedicine, broader scope of practice for non-physician providers, and greater coordination across provider organizations. In the pandemic, we have seen many liberties granted around testing locations (i.e., parking lots) and who conducts these tests. Americans will question if we should again restrict these liberties once the pandemic is over or if more healthcare services should continue to be allowed outside the hospital and performed by workers with lower qualifications. As far as recovery expectations for the economy, we should be cautious of expecting a V-shaped rebound. Carmen Reinhart, Professor of International Finance at the Harvard Kennedy School, believes we should be preparing for more of an elongated U-shaped recovery. “A big reason for this is that the progression of the pandemic has not been synchronous worldwide.” We have a global economy that is very dependent on the movement of people and objects across many countries. Unfortunately, this means that the local economy may struggle to rebound even after the virus itself has been eliminated from here. A jam-packed day of sessions
left us much better informed of the magnitude of the COVID-19 crisis and the important role business leaders have in the coming months. However, there remained an elephant in the room that an RC student was forward enough to ask Dr. Jha: “What is the likelihood of school being in-person in the fall?” Dr. Jha, hesitant to take a firm stance, instead focused on two realities that need to be present for classes to resume in their pre-COVID form. “We need the amount of active infections to be really, really low or for high immunity across the community.” Alas, it was not a very revealing answer but the most a health expert can credibly say about the state of the world months away. Regardless of the situation come fall, we have found ourselves with more time on our hands than we expected. Whether we use this time to fortify our own skills, give back to the community, or reflect more on career goals, I encourage us all to use our time with intentionality. After all, one day we will all be asked, “How did you spend your time during the COVID-19 crisis?” If you are interested in getting involved, here is a short list of nonprofits operating at both global and national levels in the fight against COVID-19:
Global UN Foundation for the World Health Organization COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund (www. unfoundation.org) International Medical Corps (www.internationalmedicalcorps. org) International Rescue Committee (www.rescue.org) National American Red Cross (www. redcross.org) CDC Foundation (www. cdcfoundation.org) Feeding America (www. feedingamerica.org) World Central Kitchen (www. wck.org) Off Their Plate (https:// offtheirplate.org/)
Tanishq Bhalla (MBA ’21) grew up in Boston, MA and has primarily worked in product and business development roles in the B2B technology space. Prior to joining HBS, Tanishq worked at Cisco Systems for four years where he specialized in various technologies across the Cybersecurity and Cloud Computing landscape. Tanishq graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) with a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering.
An Open Letter to Business Leaders from MBA Students Continued from cover belief that they have the resources to give all employees, especially those who are more vulnerable, the dignity they deserve. *** On March 10, Valeria returned from the cleaning products aisle, visibly shaken. As she was replenishing the shelves for others, a customer had unleashed a tirade of abuse, mistakenly accusing her of hoarding the toilet paper. She was frustrated, but this moment was lowest on her list of worries. Valeria—a 64-year-old front-line Walmart employee in Georgia—had yet to receive any guidance from management regarding COVID-19, two months after the first U.S. diagnosis. Her diabetes put her at high risk of becoming very sick from the virus. Yet, Valeria knew, if she missed work, she would accumulate “points” that could lead to her getting fired. Valeria’s story has become common in large corporations across the country. Although Walmart has offered its employees unlimited unpaid days off through April, most cannot afford to forgo wages, leaving them unprotected and uninformed about the risks they
face. As Fortune 500 CEOs, you face urgent, difficult choices. You must set the tone for the corporate world’s collective response to COVID-19 by caring foremost for those closest to home—your employees. Doing so will strengthen long-term financial performance, investor support, customer loyalty, and future employee engagement. More importantly, it is the moral imperative in times of crisis. WHAT LEADERS CAN DO Put your employees first now. Retain them, re-deploy them if needed, and most importantly, pay them. Communicate routinely, candidly and, if possible, daily. Reduce your own wages before reducing theirs. If you must lay off employees, extend their health coverage and cover their premiums. Many executives have already shown courageous leadership during this crisis. CEOs from Alaska Air, Lyft, and GE are foregoing or donating their salaries; Starbucks has committed to paying all workers for 30 days, regardless of whether they are able to come to work; Best Buy announced it would continue to pay all of its employees through April
18, even as its stores are closed except for order pickups. NO ORDINARY RECESSION With lives and livelihoods on the line, it matters to our collective health and safety how we care for our most vulnerable. Front-line workers are the heroes of this crisis, keeping the nation supplied with food, medicine, gasoline, information, and more. Provide them with employment policies that ensure their protection, safeguarding not only their own well-being but also that of the public they serve. The stakes for corporate decision-making have never been higher. By allocating $500 billion to corporations and keeping borrowing rates low, our government has passed the baton to corporate leadership. Now, it is your turn to prove to America that capitalism can be resilient in the face of an extended lockdown. It is your turn to show that managers and CEOs can leverage their influence and resources to benefit their own front-line employees, for whom a $1,200 stimulus check is no safety net. We don’t take our ask lightly. Any additional cost is daunting while company survival is at stake. Yet the cost of inaction is
higher. Choices made today will define your reputation—both now and in the future. Prospective employees will ask: “Did your company do all it reasonably could to protect the health, safety, and security of your customers and employees?” Institutional investors who already demand adherence to high environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards, will be particularly attuned to how you treat employees during this pandemic. Employees will pay back the care and compassion they are shown. MIT Sloan School of Management Professor Zeynep Ton’s book The Good Jobs Strategy draws a direct line from the value of employee engagement, training and compensation to long-term financial performance. Even in the best of times, customers reward organizations that do right by their employees. Given the uncertainty of tomorrow, doubling-down on supporting your people today is the best way to serve all of your organization’s stakeholders. VALERIA’S CHOICE The end of Valeria’s shift brought her peace of mind, albeit temporarily. Her choice to show
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up each day was a perilous tradeoff between health and financial stability. With few employment alternatives, she knew voluntarily leaving her job was risky. But to what extent was her employer putting her life and that of her elderly husband in danger? Bold leadership in moments of crisis can inspire millions. Your employees need timely information, sustainable compensation, meaningful sick leave policies, and healthcare even if temporarily furloughed. Support your staff. Valeria needs you. We all do. Yours, 1000+ MBA students and counting from Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Columbia, Sloan, Booth, Haas, Kellogg, Darden, Anderson, Yale, Stern, Tuck, Ross, Duke, Tepper, and many more.
Amy Villaseñor, Sarika Mendu, and Steve Moore (MBAs ’20) are three second-year students at HBS. Collectively they have experience in both the public and private sectors but their greatest similarities lie in the impetus for this letter.
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INDUSTRY INSIGHTS
Payments Industry Powering the E-Commerce Market Umang Sota (MBA ’21) shares the innovation journey of Checkout.com, an online payments platform. Umang Sota, Contributor
In my previous article, “Retail Apocalypse: Is This It?” (Harbus, February 2020), I wrote about how the global e-commerce players are bringing us the joy of shopping for stuff from all around the world while sitting on our comfy couch. The global e-commerce industry has been growing at approximately 20% year-on-year for the last few years and is expected to reach $5 trillion by 2021, according to eMarketer’s 2019 Global E-commerce Report. In this piece, I want to dive into the payment industry which is instrumental in driving the phenomenal growth in e-commerce. While it may be just a click of a button for us to buy something online, for a long time accepting online payments has been the most arduous challenge for e-commerce players. The value chain from the buyer to the retailer has various intermediaries such as banks and card networks, and each layer has individual standards, regulations, and costs associated with it. In addition, given that it’s all virtual, retailers have to add checks to verify the buyer and assume any risk of fraud. The requirements become even more complicated when transactions are crossborder. All this essentially means that any online business needs to have extensive expertise like that of financial services firms including user verification, credit risk management, and compliance. These challenges and the rise of online commerce have given way to startling innovation in the online payments space. We all know about the emerging companies in the US but one of the billiondollar superstars we, at HBS, may not have heard about is “Checkout.com”. Checkout. com is based out of London, UK and is leading the innovation in the online payment space. On a Zoom call with me, Guillaume Pousaz, CEO of Checkout.com, explains, “Think of Checkout.com as the person behind the curtain making the show between the e-commerce merchant and the buyer work. We provide a unified technology solution to make the process of accepting payments easy, reliable, and
efficient for online merchants.” What this means is that Checkout.com as a technology payments processor manages the innumerable layers on behalf of online merchants for a fee (usually a percentage of total transaction costs). This model is typically referred to as Unified Payment Processing. It allows companies like Checkout.com to provide a single platform to merchants, offering payment gateway, processing and acquiring services via a single integration. This simplifies the process for global e-commerce brands that operate in a number of different jurisdictions as they do not have to maintain relationships with card networks or banks or worry about any regulatory compliance requirements. The Unified Payment Processing model has become widely popular since 2010 and is leveraged by various companies including PayPal and Stripe. Checkout.com has taken this model and built a comprehensive service platform for its online merchants. Pousaz explains, “We started with taking financial aspects and risks away from our customers—giving them the time to focus on building their business. But now we are helping our customers with data-driven insights to drive more revenue and higher
conversion.” And what about competition? Pousaz emphasizes his company’s unique strength is “a single platform across more than 50 markets while even the largest banks and payment processors still have country- or regionwise platforms which add friction to aspects like currency conversion, driving insights for merchants from these global transactions.” Checkout.com’s go-tomarket strategy is another source of its competitive strength. Checkout.com has focused on deployment ease and speed to ensure that developers, as its primary customers, love its product. It has designed its organization with a technology focus. Today, Checkout.com has over 700 employees globally, and twothirds of these employees are in tech-focused product and engineering teams. The merit of Checkout. com’s value proposition and strategy is evident in its startling valuation of $2 billion. It achieved the unicorn status in its first funding round in May 2019, where it raised a Series A of $230 million. Unlike many of its peers within the space, the business had scaled to the status completely organically, growing at 30% annually with almost no churn.
Pousaz claims in a LinkedIn post, “We spent our first few years laying the foundation for our product and reinvesting every single dollar back into the business.” He refers to this process as ‘bootstrapping.’ “Bootstrapping a business means being lean—making tough decisions, hiring one employee at a time, making every resource count, and where mistakes are costly.” But you will be surprised (or maybe not) to know that it all started with surfing in Los Angeles. During his early life, Pousaz moved from Switzerland to LA in search of wonderful surfing waves and joined a small payment company there. It was during this time that he got interested in the payment industry. After that, he kept looking for the right opportunity, and he found one in 2009 when he came across a small start-up that had built a payment gateway. He convinced them to work with him and move to the UK to work on what we know now as Checkout.com. The UK has always been known as a finance hub, but Pousaz’s decision to invest in the UK even after Brexit is certainly an encouraging trend for the country. Over the last few years, the British government has invested in various initiatives like
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TechNation, a national network of tech entrepreneurs, investors, and talent to attract tech innovation. In Pousaz’s view, “The UK has offered us great talent and open regulation, and we see a commitment from the UK towards innovation. The Shoreditch tech scene has developed dramatically over the last few years. Even the UK financial regulators are pushing for disruption.” Checkout.com has already opened 10 international offices but continues to grow its team in the UK as its headquarters. Pousaz is very bullish about the growth prospects of Checkout. com not only in the UK but worldwide. He shares, “We see two growth pillars: one is focused on geographical expansion and another on product line extension.” Checkout.com already has acquiring licenses in the UK and France and seeks to expand the licenses and its suite of services in all core markets. In terms of the product line, Checkout.com has ambitions to be a much bigger financial services solution provider. In Pousaz’s words, “We may not become a full bank, but we want to have a majority of the GMV [gross merchandise value] of our customers flowing through us including treasurer solution, payout/disbursement, risk management, and other value-added services.” As Checkout.com takes a larger share of its customer’s wallet while also increasing its customer base from new and existing markets, expanding its customer ecosystem is only going to propel the organization forward into much bigger market opportunities. What’s exciting for us at HBS is that with this growth, Checkout. com presents great career opportunities for brilliant MBA students looking to be part of the disruption in the FinTech space.
Umang Sota (MBA ’21) is originally from India and has worked in product and business development roles in the B2B technology space across Asia and Europe. Prior to joining HBS, Umang was the Global Head of Product for Tata Communications’ Cloud & Data Center Services based out of London. In addition to technology, she is passionate about early education and has taken on active leadership roles in projects around education for the last 10+ years across India, Singapore, and the United Kingdom.
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PARTNER & COMMUNITY
Life of HBS Families during COVID-19 Four RC families give us a glimpse into their lives in the period of pandemic. Anja Do, Partner & Community Editor With the abrupt shift to online classes at HBS in the week preceding the Spring Break and other changes in the wider Boston-Cambridge community, many families at HBS had found themselves having to adjust and adapt to this new reality. Almost overnight, their children’s schools and daycares shut down and these parents had to quickly rearrange their daily schedules and routines to accommodate all aspects of family life—work, school, and childcare. It has been roughly two months since the shutdown and I reached out to four families of RC students to find out how this transition affected them. Despite coming from very different backgrounds, including having children of different ages, the four families shared many common challenges as well as delights during these strange times. Prior to COVID-19, HBS students with families would begin their day much earlier than most of their classmates. For Arpit Srivastava (MBA ’21, Section F) and Luqzan Mustafa Kamal (MBA ’21, Section I), their families would start the day as early as 6 to 7am, in time for the family to have breakfast after which everyone would be off to their daily schedule. Arpit would take turns with his wife, Victoria, to take their five-yearold daughter Olivia to school at Morse Elementary School in Cambridge, while Luqzan would walk his two children, Eijaz and Dania, to a bus stop to get to their elementary, the KennedyLongfellow School. Both fathers would then head to their classes, while their wives would spend the morning with their youngest child. Victoria, a very active mother of two, loved taking walks with her little daughter, Sophie, as far as 4-5 miles every day. Sarah, Luqzan’s wife, usually spent the mornings with her youngest son, Maliq, in playgrounds with playdates and walking along the river. Prior to the lockdown, both families have spent the majority of their days being at school, being outdoors, running errands and only returning home in the afternoon or after sunset. Now that they have to stay home for the entire day, they admit that this is one of the hardest changes to adapt to. Dominique Lacassie (MBA ’21, Section C) and Ashley Chang (MBA ’21, Section I)—who live on campus and have younger kids—would drop off their kids at the SFP Harvard-affiliated child care before heading to class.
Dominique and her husband, an MBA student at Babson College, would take turns to pick up their daughter, 19-month-old Elisa, in the afternoon around 4pm after her naps and snacks with friends. Ashley and her husband, James, would also take turns to bring their four-year-old son, Jonas, from and to daycare, but their schedule was less flexible given James’ full-time job. As soon as the school announced that the classes would be virtual and the lockdown policy was enforced across Massachusetts, the families faced the most immediate concern: How will the HBS students take classes from home with the children around? In Dominique’s household, she and her husband had to figure out a way for both of them to attend their online classes and still take care of Elisa. Fortunately, their class schedules do not clash every day and therefore whoever is not in class takes over the responsibility of taking care of their baby. Though a few times a week, when Dominique has to take her daughter to attend classes with her, she admits that it is not easy. “When I have to be with her during my classes, it can be pretty stressful. She is a great baby, but she is only one and half years old. Kids of her age don’t play a lot by themselves so I feel bad that I am looking at a computer and not paying attention to her. Also with her around, I try to listen as much as possible to the class discussion but I cannot add much value to the conversation.” What has been helpful and encouraging, however, is the response she has received from her classmates and the faculty. “Everybody is messaging me on Zoom, ‘Oh, she is so cute! It is so nice to see her! She made my day!’ Those kinds of messages really make me feel better. One of the professors was super understanding and wrote me a long email saying how this is the new normal. It was amazing that he was so empathetic.” Ashley and James, on the other hand, have divided their child care shifts to mornings with daddy and afternoons with mummy. James works remotely for a VC based in California and therefore begins most of his days around noon when it is about 9am in the West Coast. Luckily, HBS has rearranged the RC schedules to be more manageable with 2 cases per day and therefore most classes are now taking place in the morning. Even with this arrangement, there are occasions when Ashley still needs to bring both of her children to class. On those days, she just surrenders. “I just don’t know how to take the class at all. I’m holding the kids and that is my signal to the professor—
Don’t cold call me! Especially because I have two children, it is hard to handle.” On the bright side, Ashley was never a full-time mother before. Up to now, she was always working while her children were either in school or with the caregiver. In her own words, she feels that “this is forcing me to really experience that. I always admired a full time mom so now is the opportunity for me to feel what that is like.” Both Luqzan and Arpit are facing different kinds of
our girls come in and out of the bedroom, and during class, he can hear them screaming and crying, just a few meters away from him in the next room.” In spite of his wife’s concerns, Arpit is positive about the entire lock-down situation, sharing that his learning experience was less impacted by the presence of his children but more by the set-up of remote learning. “I’m struggling to stay engaged during a Zoom call. It’s very easy for me to open another tab on the computer and start
Eijaz and Dania, started virtual learning in the morning, I also became the tech guy who helped them set up for their classes. After a while, it became more fluid. So now I would just step out if anyone needs my help. I let the kids join some of the classes as well.” And the mute function on Zoom makes a difference too. Luqzan likes this function because it allows his children to be only seen on screen but not heard through the class. With all of their children now back at home, I was curious
challenges while studying from home, even with the help from their wives who are full-time stay-at-home mothers. When they first moved to Cambridge, Victoria and Arpit
looking at something that is not related to my course. Whereas when you are in a physical classroom, it’s very different; you are engaged and time flies by through those 80 minutes.”
to learn how the parents are handling homeschooling and ensuring that the kids keep up to date with their learning curriculum. Luqzan’s older children,
moved into a two bedroom apartment assuming Arpit would only study at school or in the library. But now in the COVID-19 time, Victoria sympathizes with her husband’s situation “He does not have a private space. He has to study in the bedroom, right beside our daughters’ toys. It’s distracting because sometimes
Luqzan took a more radical approach in his first week of online classes to make sure that his learning time was completely separated from his family time. “I locked myself up in the bedroom to stay concentrated in the class. After the first week, I realized I needed to help Sarah out with the children. When my oldest,
Eijaz and Dania, have received a Chromebook from their teachers and receive daily homework which they submit online. Every morning they also join their classes through Google Meet videos and have to complete this year’s curriculum in order to join the next Grade when the school reopens in Fall. As their
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M AY 2 0 2 0 Continued from page ten mornings are now dedicated to online learning, Sarah jokingly shares with me, “I designated each area in the house. The children’s bedroom is their school, our bedroom is Harvard University and our living room is the preschool for our youngest son, Maliq. I’m practically the Principal in the house now. Everyone else is a student in our family.” For little Olivia, her teachers send daily communication to her parents via an app. She can then complete English and Math exercises on the app as well. As Olivia is only five years old, the school does not make these exercises compulsory and leaves it to the parents’ discretion to go through the exercises with their kids. Despite trying their best, both Arpit and Victoria definitely feel the lockdown has taken a hit on Olivia’s learning. “It’s been hard to get Ollie to focus on her school work,” Victoria says. “She does not have a schedule that she must follow or homework she has to submit so it is not very effective. Because I am also the primary caretaker of the younger sister, Ollie cannot get my attention to do her school work when her little sister is around.” Ashley faces the same practical challenge with her son Jonas and his one-year-old brother, Clement, though she is grateful that he is only four years old and does not have to make real academic progress. His school took two to three weeks to figure out the online curriculum but it works very well for her son. “Jonas has a lot of Zoom meetings, like Zoom story time once a week and Zoom circle time with his friends twice a week. And he is always looking forward to it.” In fact, all the parents have observed that their children miss socializing with their friends. When asked what she misses the most, Olivia said, “I miss playing with my friends in school. I really want to go back.” Just like their HBS parents, the children are also using online platforms to keep in touch with friends. Despite all the challenges of social distancing and homeschooling, all the families recognize that it is very helpful the schools and teachers have provided guidance to parents to ensure continuity of the learning experience for their children. However, as Luqzan points out, there is only limited capability parents have to teach their children well. “Homeschooling is really difficult. We can’t become teachers overnight. We try our best but we are not trained to do this, to have the patience and ability to connect with the kids like the teachers would have.” Since online classes have been in full swing for the last two months, most of the parents have learnt to manage their time with the children around. However, one of the issues that is on everybody’s mind is, “What happens when the summer internships start?” Both Arpit and Dominique have yet to hear back from their respective companies, whether the internship will be virtual given the dire pandemic situation all around the world. But even with the internship taking place online, the uncertainty makes planning full time work around children a very difficult task. In particular, Dominique and her husband are both going to be working over the summer and that would make it “a very
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different deal” as Dominique puts it gravely to me. They are potentially planning to return home, to Chile, and get help from her parents and parents-in-law. For Ashley, her summer employer has already confirmed that she will be working remotely but on West Coast hours. This will coincide with James’ working hours so they will need to be very creative with their scheduling. Ashley gave me a huge smile and said with all the optimism she could muster, “I have not figured out how we will do that!” There is one universal concern that I have heard across most of the families: “Our children are having too much screen time.” Often the parents share this with a sense of failure on their part, as none of them have found an effective solution
never experience it again. Despite all these challenges, I was personally amazed at how well all the families are coping with the current situation and how they all have focused on what is wonderful during this period instead of dwelling on the problems. One aspect of HBS life that has changed and that none of parents are experiencing at the moment is the “fear of missing out” (FOMO). Ashley, for example, feels she can finally be present at more HBS events than ever before. “Now, I don’t need to worry about FOMO. We actually get an opportunity to join more events, like HBS Got Talent, or Heard On The Street. In normal times, there is only a 30% chance that I can go to those events, but now I stay at home and enjoy it with
I’m very fortunate in the sense that I get to see my kids grow up 24/7. When I started HBS, it was pretty intense as you have to go to classes, but now I’m at home taking care of my kids. It’s great. Life is definitely better. The quality of life from personal relationships with my wife and our kids has improved.” What the parents also get to witness nowadays are the special moments when their children positively surprise them with their way of thinking about the world. Luqzan, for instance, found it hard to explain the magnitude of COVID-19 to his kids, especially with news outlets doing so much reporting about this topic. So his kids actually helped him out. “My kids were very interested in knowing how they can help in this kind of situation. So we said
to resolve this. Ashley felt very much defeated until she listened to a recent breakfast podcast by Arthur Brooks (Professor of the
my kids. And they love it! They love seeing my sectionmates on the screen.” Although Dominique is pretty sad about social
if we stay at home, we can help others as well. This helped them understand a bit more why we have to do social distancing.” Olivia, who is even younger
Practice of Public Leadership at HKS) and Len Schlesinger (Baker Foundation Professor at HBS), “From disappointment and fear to love in the time of COVID-19.” At first, she was not paying much attention but she listened keenly when one of the parents asked, “How do you manage the stress in these situations as a parent?” One of the professors gave a rather uplifting answer: “Think about 10 years from now, when everybody remembers this period. If you have kids, you hope they will say: ‘Hey, there was this coronavirus period and it was superb! I was stuck at home and I could do whatever I want.’” This kind of philosophy really stuck with Ashley and made her feel more relaxed about letting her kids enjoy their TV and snack time more leisurely. She wishes her sons remember this time as a fun period because they will
distancing from her friends, she also recognizes that by staying at home, she can enjoy many precious moments with her daughter. “This period has been less stressful for me. As a parentstudent at a business school, you have trade-offs. Though I love social activities, you have to sacrifice most of them. The fact that no extra-curricular activities are happening now makes my life easier. I tell my husband that I feel bad because I’m actually happy. I get to have lunch together with my family, read books to my daughter and put her to sleep when she’s falling asleep during her nap time. All these little things make my day great and amazing.” Arpit feels the same way and he savors every moment that he has with his wife and daughters. “I’m actually enjoying this. I definitely sleep more than I used to and I get to do more work. And
than Eijaz and Dania, has also surprised her parents with her views and behaviors. Arpit fondly retells the adorable story of how his five-year-old daughter reminds him of preventive measures. “She is very careful during COVID now. If we go downstairs to pick up a package, she knows not to touch the elevator button. Once, she even scolded me and said, ‘Daddy, don’t do that!’” Another element of family life that can be neglected prior to COVID-19, is how often the family stays in touch with the extended family. Luqzan’s parents are back in Malaysia and his sister is London, but thanks to the lockdown his family is more connected. “Now everybody’s indoors so it’s a lot easier to organize play dates. On the weekends, the kids would do a virtual yoga session. They will meet up with all their cousins on
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Zoom and they will do it together. This builds that connection between them. So that’s the silver lining to all of this!” In hope that the current situation gets better, I wanted to find out what the families most look forward to and what would be the first thing they want to do when the lockdown order is removed. Luqzan and Sarah, who are both very active members of the Crimson Parents community, simply want to meet up with everyone again and have playdates. “Right now, we feel like we’re on a deserted island. If you meet someone outside, you might not know how to react because you haven’t interacted with people for some time. So we’re looking forward to reconnecting with people and going where the community is, in the library, in the classes. We were a strong part of the HBS community and that has formed many of our daily activities.” For Victoria, she is excited to start bringing her one-yearold daughter Sophie to the playground to socialize and interact with others. “She’s growing older now and is more aware of playing with people. Every day now she’s learning to talk so I can’t wait to watch her become more sociable.” And Olivia, of course, can’t wait to return to school and see her friends! James, Ashley’s husband, worries about the social experience for his children in the long term and hopes that they soon can return to school and daycare. “My son Jonas loves the school. He is very outgoing and likes to hang out with people. So we look forward to hanging out more with other families and having playdates with Jonas’ and Clement’s friends in the Section.” Like other HBS parents, Dominique also looks forward to meeting other families and hosting friends for dinner again. What she also hopes for is to return to normal relationships prior to COVID-19. She explained to me what she meant with an adorable story. “One day we were outside and my daughter saw one of my friends. She wanted to give her a hug while my friend was trying to keep a distance. I tried explaining to Elisa that my friend needs some space but she did not understand. She kept opening her arms as if she was saying ‘Hug me! Hug me!’ My heart was breaking but I did not know what to do. How do you explain to a one-and-a-half year old to stop doing what I have always taught her, to express her love freely?” Having had this unique chance to hear from these four amazing families, I humbly salute them for their positivity and strength as parents and as individuals. Thank you for letting us take a glimpse into your hectic but joyful family lives. There is so much wisdom from your stories that will benefit both parents and other students to carry on through these challenging times.
Anja Do is an RC Partner at HBS who recently moved to Cambridge, MA, with her husband from Singapore. She identifies herself as a global citizen and loves meeting people from diverse cultures, backgrounds, and religions and learning about their personal stories.
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THE HARBUS NEWS
COMMENTARY
Thank You, HBS
In his monthly column for the Harbus, Professor Kevin W. Sharer shares his thoughts on the issues facing HBS students.
©Harvard Business School
Kevin Sharer, Contributor
All things must end and so it is for my days as an HBS faculty member and your correspondent. It has been a wonderful adventure in so many ways, and I want to use this last column to express my deep gratitude for the journey. There are so, so many individuals who deserve and have my thanks. They are on the faculty, among the nearly 10,000 students who have been here and the wonderful support staff. Thank you all. But rather than do a roll call, my comments are mainly directed towards this great institution in which we are privileged for a time to be members. The venerable, the inspiring, and the timeless Harvard Business School. She is the mother we love. Yet we also are a bit intimidated by her, want to please her and so earn her love and pride. She was here before us and will be here after us. She is not perfect. She is not static. But she is the best there is, and the place the best and brightest have come since
the beginning. At first, they were white men from America. Now the family is from the farthest corners of the world and represents all of humanity in its wonderful kaleidoscope of diversity. There has been one true constant from the first day. The mission endures. HBS’s mission is to train leaders who can and will make a difference in the world. Leaders. Make a difference. World. Make those ideas and aspirations as big in your mind and goals as you possibly can. Now think bigger. Mother Harvard expects it of us and knows we have within us more than we can even imagine. She has seen it happen across the generations. Especially now she calls on us. She did not so much choose me as give me a shot. Yes, there were other places that offered but none compared. You will not be a visitor or an executive-in-residence of ill-defined role or purpose. You will be a Harvard faculty member! But staying a faculty member demands dedication, performance, growth, and contribution. Do you know you are only a humble rookie who again needs to prove yourself? Becoming a teacher is a craft you must learn and in the
process suffer and again doubt yourself and be afraid. But the view was worth the climb. We help you. We root for you. We give you time to grow. Teaching is a form of leading. Teaching is a chance to serve. Teaching is a chance to learn. Teaching is a chance to contribute. Teaching is a privilege. You did not receive a job description or a how-to manual. In fact, someone told you that “Harvard has a lot of rules they will not reveal to you, and if you are not smart enough to figure them out, you should not be there.” That translated into a friendly and welcoming culture with a fierce dedication to the mission, little tolerance for wasting time and a premium on being self-directed. If you can help fulfill the mission and help the team, you are in. After a career in business, Harvard was a new challenge, a new purpose, and a new city. Life is a journey of growth in all the human dimensions and Harvard provided opportunity in so many ways. I did not really know Boston. I now know and love Boston. Living in Beacon Hill was a joy. Now more than ever we know how important are friends. Harvard was a place I made several
important new friendships that I am sure will be lifelong. This is not something you expect to happen at my life stage, and it could well be the single most important gift I received. Opening day at Fenway watching the mighty Patriots charge on the field with their latest Super Bowl trophy was a thrill. Looking up at all the championship banners at TSA Logan and feeling part of that. Stopping cold in Logan in front of a wall where Commonwealth accomplishments are inscribed and seeing “Group of farmers defeat world’s preeminent military power” leading the list. Then standing on Cambridge Common at the spot Washington took command. So, the journey was not only about Harvard but also about Boston. The things that happened because of Harvard deserve recognition and thanks too. Time to reflect on what I learned on my journey. A chance to write over fifty columns to you over the years. Time to learn from so many other leaders and scholars. Again and again being impressed and inspired by my students and so being able to testify with total conviction to my friends and the wider public
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that the future is in good hands. Harvard Business School helped me grow, demanded my best, let me get to know and work with so many exceptional people, and gave me a chance to earn a place as a member of one of the world’s great institutions. *** I am thankful beyond my ability to express what is in my heart but these few words are a start. It has been a profound privilege to be a member of the Harvard Business School faculty. Thank you.
Professor Kevin W. Sharer joined the HBS Strategy unit in the fall of 2012. Before HBS, he was CEO of Amgen for 12 years and, before that, Amgen’s president for eight. He has served on the boards of directors of Chevron and Northrop Grumman and is currently on the board of Allied Minds. For a decade he was chairman of the board of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. Professor Sharer is a Naval Academy graduate and has master’s degrees in aeronautical engineering and business.
M AY 2 0 2 0
THE HARBUS NEWS
PA G E T H I RT E E N
COMMENTARY
The Three Equations for a Happy Life, Even During a Pandemic Arthur Brooks, Contributor
[Editor’s note: This article first appeared in the April 9, 2020 edition of the Atlantic. © 2020, Arthur Brooks.] It seems strange to launch a column on happiness during a pandemic. The timing is, well, awkward, isn’t it? Maybe not. We’re stuck at home; our lives on COVID time have slowed to a near halt. This creates all sorts of obvious inconveniences, of course. But in the involuntary quiet, many of us also sense an opportunity to think a little more deeply about life. In our go-go-go world, we rarely get the chance to stop and consider the big drivers of our happiness and our sense of purpose. On second thought, maybe this is the perfect time to launch a column on happiness. I teach a class at the Harvard Business School on happiness. It surprises some people when I tell them this—that a subject like happiness is taught alongside accounting, finance, and other, more traditional MBA fare. Nathaniel Hawthorne once famously said, “Happiness is a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.” This is not exactly the stuff of business administration. But if you imagine my students sitting outside in a circle (or in a virtual circle on videochat, these days) hoping to have a butterfly land on us, you’re wrong. Here are a few of our topics: “Affect and the Limbic System,” “The Neurobiology of Body Language,” “Homeostasis and the Persistence of Subjective Well-Being,” “Oxytocin and Love,” “Acquisition Centrality and Negative Affect,” and “The Hedonic Treadmill.” The scientific study of happiness has exploded over the past three decades. The Nobel Prize winners Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton (both at Princeton University) publish extensively on the subject. The University of Pennsylvania has a whole graduate-degree program in positive psychology, led by Martin Seligman, one of the most distinguished social psychologists in the world. A peer-reviewed academic journal called the Journal of Happiness Studies has been in operation since the year 2000 and enjoys high prestige in scholarly circles. Religion, philosophy, and the arts have long considered happiness a subject suitable for study. The sciences have only recently caught up. This column, which we’re calling “How to Build a Life,” will draw on all
these sources of wisdom in the hope of helping you identify the building blocks of happiness— family, career, friendships, faith, and so on—and giving you the tools to use them to construct a life that is balanced and full of meaning, and that serves your values. This column has been in the works for some time, but my hope is that launching it during the pandemic will help you leverage a contemplative mindset while you have the time to think about what matters most to you. I hope this column will enrich your life, and equip you to enrich the lives of the people you love and lead. To start us off, I want to give you three equations for well-being—equations that, in my opinion, you need to know to start managing your own happiness more proactively. EQUATION 1: SUBJECTIVE WELL-BEING = GENES + CIRCUMSTANCES + HABITS Subjective well-being is a term of art usually used by social scientists. Why not happiness? Many scientists consider happiness as a term to be too vague and too subjective, and to contain too many competing ideas. In everyday language, happiness is used to denote everything from a passing good mood to a deeper sense of meaning in life. The term subjective well-being, on the other hand, refers to an answer to this kind of question: “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days—would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” (That is the actual wording from one of the most prominent surveys that address the subject, the General Social Survey.) Equation 1 summarizes a vast amount of literature on subjective well-being, starting with the question of the heritability of happiness. Personally, I dislike the idea that happiness is genetic; I dislike the idea that anything about my character or personality is genetic, because I want to be fully in charge of building my life. But the research is clear that there is a huge genetic component in determining your “set point” for subjective wellbeing, the baseline you always seem to return to after events sway your mood. In an article in the journal Psychological Science reporting on an analysis of twins—including identical twins reared apart and then tested for subjective well-being as adults—the psychologists David Lykken and Auke Tellegen estimate that the genetic component of a person’s wellbeing is between 44 percent and 52 percent, that is, about half. The other two components are your circumstances and your
habits. Research is all over the map on what percentage each part represents. Circumstances—the good and the bad that enter all of our lives—could make up as little as 10 percent or as much as 40 percent of your subjective wellbeing. Even if circumstances play a big role, however, most scholars think it doesn’t matter very much, because the effects of circumstance never last very long. We may think that getting a big promotion will make us permanently happier or that a bad breakup will leave us permanently brokenhearted, but it isn’t true, as a casual look back on your own life would surely attest. Indeed, one of the survival traits of human beings is psychological homeostasis, or the tendency to get used to circumstances quickly, both good and bad. This is the main reason money doesn’t buy happiness: We get used to what it buys very rapidly and then go back to our happiness set point. And for those of us lucky enough to avoid illness, even the unhappiness from the COVID-19 crisis will be in the rearview mirror before very long. Genes and circumstances aren’t a productive focus in your quest for happiness. But don’t worry, there’s one variable left that affects long-term well-being and is under our control: habits. To understand habits, we need Equation 2. EQUATION 2: HABITS = FAITH + FAMILY + FRIENDS + WORK This is my summary of thousands of academic studies, and to be fair, many scholars would dispute it as too crude. But I am convinced that it is accurate. Enduring happiness comes from human relationships, productive work, and the transcendental elements of life. A little bit of clarification is in order here. First, faith doesn’t mean any faith in particular. I practice the Catholic faith and am happy to recommend it to anyone, but the research is clear that many different faiths and secular life philosophies can provide this happiness edge. The key is to find a structure through which you can ponder life’s deeper questions and transcend a focus on your narrow selfinterests to serve others. Similarly, there is no magic formula for what shape your family and friendships should take. The key is to cultivate and maintain loving, faithful relationships with other people. One extraordinary 75year study followed Harvard graduates from 1939 to 1944, into their 90s, looking at all aspects of their health and well-being. The principal investigator, the psychologist George Vaillant, summarized the findings as follows: “Happiness
is love. Full stop.” People who have loving relationships with family and friends thrive; those who don’t, don’t. Finally, there’s work. Maybe it shocks you that work is part of this equation; it shouldn’t. One of the most robust findings in the happiness literature is the centrality of productive human endeavor in creating a sense of purpose in life. Of course, there are better jobs and worse jobs, but most researchers don’t think unemployment brings anything but misery. What kind of work? White collar or blue collar? Stay-athome parenting? Work requiring college? A super-high-paying job? My own research as a social scientist has focused on this subject, and I can tell you that these are the wrong questions. What makes work meaningful is not the kind of work it is, but the sense it gives you that you are earning your success and serving others. Equation 2 is especially worth considering during our pandemic isolation. Ask yourself: Is my happiness portfolio balanced across these four accounts? Do I need to move some things around? Are there habits I can change during this pause? I asserted above the old claim “Money doesn’t buy happiness.” It’s not quite that simple, of course. I should say, “Money doesn’t buy satisfaction.” Homeostasis sees to that, in the form of what psychologists call the hedonic treadmill: People never feel they have enough money, because they get used to their circumstances very quickly and need more money to make them happy again. Don’t believe it? Think back to your last significant pay increase. When did you get the greatest satisfaction—on the day your boss told you that you were getting a raise? The day it starting hitting your bank account? And how much satisfaction was it giving you six months later? You might be tempted to conclude that satisfaction is out of reach. But that’s not quite right. Equation 3 provides a better way of thinking about satisfaction. EQUATION 3: SATISFACTION = WHAT YOU HAVE ÷ WHAT YOU WANT Many great spiritual leaders have made this point, of course. In his book The Art of Happiness (written with the psychiatrist Howard Cutler), the Dalai Lama stated, “We need to learn how to want what we have not to have what we want in order to get steady and stable Happiness.” The Spanish Catholic saint Josemaría Escrivá made the same point in a slightly different way: “Don’t forget it: he has most who needs least. Don’t
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create needs for yourself.” This is not just a gauzy spiritual nostrum, however—it is an intensely practical formula for living. Many of us go about our lives desperately trying to increase the numerator of Equation 3; we try to achieve higher levels of satisfaction by increasing what we have—by working, spending, working, spending, and on and on. But the hedonic treadmill makes this pure futility. Satisfaction will always escape our grasp. The secret to satisfaction is to focus on the denominator of Equation 3. Don’t obsess about your haves; manage your wants, instead. Don’t count your possessions (or your money, power, prestige, romantic partners, or fame) and try to figure out how to increase them; make an inventory of your worldly desires and try to decrease them. Make a bucket list—but not of exotic vacations and expensive stuff. Make a list of the attachments in your life you need to discard. Then, make a plan to do just that. The fewer wants there are screaming inside your brain and dividing your attention, the more peace and satisfaction will be left for what you already have. Perhaps decreasing the denominator of Equation 3 is a little easier for you than normal during your isolation, because your expectations have diminished along with your physical ability to meet them. Can you find a way to continue this after the material world begins to beckon again in a few weeks or months? Think of these three equations as the first class in the mechanics of building a life. But there is much, much more where all that comes from. Hence, this new column. In the coming months, I will pull back the curtain on the art and science of happiness to show how the brightest ideas can illuminate new solutions to our ordinary challenges. Stay tuned. In the meantime, while you are still stuck at home, go study your equations.
Arthur C. Brooks is Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and Arthur C. Patterson Faculty Fellow at the Harvard Business School. Before joining the Harvard faculty in July of 2019, he served for 10 years as president of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a public policy think tank in Washington, DC. Brooks is the author of 11 books and a columnist for the Washington Post. He began his career as a classical French hornist.
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COMMENTARY
Leadership for a Changed World Our generation will be called to lead a great American renewal. Chuck Nadd, Contributor
On January 26, 1986, addressing the United States in the wake of the deaths of seven astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, President Ronald Reagan reminded the country, “The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave.” Today, as we face a tragedy of previously unimaginable scale, our generation of “leaders who make a difference in the world” would be wise to use President Reagan’s words to guide our response. We should allow this unique period in American history to reorient our priorities towards the societal good that free enterprise is so well positioned to deliver. As members of the Harvard Business School community, it is our duty to lead this charge. The current MBA classes will graduate into a world where the once-thriving business ecosystem has been thrown into survival mode.
The near-complete shutdown of the consumer economy has led to a rise in unemployment, unprecedented in how rapidly it has metastasized. In the past four weeks alone, 22 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits and many more are sure to follow. Some may argue that the past several months prove the inadequacies of the market system. “How can so many feel so much pain in such a short amount of time?” they may ask, pointing to more centrallyplanned government as a cure. While perhaps wellintentioned, efforts to seek respite by adding to the government’s burden can never truly replace
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the unmatched strength and perseverance that comes from the spirit of Americans lifting up their fellow man. As President Barack Obama reminded us during his 2008 campaign, “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Indeed, every action we take—every decision we make— has an effect on those around us. Rapper Kid Cudi explains, “Living life is a choice. Making a difference in someone else’s isn’t.” It is on us to foster a spirit of making a positive difference in the world, even in the bleakest of times. This spirit, which we’ve witnessed in the grit of tens of thousands of American healthcare
workers serving on the frontlines of the battle against COVID-19, should be an inspiration to us all. It is a spirit we’ve seen in our own classmates with their founding of LivelyHood, a platform to connect elderly and immunocompromised individuals to healthy, young volunteers who can run errands for them. It is the same spirit that moved another enterprising group of classmates to launch “MBAs Fight COVID-19,” a website connecting students nationwide to help develop budgets for non-profits, coach small businesses, and help direct relief aid, among a number of other projects. We ought to declare this crisis as a defining moment for our American generation. We will use the power of the free market and the skills that we bring to the table to protect the underserved, to contribute fairly to the larger national ecosystem, and to reemerge from this moment as a stronger and more united force for good. T.E. Lawrence, known as Lawrence of Arabia, wrote, “All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds
wake up in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.” There are two paths: to dream by night or to dream with open eyes—to return to a cynical world where tax evasion schemes and corporate welfare were too often accepted and even celebrated, or to embrace the calling for business leaders to be community leaders, and to lead with integrity. In the words of the late, great HBS professor Clayton Christensen, “Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time.”
Chuck Nadd (MBA ’21) is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point. He serves as a US Army Aviator and has been deployed twice to Afghanistan, where he flew airplanes and Black Hawk helicopters.
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PA G E F I F T E E N
COMMENTARY
Focusing on Disruptive Innovation Theodore Seem (MBA ’20) introduces the idea behind Outsiders Fund, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on identifying opportunities where technology will disrupt traditional, incumbent industries. Theodore Seem, Contributor
The world of start-ups is complex. It is hard to organize and harder to analyze. But one simple way to look at the world is to sort companies into two categories, those that operate on the frontier and those that disrupt established industries. The companies building on the frontier are usually the ones that make splashy news headlines. Today, they are developing virtual reality, blockchain technology, and new age pharmaceuticals. They stretch the limits of human possibility and attract great attention from the venture community. But when it comes to investing, these companies tend to be the ones that overpromise and underdeliver. That is because the risk of these companies is often underestimated and mispriced, while the expected return is inflated and aggrandized. As such, an investor may be better served by backing the companies disrupting established industries to find the risk-adjusted returns they desire. My business partner, Austin McChord, and I founded a venture capital firm based on this thesis. So, let’s understand why we believe strongly enough to put this idea into practice. Before going any further, it is necessary to discern what distinguishes these two segments. Disruptors seek to displace established players through improved customer experience, an enhanced product, or a superior business model. A few well-known examples are Facebook, Slack, or Dropbox. Each took an established industry— social networking, multi-user messaging, and file storage— and improved the user experience and functionality to create companies superior to those of established players. On the other hand, companies operating on the frontier seek to develop breakthrough technologies or create new products, usually with a goal of capitalizing on first-mover advantage. An example here would be Magic Leap, which is working to develop glasses that superimpose 3D computer-generated images over real world objects. Each segment faces a unique set of
challenges and opportunities, and when Austin and I took an empirical view of the world, we saw a drastically different set of outcomes between them. The venture capital model is one predicated on swinging for the fences with the understanding that there will be many strikeouts between successive home runs. Investors do this with the hopes that the winners will be more than enough to make up for all the losers. The problem with this model is that by swinging for the fences, investors largely ignore the risk, and the entire focus goes to an investment’s potential return. The reason for this problem stems from the
if we could calculate risk for an entire segment and find one with an optimal risk profile, we could construct a better portfolio comprised of companies only from this segment. At this point we have already divided the world into our two segments of interest and determined that it may be possible to find one that offers a better set of risk-adjusted companies. The next step is to look at the way to assess the risk on an aggregate basis. Given that venture investments do not have historical data and the historical data of comparable companies is not marked to market on a frequent
we can assign a number to each obstacle which affects a segment based on severity and add them up, we can get to a rough, yet useful, measure of a segment’s overall risk. When running this analysis, we looked at all the obstacles that would generally apply to each segment and concluded that disruptive business models were less risky than those operating on the frontier. If we turn to our previous example, Magic Leap faces far more hurdles than the likes of Facebook, Slack, or Dropbox. For Magic Leap to succeed, it needs to have technological breakthroughs, generate new user demand and
inability to properly calculate a venture investment’s true risk, given it is almost impossible to properly assess the confluence of factors which determine a new company’s chance of success. But what if we could solve this problem by assessing risk not on a single investment, but on an entire segment. Going back to the analogy, instead of swinging at every pitch that looks auspicious in the moment, we can take a step back and assess pitches on an aggregate level, swinging only at the set of pitches we know to be most promising. Therefore,
basis, we cannot calculate any type of volatility and are going to have to think a little outside the box. One way to think about the problem is that, instead of being backwardlooking with data, we could turn our attention forward and look at the probability of company failure. One way to approximate this probability is by looking at the number and severity of known obstacles in a company’s path to success. The greater the number and severity, the more likely the company is to fail and thus, the riskier the investment. If
find consumer use cases—all lofty challenges not faced by Facebook, Slack, or Dropbox. While these three companies also faced their own unique set of problems, such as maintaining data consistency at scale or battling head to head with deep-pocketed incumbents, the problems seem comparatively less insurmountable than those faced by Magic Leap. As a sanity check, we also ran an analysis of the return profile of both segments to make sure that by focusing on risk, we were
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not compromising on return. To do this, we categorized the top 100 funded companies between 2008 and 2013 into each of the two categories and then ran a regression analysis on their valuations as of 2020. Surprisingly, we found that not only did the disruptors not compromise on returns, even though we had deduced they were inherently less risky, but being categorized as a disruptor actually had a statistically significant positive effect on valuation. While we understand this analysis is fairly narrow and that there is more to be done to expand the scope to isolate additional variables such as funding year, check size, and industry, we do take this as preliminary evidence in support of our thesis. This simple idea, that disruptive business models have higher risk-adjusted returns than those operating on the frontier, was the genesis of Outsiders Fund. The fund focuses on earlystage investing and looks to back companies disrupting the status quo in long-standing, incumbent industries. In addition, we look to practice what we preach and become one of the players disrupting the traditional venture capital model in the future. We are already doing things largely unheard of in the venture world and hope to continue on this path to shake things up from the way they have traditionally been done. If you have any questions or want to learn more, we would love to hear from you. You can reach us at contact@ outsidersfund.com or find us at www.outsidersfund.com.
Theodore Seem (MBA ’21) spent just under a year prior to HBS spearheading the artificial intelligence initiatives at Resonance Companies, a start-up reimagining the product lifecycle management of clothing manufacturing. Before Resonance, Teddy worked at Bridgewater Associates, where he held roles as a Product Integration Engineer and then an Investment Engineer on the foreign exchange research team. He completed his undergraduate degree at Amherst College where he played varsity lacrosse and was president of the computer science club.
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COMMENTARY
Vexing Requests for Vulnerability
To celebrate the Mental Health Awareness Month, Ariam Tesfai (MBA ’20) reflects on the value of prompting vulnerability with tact.
Ariam Tesfai, Contributor
Oprah-style “aha” moments have colored my time at HBS. More recently, I have been working to collect and dissect my first- and secondyear revelations. Some insights are clearer than others. One, however, is of crystal quality. It goes something like this: vulnerability is not a virtue. Well, this is at least not without caveat. I say so, and per The Divine Comedy, a narrative poem which centers on personifications of vice and virtue, Dante Alighieri says so too. To confirm, yes, I just brazenly tagged Alighieri as my ally. Fine, I’ll keep him out of this for now. Before you start to think that I’m going to challenge the merits of psychological safety, let me clarify, I wouldn’t dare. The benefits of being unnervingly open, sharing pain or insecurity of some kind, are evident to me. I simply take issue with the often-applied assumption that vulnerability is accessible and acceptable for an overwhelmingly broad spectrum of individuals and communities. Various publications and communication channels, classroom discussions
included, almost blanketly propel the notion that vulnerability is a virtue, especially within the context of good leadership. It is, however, careless to position the attribute or state in such a way. Vulnerability is nuanced and deeply complex; it should not be promoted as fervently, or simply, as lemonade is in the summertime. Most critically, one should not feel inept for failing to express it on demand. Being open with oneself arguably precedes being open with others. What happens, though, if one is ill-equipped to lean into herself? To be open with herself? To be vulnerable? A more detailed syllogism might suggest a grim conclusion: she cannot be open with others, and therefore, she cannot be a good leader, or more harshly, good enough. The more this idea is reinforced, the more susceptible current and future generations are to the potentially tragic outcomes of hopelessness. Some individuals have been raised in homes where self-exploration is encouraged and supported, say, through open dialogue or professional therapy. There are also intrinsically-motivated and able individuals who engage in productive, transformative introspection without aid. These groups are fortunate in many respects, especially given some of the harsh realities others face.
Who else is left you ask? Well, individuals who don’t have the luxury of encouragement, support, or intrinsic motivation for such intrapersonal probes. They could actually be afraid of what they might discover. In these cases, mental health can be at risk, giving rise to wounds that are often invisible to the naked eye, yet highly susceptible to inflammation. Albeit an oversimplification, these illustrations, focused on extremes, aim to snapshot the spectrum of human experience. There are, of course, countless groups that could be explored. In 1999, the Office of the Surgeon General released its first report solely focused on mental health. The report, Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General, posited that mental health is vital for one’s overall health, emphasizing that it underpins personal wellbeing, family relationships, and successful contributions to society. It also highlighted the inequities that Americans, especially members of racial and ethnic minority groups, face with respect to mental illness susceptibility and recovery. The report garnered attention and fostered awareness. In fact, it charged the United States Department of Health and Human Services to publish a 2001 supplemental report, Mental Health:
Culture, Race, and Ethnicity. The supplement affirms that minorities face sizable barriers that deter them from addressing mental health-related care, including, but not limited to, the cost of care, societal stigma, clinicians’ lack of awareness of cultural issues, as well as fear and mistrust of treatment. Most notably, it reinforces the relevance of culture and society on mental health, mental illness, and mental health services. Culture, for instance, proved to influence how people cope with common problems and more extreme types of adversity. From affect suppression to spiritual dependence, coping styles vary significantly. Race and ethnicity can underlie these variances, suggesting that vulnerability elicitations warrant tact. Let’s not call for vulnerability without acknowledging that disparities exist concurrently. This qualification is critical. Without it, leaders, business or otherwise, might feel compelled to put on a show simply for pleasant consumption. They could also create environments in which those around them feel the need to do the same. Most disturbingly, this ripple effect is unlikely to have bounds, ultimately promoting phoniness and unduly legitimizing it. Acknowledgement may seem insufficient, but it can play a meaningful role in combating mental health-related stigmas.
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We need more people willing to engage in hard, internal work. Doom is not inevitable— even for those who haven’t yet recognized that there’s work to be done. Acknowledgement can elucidate that there’s the prospect of self-discovery and that the path to vulnerability can be arduous. Vulnerability, lonestanding, is not virtuous. It is a beautiful end, but it is rarely reached without humility, mindfulness, bravery, and countless other enabling forces—these are the real MVPs. If heartened by this view, maybe more people will be less inclined to request vulnerability like an on-demand offering. Maybe then more people will care to turn inward and tend to their wellbeing. Maybe then more people will turn outward and offer others insight into their being. That’s my hope for now.
Ariam Tesfai (MBA ’20) is originally from Maryland and graduated from Boston College in 2015. Prior to HBS, she worked as a management consultant on M&A transactions. She loves a good laugh—don’t be too flattered if your joke has her in seemingly endless tears, though. That’s a quirk she hasn’t quite figured out yet.
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WEATHER
Accu-Reggie’s Weather Forecast for May: A New Chapter Reggie Smith (MBA ’20) tells us what to expect this month.
Reggie Smith, Contributor
Transitions are sometimes difficult. As we move through life, we are constantly ending one chapter and starting another. While we eagerly anticipate what lies ahead, we sometimes mourn the loss of what we had. Class of 2020, we are flipping the page and entering a new season. We will take the incredible memories, relationships, and learnings we have had together forward, but our HBS season is ending and will not return. While we will face challenges in our new season, trouble will not hang around forever. Just as our February shivers on a frozen campus always give way to sunshine and warmth in May, so too will our
challenges be replaced with new opportunities. The weather reminds us that seasons change. It is cold half the year, but it is warm the other half. It is chilly one month but warmer the next. It is sunny and bright today but rainy and dark tomorrow. The weather is constantly oscillating between better and worse, between what we enjoy and what we do not. It changes by the minute, day, month, and year. Our lives are not too dissimilar. We have seasons of accomplishment and triumph and seasons of pain and loss. Our lives change in a moment (like when we got accepted into HBS) or over a period, for example, when we deal with a prolonged family health crisis. For weather, we have tools and protective gear to help us deal with these changing seasons: umbrellas, rain coats, hats, and snow boots. For life,
what will be the source(s) of protection and comfort that sustain you through the different seasons of your own life ahead? As you read this, the weather is flipping to a new season right before your eyes. The leaves are coming back and the flowers are blooming. April was a yucky month. It was cold and dreary with lots of rain. In fact, temperatures averaged about 3 degrees below normal with more rain than usual. The real issue is that it rained half the time. Seriously, we had measurable rain on 14 of 30 days in the month. So what will May bring? May will start much the way April ended. Temperatures will be cooler than normal and we will have to deal with rounds of rain. The highlands in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine will probably still see another round of snow. It
just will not end. However, by the second half of the month, summer will start to crack through. Temperatures will start to climb regularly into the 60s, with even 70s and 80s making an appearance or two. I have had the time of my life these past two years and being able to share my love of the weather with you has been one of the highlights. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for giving me this opportunity to share this passion with you. No matter what season of life you may find yourself in, I am always happy to give you a custom forecast. I will leave you with a saying from one of my favorite meteorologists: “Enjoy the weather, it’s the only weather you got!” — Joe Bastardi. off
Accu-Reggie, signing for the last time.
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Congratulations, Class of 2020, we made it!
Reggie Smith (MBA ’20) grew up in Philadelphia and has studied the weather for over 17 years. He was the Meteorologist for the Spirit News serving over 100,000 people in the city. Prior to HBS he worked at Johnson Controls (JCI), where he developed large energy conservation and solar projects. Most recently, he led the development engineering for an energy storage start-up business within JCI. He spent the summer of 2019 at Marathon Capital and Eventide Asset Management doing investment banking in clean energy and investing in clean energyrelated companies, respectively. Reggie graduated summa cum laude with a B.S./M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Drexel University.
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SATIRE
Dean Nohria’s Quest to Figure Out What’s Next after HBS
What is it that Dean Nohria will do with his one wild and precious life? Harby, Satirical Advice Columnist Last November, Dean Nitin Nohria announced that he would be passing the torch and stepping down from his role at the helm of HBS. While that led most of us to reflect on his many accomplishments at the school (including his star performance in last year’s HBS Show), Dean Nohria was leaning back in his home office chair (hurrah, selfisolation) and staring out of a window, deep in thought. He was already looking ahead, meditating about what he would do with the rest of his one wild and precious career. Of course, changing jobs can be a challenge, so Dean Nohria did what any member of the HBS community would in his shoes: he took a trip to CPD. “I was actually planning on leaving last fall when I first made the announcement, but CPD didn’t have availability until March 2020. Hence, I ended up staying well past my two weeks’ notice,” said Nohria. Clutching his HBSemblazoned padfolio, he recounted his experience meeting with the CPD team. “They kept referring me to ‘12Twenty.’ I wasn’t sure if that was an address or a time I should come back to their office, but everyone else seemed to agree that was the best next step, so I just nodded along.” Filing away his professional headshots, he continued, “They were very direct about the challenges ahead, but remained encouraging, which I appreciated. Kelly told me finding a job can be difficult, but that even 3s become offerees, so I should be fine.” Kelly Schmidt, a senior career coach with CPD, outlined the long road ahead for candidates like Dean Nohria. “It’s a tough market out there, especially in Nitin’s case. After all, although he has spent over a decade at the university, Dean Nohria still doesn’t hold a Harvard degree. That will surely give pause to firms, and so many of the graduates he’ll be competing against for jobs will have that edge,” Schmidt sighed. “Plus, from an outsider’s perspective, he hasn’t been promoted at HBS for the last ten years. He kept insisting that Dean was the highest possible position at HBS during our meeting, but how would a hiring manager at a company know that? That kind of stagnation will be a
major red flag for employers.” Getting ready for the job search doesn’t end there. At a CPD recruiting workshop, Dean Nohria was able to hone his interview skills and update his resume. “While some students may slightly exaggerate the extent of their experience on their resumes, we’ve advised him to limit his references to being a ‘leader as an architect’ as he has no formal training in architecture,” said Jackie Green, a CPD career coach working with Dean Nohria. The CPD team also told Dean Nohria to headline his resume with something other than “Appeared in the Spider-Man movie.” Fortunately, attending
CPD’s spring recruiting sessions paid off, and Nohria managed to impress a few companies. Following his firstround interview with BCG, Paul Simpson, a partner in the Boston office, had this to say about Dean Nohria: “He had a great interview—he clearly prepared and knew how to handle a case. My only concern was that he kept referring to us as ‘The Boston Consulting Group’ instead of just ‘BCG’ like everyone else. Also, every time an acronym came up, he seemed to struggle— which could be a problem. As consultants, most of our job is turning existing business practices and common knowledge into frameworks
littered with unnecessary and unclear abbreviations—it’s our core value-add.” When asked about his aversion to acronyms, Nitin said he’s working on it. “I’ve started calling it ‘The BCG’ but it still seems too formal. Maybe I’ll check out McKinsey where they call it ‘The Firm.’ That seems more up my alley.” While Dean Nohria hasn’t found the perfect fit quite yet, he’s still hopeful. In the meantime, he will stay in his current role until May 2021. When asked about his decision to remain at HBS, Dean Nohria reflected on his experience over the past year, “Through this process, I’ve come to realize that HBS is home. No, literally.
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I live here. I can’t leave.” Check back with The Harbus for the latest on Dean Nohria’s recruitment. Also, if your company has openings that include housing and limited acronyms, please email nnohria@dearharby.com.
Harby is a Pulitzer Prizenominated MBA advice columnist and the author of such bestsellers as Teaching Your Dog How to DCF and The Seven People You Meet at the Boston Doubletree. She is on Instagram @dearharby. Want some advice from Harby? Email your question to harby@harbus.org.
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PA G E N I N E T E E N
CONGRATULATIONS
Messages to Our Graduates
Thank you for being the most wonderful Editor-inChief ever, Gabriel. We learnt so much about work ethic and dedication to quality from you. With the end of your brilliant seven-year run at HBS, we envy the organization you will join next. Congratulations, and best of luck for future!
Thank you for making the Harbus stronger in your role as the CEO, Ryo. Your turnaround time for an article is enviable, and we cannot thank you enough for all your brilliant, insightful articles over the past two years. Congratulations on your well-deserved success!
Thank you for making us laugh in your role as Satire Editors throughout the past year, Billy and Ratnika. Dear Harby� would not have been the same without you. Congratulations, and good luck with your next chapter!
Thank you for adding color and vibrancy to the Harbus in your role as the Photo Editor, Stan. Your photos were the major highlights of so many of our issues. Congratulations on graduation!
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