Please describe a time when you went beyond what was defined, expected, established, or popular.

Sample One

As business development manager at New Tech Company, I was responsible for driving new initiatives for our existing clients as well as driving new business for our enterprises team. One day I was approached by a large educational client with a proposal to develop fun and interactive budgeting software aimed at teenagers. The client had observed that high school math curriculum rarely included basic financial literacy education. At the same time the financial crisis had illuminated the need for basic consumer education about banking, checking and credit. Our client wanted to fill the gap with educational software that would be scalable across school systems and provide teachers with a ready-made solution. The only issue was that our product development team was already engaged on a higher margin project, and senior management didn’t see the same revenue opportunity for the budgeting software.

I decided to build a business model for the educational software and demonstrate the market potential. Working with marketing and the client, we researched the opportunity. We discovered that no existing low cost, flexible and simple budgeting software was in the marketplace, and we saw the opportunity to scale our software into the consumer market as well. I spent significant time on personal finance blogs and noticed there was strong recommendation engine potential if our product was successful with the bloggers.

After presenting our findings to the senior management team, we convinced them to provide two engineers to develop the product. Working in cooperation with the client and our marketing team, I led the beta development. Once we had a beta product, I reached out to several well-respected personal finance bloggers to test our software. We then incorporated their feedback to improve the product, and released the budgeting software for our client’s use.

What was most exciting was bringing our software to market in the consumer arena. New Tech was not traditionally a consumer facing company, so we marketed using social media and bloggers. We were able to drive significant grass roots sales in response to several positive articles, and the profit exceeded expectations by 13%. I was gratified that we were able to both respond to a client need and drive new business. At MIT Sloan I look forward to developing my innovative strategies further, with the ultimate goal of starting my own successful enterprise.

Sample Two

My aunt was like a second mother to me, and watching her struggle with breast cancer was a defining moment for me. I was touched by her resilience, determination, and the help she had from doctors, family and friends to overcome the disease. When she had been cancer free for three years we celebrated with a family cruise. Many women are not so lucky, and I have devoted much of my free time outside of work to raising money for low-income women to support their fight against cancer.

In 2008, I became the president of the NYC chapter of my non-profit organization and was charged with setting the vision and goals, and restructuring the leadership team. I set an ambitious objective for our team: raise $30,000 at our largest fundraising event of the year.

During a planning meeting for our fundraiser I learned a crucial lesson about the power of personal relationships and leading by example. The team of volunteers had worked hard to set up a nice meeting for our prominent board members, yet had neglected to hire an audio-visual team to run the microphones and projector for our presentation. While this was a minor oversight, it could have derailed our meeting. I was able to call a few of my work contacts and secure a company at the last minute.

I realized the minimal structure and accountability in the team had led to the issue at the planning meeting, and I realized I needed to reset the team dynamics before our major fundraiser. I decided to actively assign each member of the team to delegated tasks and responsibilities, and have honest conversations with each team member about their level of involvement. After I coached new leaders, helped a few less committed members resign, and delegated tasks, the team dynamics improved greatly. Since involvement was voluntary, one tremendous challenge was to overcome competing priorities to achieve our goals. I ensured that the team felt closely tied to the organization by matching their professional and personal goals with their role on the leadership team, empowering them to make decisions and giving them credit when due.

At our large fundraising event everything went smoothly, and several board members commented that it was the best gala they had ever attended with the organization. The most impressive result was that we met our goal and raised $32,000 towards the cause.