As we review your application, what more would you like us to know as we consider your candidacy for the Harvard Business School MBA program?
As we review your HBS application, what more would you like us to know as we consider your candidacy for the Harvard Business School MBA program?
Sharing a makeshift cake with strangers at the Charlotte airport as the clock strikes midnight on my birthday. Meeting with a Partner on the mountains of Park City, breathless from the elevation. Dashing from an anniversary dinner to catch an impromptu flight to London for a project kick-off. My resume will have detailed my professional experiences to date, but underneath each of the bullets are dozens of memories like the above. Reflecting on these memories, I am proud that I have chosen adaptability as my defining characteristic.
My favorite personality test will tell you that I am introverted, intuitive, a thinker, and a planner. Growing up, I was markedly different from my sisters, and you could typically find me reading in the clothing racks as my mother took us shopping, or out loud in the back seat of our family car while my sisters tried to listen to their favorite N*Sync song. As I considered my future, my instinct told me that an introverted bookworm should not pursue a client-facing, heavily social and unpredictable career.
Three years later, I am thankful that I didn’t listen to that instinct: I overcame my insecurities and adapted to the life of a consultant. At X, my focus has been building a market around the Future of Work – how technology, demographics, and globalization will change the nature of work. I have become a leader in this space, crafting our response to clients’ questions for dozens of discussions, pursuits, and conferences. I have developed compelling thought leadership, but the fundamental challenge of driving this point of view in the market is similar to the fears I once held as I embarked on my career.
I believe the central theme of the Future of Work is the concept of adaptability – the need for companies and individuals alike to be agile and willing to engage in lifelong learning to keep up with today’s constant rate of change. In the same way that I overcame my fears to pursue my passions, millions of workers (and their leaders) will have to overcome theirs in order to succeed in a future that is increasingly uncertain and irrevocably different – and that is a difficult pill to swallow.
Adapting to uncomfortable situations is a skill that was accelerated by my personal journey and background. I am the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and the daughter of a failed small business owner who reinvented himself at 50. The epitome of strength and adaptability, my grandparents came to America after being liberated from the camps, started a family in Queens and opened a small Jewish bakery that was eventually passed on to my father. By the time I was born, the business was being out-competed by supermarkets. I grew up in an environment of uncertainty, but also with a role model: when the business failed, my dad learned an entirely new trade after a 25-year career and found a job that excites him every day.
I embraced my family’s strength and adaptability last November, when my mother suffered a sudden, fatal heart attack. Moving forward seemed inconceivable, but career opportunities kept coming. The same week that my mother passed, I was offered a role directly supporting a Human Capital Partner in building a new practice grounded in thought leadership in the Future of Work space. Despite my personal hardships, I jumped at the opportunity to be involved in transforming the face of Human Capital. I was immediately immersed in setting the strategy for the new business that will deliver large-scale transformations following Future of Work discussions. This has meant gaining experience with cognitive technologies, considering how they will fundamentally change jobs, and developing new ways to transform the workforce for the future. It has been a fast-paced role, vastly different from traditional Consulting client work. Adaptability has been my strength in this new role.
My insight into adaptability has impacted not only my professional focus, but also my community work. Much of the professional struggle my father experienced came from not having a college degree. As a first-generation college graduate, my passion for literacy and education access has steered me to become a founding Board member of X and a volunteer high school mentor. I try to instill adaptability in the students I mentor and the non-profit leaders and school administrators I have the pleasure of working with, sharing the opportunities afforded by the same disruption my clients face such as rethinking the skills we teach our students, crowdsourcing global expertise to the classroom, and augmenting the physical classroom with digital tools. Adaptability in this context does not only mean prevailing over hardship to pursue your passions, but also fundamentally changing the way we think about delivering education in the future.
Grounded in the concept of adaptability, my personal, professional and community experiences have informed my dream of becoming a strategist transitioning Fortune 500s to the Future of Work and a board member of innovative education NPOs, transforming how we develop the future workforce. Through the Harvard MBA, I will be able to bring my own unique perspectives and ability to adapt to the case method, peer and alumni network and global community. This will accelerate and broaden my thinking on how to instill adaptability into organizations and our future workforce, ultimately deepening my ability to lead through the transition to the Future of “X”– work, education – you fill in the blank.