PKU + Tech Background with PHD in US + 5 yrs Tech Industry +created a profitable small business in past 5 yrs in part time.
GMAT 750 with 6/6
由于经验特殊，我的面试基本上都是在聊part time做的事情，最后interviewer象征性的问了几个behavior questions:
- How to handle conflict?
- When you help out with others in professional space?
- Why MBA and why MIT sloan?
- What you wish me have asked?
- Your questions for me?
面试就像一次coffee chat，一次dating，就好像在路边碰到一个陌生人你要充满激情的把自己介绍出去，be genuinely interested in introducing yourself and knowing the other person. 我之前想就当作一次认识MIT人的机会，就算不成功，我也至少多认识了一好哥们儿。。。
点开letter之前我翻出来harvard business review的一片文章how to measure your life又读了一遍，提醒自己我的life不会因为去MIT sloan而measured differently，我的life will be measured by how much I have helped others and how much value I bring to the world，听起来cheesy，但是年龄大了可能就开始想，到底怎样pursue happiness？我知道我的墓碑上不会写我上过什么学校，而会写我给社会带来了什么正面的影响。
附上这篇 how will you measure your life，版权是HBR的，排版在word里好好的，不知道怎么paste到这里就有问题了，大家凑或看。
最后不管大家有没有进到自己最最最想去的学校，祝大家都能够找到自己真正的happiness。
How will you measure your life?
Clayton M. Christensen
Editor’s Note: When the members of the class of 2010entered business school, the economy was strong and their post-graduationambitions could be limitless. Just a few weeks later, the economy went into atailspin. They’ve spent the past two years recalibrating their worldview andtheir definition of success.
The students seem highlyaware of how the world has changed (as the sampling of views in this articleshows). In the spring, Harvard Business School’s graduating class asked HBSprofessor Clay Christensen to address them—but not on how to apply hisprinciples and thinking to their post-HBS careers. The students wanted to knowhow to apply them to their personal lives. He shared with them a set ofguidelines that have helped him find meaning in his own life. ThoughChristensen’s thinking comes from his deep religious faith, we believe thatthese are strategies anyone can use. And so we asked him to share them with thereaders of HBR. To learn more about Christensen’s work, visit his HBRAuthor Page.
Before I published The Innovator’s Dilemma, I got a call from Andrew Grove, then thechairman of Intel. He had read one of my early papers about disruptivetechnology, and he asked if I could talk to his direct reports and explain myresearch and what it implied for Intel. Excited, I flew to Silicon Valley andshowed up at the appointed time, only to have Grove say, “Look, stuff hashappened. We have only 10 minutes for you. Tell us what your model ofdisruption means for Intel.” I said that I couldn’t—that I needed a full 30minutes to explain the model, because only with it as context would anycomments about Intel make sense. Ten minutes into my explanation, Groveinterrupted: “Look, I’ve got your model. Just tell us what it means for Intel.”
I insisted that I needed10 more minutes to describe how the process of disruption had worked its waythrough a very different industry, steel, so that he and his team couldunderstand how disruption worked. I told the story of how Nucor and other steelminimills had begun by attacking the lowest end of the market—steel reinforcingbars, or rebar—and later moved up toward the high end, undercutting the traditionalsteel mills.
When I finished theminimill story, Grove said, “OK, I get it. What it means for Intel is...,” andthen went on to articulate what would become the company’s strategy for goingto the bottom of the market to launch the Celeron processor.
I’ve thought about thata million times since. If I had been suckered into telling Andy Grove what heshould think about the microprocessor business, I’d have been killed. Butinstead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think—and then he reachedwhat I felt was the correct decision on his own.
That experience had aprofound influence on me. When people ask what I think they should do, I rarelyanswer their question directly. Instead, I run the question aloud through oneof my models. I’ll describe how the process in the model worked its way throughan industry quite different from their own. And then, more often than not,they’ll say, “OK, I get it.” And they’ll answer their own question moreinsightfully than I could have.
My class at HBS is structuredto help my students understand what good management theory is and how it isbuilt. To that backbone I attach different models or theories that helpstudents think about the various dimensions of a general manager’s job instimulating innovation and growth. In each session we look at one companythrough the lenses of those theories—using them to explain how the company gotinto its situation and to examine what managerial actions will yield the neededresults.
On the last day ofclass, I ask my students to turn those theoretical lenses on themselves, tofind cogent answers to three questions: First, how can I be sure that I’ll behappy in my career? Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with myspouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? Third, how can Ibe sure I’ll stay out of jail? Though the last question sounds lighthearted,it’s not. Two of the 32 people in my Rhodes scholar class spent time in jail.Jeff Skilling of Enron fame was a classmate of mine at HBS. These were goodguys—but something in their lives sent them off in the wrong direction.
The Class of 2010
“I came to businessschool knowing exactly what I wanted to do—and I’m leaving choosing the exactopposite. I’ve worked in the private sector all my life, because everyonealways told me that’s where smart people are. But I’ve decided to trygovernment and see if I can find more meaning there.
“I used to think thatindustry was very safe. The recession has shown us that nothing is safe.”
Ruhana Hafiz,Harvard Business School, Class of 2010
Her Plans:To join the FBI as a special adviser (amanagement track position)
“You could see a shifthappening at HBS. Money used to be number one in the job search. When you makea ton of money, you want more of it. Ironic thing. You start to forget what thedrivers of happiness are and what things are really important. A lot of peopleon campus see money differently now. They think, ‘What’s the minimum I need tohave, and what else drives my life?’ instead of ‘What’s the place where I canget the maximum of both?’”
Patrick Chun,Harvard Business School, Class of 2010
His Plans:To join Bain Capital
“The financial crisishelped me realize that you have to do what you really love in life. My currentvision of success is based on the impact I can have, the experiences I cangain, and the happiness I can find personally, much more so than the pursuit ofmoney or prestige. My main motivations are (1) to be with my family and peopleI care about; (2) to do something fun, exciting, and impactful; and (3) topursue a long-term career in entrepreneurship, where I can build companies thatchange the way the world works.”
Matt Salzberg,Harvard Business School, Class of 2010
His Plans:To work for Bessemer Venture Partners
“Because I’m returningto McKinsey, it probably seems like not all that much has changed for me. Butwhile I was at HBS, I decided to do the dual degree at the Kennedy School. Withthe elections in 2008 and the economy looking shaky, it seemed more compellingfor me to get a better understanding of the public and nonprofit sectors. In away, that drove my return to McKinsey, where I’ll have the ability to exploreprivate, public, and nonprofit sectors.
“The recession has madeus step back and take stock of how lucky we are. The crisis to us is ‘Are wegoing to have a job by April?’ Crisis to a lot of people is ‘Are we going tostay in our home?’”
John Coleman,Harvard Business School, Class of 2010
His Plans:To return to McKinsey & Company
As the students discussthe answers to these questions, I open my own life to them as a case study ofsorts, to illustrate how they can use the theories from our course to guidetheir life decisions.
One of the theories thatgives great insight on the first question—how to be sure we find happiness inour careers—is from Frederick Herzberg, who asserts that the powerful motivatorin our lives isn’t money; it’s the opportunity to learn, grow inresponsibilities, contribute to others, and be recognized for achievements. Itell the students about a vision of sorts I had while I was running the companyI founded before becoming an academic. In my mind’s eye I saw one of mymanagers leave for work one morning with a relatively strong level ofself-esteem. Then I pictured her driving home to her family 10 hours later,feeling unappreciated, frustrated, underutilized, and demeaned. I imagined howprofoundly her lowered self-esteem affected the way she interacted with herchildren. The vision in my mind then fast-forwarded to another day, when shedrove home with greater self-esteem—feeling that she had learned a lot, beenrecognized for achieving valuable things, and played a significant role in thesuccess of some important initiatives. I then imagined how positively thataffected her as a spouse and a parent. My conclusion: Management is the mostnoble of professions if it’s practiced well. No other occupation offers as manyways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized forachievement, and contribute to the success of a team. More and more MBAstudents come to school thinking that a career in business means buying,selling, and investing in companies. That’s unfortunate. Doing deals doesn’tyield the deep rewards that come from building up people.
I want students to leave my classroomknowing that.
Createa Strategy for Your Life
A theory that is helpful inanswering the second question—How can I ensure that my relationship with myfamily proves to be an enduring source of happiness?—concerns how strategy isdefined and implemented. Its primary insight is that a company’s strategy isdetermined by the types of initiatives that management invests in. If acompany’s resource allocation process is not managed masterfully, what emergesfrom it can be very different from what management intended. Because companies’decision-making systems are designed to steer investments to initiatives thatoffer the most tangible and immediate returns, companies shortchangeinvestments in initiatives that are crucial to their long-term strategies.
Over the years I’ve watchedthe fates of my HBS classmates from 1979 unfold; I’ve seen more and more ofthem come to reunions unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their children. Ican guarantee you that not a single one of them graduated with the deliberatestrategy of getting divorced and raising children who would become estrangedfrom them. And yet a shocking number of them implemented that strategy. Thereason? They didn’t keep the purpose of their lives front and center as theydecided how to spend their time, talents, and energy.
It’s quite startling that asignificant fraction of the 900 students that HBS draws each year from theworld’s best have given little thought to the purpose of their lives. I tellthe students that HBS might be one of their last chances to reflect deeply onthat question. If they think that they’ll have more time and energy to reflectlater, they’re nuts, because life only gets more demanding: You take on amortgage; you’re working 70 hours a week; you have a spouse and children.
For me, having a clearpurpose in my life has been essential. But it was something I had to think longand hard about before I understood it. When I was a Rhodes scholar, I was in avery demanding academic program, trying to cram an extra year’s worth of workinto my time at Oxford. I decided to spend an hour every night reading,thinking, and praying about why God put me on this earth. That was a verychallenging commitment to keep, because every hour I spent doing that, I wasn’tstudying applied econometrics. I was conflicted about whether I could reallyafford to take that time away from my studies, but I stuck with it—andultimately figured out the purpose of my life.
Had I instead spent that houreach day learning the latest techniques for mastering the problems ofautocorrelation in regression analysis, I would have badly misspent my life. Iapply the tools of econometrics a few times a year, but I apply my knowledge ofthe purpose of my life every day. It’s the single most useful thing I’ve everlearned. I promise my students that if they take the time to figure out theirlife purpose, they’ll look back on it as the most important thing theydiscovered at HBS. If they don’t figure it out, they will just sail off withouta rudder and get buffeted in the very rough seas of life. Clarity about theirpurpose will trump knowledge of activity-based costing, balanced scorecards,core competence, disruptive innovation, the four Ps, and the five forces.
My purpose grew out of myreligious faith, but faith isn’t the only thing that gives people direction.For example, one of my former students decided that his purpose was to bringhonesty and economic prosperity to his country and to raise children who wereas capably committed to this cause, and to each other, as he was. His purposeis focused on family and others—as mine is.
The choice and successfulpursuit of a profession is but one tool for achieving your purpose. But withouta purpose, life can become hollow.
AllocateYour Resources
Your decisions aboutallocating your personal time, energy, and talent ultimately shape your life’sstrategy.
I have a bunch of“businesses” that compete for these resources: I’m trying to have a rewardingrelationship with my wife, raise great kids, contribute to my community,succeed in my career, contribute to my church, and so on. And I have exactlythe same problem that a corporation does. I have a limited amount of time andenergy and talent. How much do I devote to each of these pursuits?
Allocation choices can makeyour life turn out to be very different from what you intended. Sometimesthat’s good: Opportunities that you never planned for emerge. But if youmisinvest your resources, the outcome can be bad. As I think about my formerclassmates who inadvertently invested for lives of hollow unhappiness, I can’thelp believing that their troubles relate right back to a short-termperspective.
When people who have a highneed for achievement—and that includes all Harvard Business Schoolgraduates—have an extra half hour of time or an extra ounce of energy, they’llunconsciously allocate it to activities that yield the most tangibleaccomplishments. And our careers provide the most concrete evidence that we’removing forward. You ship a product, finish a design, complete a presentation,close a sale, teach a class, publish a paper, get paid, get promoted. Incontrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse andchildren typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kidsmisbehave every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you canput your hands on your hips and say, “I raised a good son or a good daughter.”You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis,it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excelhave this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families andoverinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships withtheir families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.
If you study the root causesof business disasters, over and over you’ll find this predisposition towardendeavors that offer immediate gratification. If you look at personal livesthrough that lens, you’ll see the same stunning and sobering pattern: peopleallocating fewer and fewer resources to the things they would have once saidmattered most.
Createa Culture
There’s an important model inour class called the Tools of Cooperation, which basically says that being avisionary manager isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s one thing to see intothe foggy future with acuity and chart the course corrections that the companymust make. But it’s quite another to persuade employees who might not see thechanges ahead to line up and work cooperatively to take the company in that newdirection. Knowing what tools to wield to elicit the needed cooperation is acritical managerial skill.
The theory arrays these toolsalong two dimensions—the extent to which members of the organization agree onwhat they want from their participation in the enterprise, and the extent towhich they agree on what actions will produce the desired results. When thereis little agreement on both axes, you have to use “power tools”—coercion,threats, punishment, and so on—to secure cooperation. Many companies start inthis quadrant, which is why the founding executive team must play such anassertive role in defining what must be done and how. If employees’ ways ofworking together to address those tasks succeed over and over, consensus beginsto form. MIT’s Edgar Schein has described this process as the mechanism bywhich a culture is built. Ultimately, people don’t even think about whethertheir way of doing things yields success. They embrace priorities and followprocedures by instinct and assumption rather than by explicit decision—whichmeans that they’ve created a culture. Culture, in compelling but unspoken ways,dictates the proven, acceptable methods by which members of the group addressrecurrent problems. And culture defines the priority given to different typesof problems. It can be a powerful management tool.
source of happiness?, mystudents quickly see that the simplest tools that parents can wield to elicitcooperation from children are power tools. But there comes a point during theteen years when power tools no longer work. At that point parents start wishingthat they had begun working with their children at a very young age to build aculture at home in which children instinctively behave respectfully toward oneanother, obey their parents, and choose the right thing to do. Families havecultures, just as companies do. Those cultures can be built consciously orevolve inadvertently.
If you want your kids to havestrong self-esteem and confidence that they can solve hard problems, thosequalities won’t magically materialize in high school. You have to design theminto your family’s culture—and you have to think about this very early on. Likeemployees, children build self-esteem by doing things that are hard andlearning what works.
Avoidthe “Marginal Costs” Mistake
We’re taught in finance andeconomics that in evaluating alternative investments, we should ignore sunk andfixed costs, and instead base decisions on the marginal costs and marginalrevenues that each alternative entails. We learn in our course that thisdoctrine biases companies to leverage what they have put in place to succeed inthe past, instead of guiding them to create the capabilities they’ll need inthe future. If we knew the future would be exactly the same as the past, thatapproach would be fine. But if the future’s different—and it almost alwaysis—then it’s the wrong thing to do.
This theory addresses thethird question I discuss with my students—how to live a life of integrity (stayout of jail). Unconsciously, we often employ the marginal cost doctrine in ourpersonal lives when we choose between right and wrong. A voice in our headsays, “Look, I know that as a general rule, most people shouldn’t do this. Butin this particular extenuating circumstance, just this once, it’s OK.” Themarginal cost of doing something wrong “just this once” always seems alluringlylow. It suckers you in, and you don’t ever look at where that path ultimatelyis headed and at the full costs that the choice entails. Justification forinfidelity and dishonesty in all their manifestations lies in the marginal costeconomics of “just this once.”
I’d like to share a storyabout how I came to understand the potential damage of “just this once” in myown life. I played on the Oxford University varsity basketball team. We workedour tails off and finished the season undefeated. The guys on the team were thebest friends I’ve ever had in my life. We got to the British equivalent of theNCAA tournament—and made it to the final four. It turned out the championshipgame was scheduled to be played on a Sunday. I had made a personal commitmentto God at age 16 that I would never play ball on Sunday. So I went to the coachand explained my problem. He was incredulous. My teammates were, too, because Iwas the starting center. Every one of the guys on the team came to me and said,“You’ve got to play. Can’t you break the rule just this one time?”
I’m a deeply religious man,so I went away and prayed about what I should do. I got a very clear feelingthat I shouldn’t break my commitment—so I didn’t play in the championship game.
In many ways that was a smalldecision—involving one of several thousand Sundays in my life. In theory,surely I could have crossed over the line just that one time and then not doneit again. But looking back on it, resisting the temptation whose logic was “Inthis extenuating circumstance, just this once, it’s OK” has proven to be one ofthe most important decisions of my life. Why? My life has been one unendingstream of extenuating circumstances. Had I crossed the line that one time, Iwould have done it over and over in the years that followed.
The lesson I learned fromthis is that it’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it isto hold to them 98% of the time. If you give in to “just this once,” based on amarginal cost analysis, as some of my former classmates have done, you’llregret where you end up. You’ve got to define for yourself what you stand forand draw the line in a safe place.
Rememberthe Importance of Humility
I got this insight when I wasasked to teach a class on humility at Harvard College. I asked all the studentsto describe the most humble person they knew. One characteristic of thesehumble people stood out: They had a high level of self-esteem. They knew whothey were, and they felt good about who they were. We also decided thathumility was defined not by self-deprecating behavior or attitudes but by theesteem with which you regard others. Good behavior flows naturally from thatkind of humility. For example, you would never steal from someone, because yourespect that person too much. You’d never lie to someone, either.
It’s crucial to take a senseof humility into the world. By the time you make it to a top graduate school,almost all your learning has come from people who are smarter and moreexperienced than you: parents, teachers, bosses. But once you’ve finished atHarvard Business School or any other top academic institution, the vastmajority of people you’ll interact with on a day-to-day basis may not besmarter than you. And if your attitude is that only smarter people havesomething to teach you, your learning opportunities will be very limited. Butif you have a humble eagerness to learn something from everybody, your learningopportunities will be unlimited. Generally, you can be humble only if you feelreally good about yourself—and you want to help those around you feel reallygood about themselves, too. When we see people acting in an abusive, arrogant,or demeaning manner toward others, their behavior almost always is a symptom oftheir lack of self-esteem. They need to put someone else down to feel goodabout themselves.
Choosethe Right Yardstick
This past year I wasdiagnosed with cancer and faced the possibility that my life would end soonerthan I’d planned. Thankfully, it now looks as if I’ll be spared. But theexperience has given me important insight into my life.
I have a pretty clear idea ofhow my ideas have generated enormous revenue for companies that have used myresearch; I know I’ve had a substantial impact. But as I’ve confronted thisdisease, it’s been interesting to see how unimportant that impact is to me now.I’ve concluded that the metric by which God will assess my life isn’t dollarsbut the individual people whose lives I’ve touched.
I think that’s the way itwill work for us all. Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence youhave achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become betterpeople. This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which yourlife will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in theend, your life will be judged a success.
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