Best Lessons From The MBA Class of 2016

The biggest lessons in life are often simple and profound, requiring humility to accept and courage to act upon. Just ask the most recent business school graduates in the Class of 2016.

Ali Mehlsak, a 2016 University of Virginia MBA, was drawn to Darden for its focus on academics, particularly the case method. “There’s a common story among Darden students,” she explains to Poets&Quants. “We come to school hoping to improve our hard skills in finance, data analysis, and accounting. We think of our leadership cases as the ones that lighten our load during learning team, the ones we can spend less time on because they seem easier.”

Alison Mehlsak, University of Virginia (Darden)

Eventually, Mehlsak experienced the same rude awakening as her predecessors: What seems trivial in an MBA program often carries the most weight in the real world. “We start recruiting and asking alumni about the most important classes they took,” Mehlsak adds. “Nearly every time those alumni will say, Leading Organizations. You don’t realize it in school, but your biggest challenges in your jobs will be in managing people, and you’ll wish you had paid closer attention to those cases.”

SELF-AWARE LEADERS ‘WALK THE TALK’

Mehlsak wasn’t alone among Poets&Quants’ 2016 Best & Brightest MBAs to cite the value of interpersonal relationships as their biggest takeaway from business school. Generally, these graduates viewed relationships as the foundation for leadership. At the same time, they treated their MBA experience like a laboratory, where they could test what felt comfortable — and what worked with their peers.

Every lab exercise begins with a statement of purpose. At Stanford, that purpose takes the form of a question: “Why would someone follow you?” For GSB grad Sarah Wang, answering this question enabled her to develop confidence, along with “a keen awareness of both my strengths and flaws as a leader.” For INSEAD’s Pedro Filipe Tavares Ramos, business school was his first opportunity to lead teams. Like Wang, he started his leadership journey by being self-aware. “One needs to lead by example,” he writes. “Only when you “walk the talk” will you get the full effort and commitment of your team. Be humble, be bold and gain their trust early so that you can leverage their talent and experience and achieve the best possible results.”

After recognizing the significance of “LO” cases, Mehlsak herself decided to “break the cycle” and focus more on the big lesson. “Businesses are run by humans — individuals — and few leaders can be successful if they do not know how to manage people just as well as they know to manage products, services, processes, and balance sheets,” Mehlsak adds. “Even if I forget everything else I’ve learned these past two years, this is the one thing that will never be erased from my mind.”

UC-Berkeley’s Dan Fishman

BUSINESS IS ABOUT PEOPLE FIRST AND FOREMOST

The “human element” of business was interpreted by the Class of 2016 in different ways. UC-Berkeley’s Dan Fishman added several postulates to Mehlsak’s people-centric methodology. “People are everything, in every business; institutions are only as good as their people; and the right talent at the right time is hard to find and hard to keep,” Fishman explains. This credo has forever changed how he looks at others. “If I ever find myself saying ‘this is a terrific idea’ or ‘what a stellar organization,’ I peel a few layers deeper to discover the people who make that thing great, and why. If I’m to be successful in anything I do from here on out, it is because I’m able to work with, and learn from, excellent people.”

Duke University’s Paul Jacobs, an engineer who rivals Elon Musk with his dream of building a space elevator, takes Fishman’s philosophy a step further. He plans to use empathy as a business tool. “Understanding how to see the world through your user’s eyes not only provides market opportunities but it also allows you to shape your strategy to be the most efficient for the customer.”

Just as important, some members of the Best & Brightest — whose success prior to B-school was sometimes rooted in being Type-A empire builders — learned to step back and let go. That was the case for Texas A&M’s Tyler Lorenz. He described himself as a “recovering control freak” early in the program, which impeded his effectiveness in a team setting. “You have to be able to trust people around you to work,” he explains. “I took on too much work for myself. Once I was comfortable trusting my teammates, our final deliverables improved dramatically.”

Georgetown’s Coral Taylor

DIVERSITY AND MUTUAL RESPECT ARE FORCE MULTIPLIERS

Team settings are often where MBAs gain their deepest insights into the interpersonal side of business. Like many, Georgetown’s Coral Taylor, who started as a product manager at Starbucks this month, discovered that she needed to learn how to follow before she could lead. “One of the greatest lessons I learned is how to cooperate and collaborate with a team even if I may not agree with the direction the team is going,” she says. “Sometimes there is greater value in having a cohesive vision than pushing for the team to take one individual’s vision.”

Others learned to reserve judgment on their peers. Arizona State’s Phil Jeong has observed that the hectic B-school lifestyle can “desensitize students and create an atmosphere where students make quick judgments in regards to other students.” Such feelings may not reflect fact, which is why Jeong has committed himself to building bridges instead of slapping on labels. “I believe it is crucial to step back and be mindful of others, as we don’t know what each individual is going through on a daily basis,” he explains.

Although the Class of 2016 admits that team dynamics can create extra work, they add that it often acts as a force multiplier. “You can accomplish anything if you build out a well-rounded team and pool resources,” says Carnegie Mellon’s Samantha Grant. “Monstrous tasks can be broken into smaller components, and no one person has to know or do everything.” According to MIT’s Brian Kirk, a former submarine warfare officer, the best teams are the most diverse ones. “When everybody coming to the table comes from different professional backgrounds, cultural heritages, and geographics — and wants to actively listen and learn from one another — great things can happen.”

CLASSMATES ARE ‘YOUR FUTURE WEDDING PARTY, BUSINESS PARTNERS, AND CONFIDANTS’

One of those great things is life-long connections. Emory’s Heidi Laki admits that early on, she focused too heavily on academics and career and nearly missed out on the real benefits of business school. “About a year in,” she explains, “I realized I was neglecting a huge part of the experience by not nurturing the relationships I had developed. I realized the friendships you build in business school are your future wedding party, business partners and confidants.” In other words, Laki built her “network” — a concept sometimes associated with the backroom wheeling and dealing of an old boys’ club.

For Northwestern’s Tim Bossidy, the big lesson was discovering that networking need not be a dirty word. “Rather than associate it with getting ahead through connections versus hard work,” he says, “I now associate it with pushing myself to constantly meet new and interesting people. I have a bigger, better group of friends and people I can learn from and rely on after Kellogg.”

University of Iowa’s Kyle Wehr

FAILURE ISN’T AN END, JUST A TEACHABLE MOMENT

Teamwork and relationships weren’t the only takeaways for this year’s Best & Brightest MBAs. The experimental nature of business school lends itself to looking at process as much as result. Thus, variables are constantly being added, subtracted, and re-arranged. That creates ambiguity, an uncertainty that undermines a comforting certitude that many rely on for decisions. For Indiana University’s Sam Edwards, the MBA was about learning how to embrace ambiguity and develop strategies to lessen it. “The biggest lesson that I learned is that ambiguity is okay,” Edwards shares. “It’s okay because we have learned valuable tools that give us an organized process for how to think about, approach, illuminate, and ultimately solve the ambiguous situation or problem.”

For many MBAs, navigating ambiguity and accepting imperfection are two more requirements for leadership. “There are tradeoffs in every decision,” says the University of Michigan’s Lily Hamburger. Sometimes, points out Penn State’s Ian Nicholas Wetzel, students just need to take a leap of faith. “You’re not going to know all the information to make the best decision at any given time. You have to work with what you’re given and go with it.”

However, things don’t always work out at business school. Startups founder. Job offers aren’t tendered. Attendees don’t always show. That’s perfectly natural — it happens in the real world all the time. “At its core, an MBA is really an education in strategic failure,” writes the University of Iowa’s Kyle Wehr. “After learning this lesson, I better prioritized my time and effort.” Like Wehr, the University of Wisconsin’s Angie Peltzer uses failure as a teachable moment, not a cautionary tale. “Call it experimentation,” she says. “Often we’re afraid of failure, but failure is what enables us to learn. Scientists are accustomed to failure and that’s what enables them to get closer to the next big scientific discovery. The same is true when starting a new business. Keep trying, keep learning, keep iterating.”

Washington University’s Allison Campbell

Sounds easy … in theory, at least. In truth, failure rarely feels like a normal step in the process.  For Washington University’s Allison Campbell, now an associate marketing manager at Walmart, the high odds for some failure in b-school compelled her to change her outlook and become adaptable enough to “roll with the punches.” “Projects change and you have to be flexible and willing to evolve with them,” she explains. “Sometimes you have to take a more creative approach. Other times you have to start from square one. I had one project that changed scope three times before it took off in the right direction. It’s important to be able to multitask and focus on other pieces if you have a roadblock in one direction. Then you have to execute. Complete is better than perfect if you have a timeline.”

NEVER HESITATE TO TAKE RISKS

In the end, the biggest lesson for the Class of 2016 can be summed up this way: You regret what you don’t do more than what you do. That theme hit home for UCLA’s Maeghan Rouch, a Dean’s Honor Scholar and Bain & Company recruit who urges future MBA students to take risks. “Every great speaker I heard from, or every great company I learned about, all took on risk to get where they are,” Rouch says. “I’m admittedly a more risk-averse person. While I benefit from that sometimes, I see how easy it could be to let that hold me back. After two years in business school I now have plenty of examples where taking risks paid off, and even in cases where it didn’t you try again and eventually it pays off.”

Taking risks doesn’t necessarily mean that MBAs launch a tech startup or join an NGO in Rwanda. Some are smaller, yet no less overriding, risks. Claudia Caron grew up in Quebec with a thin English vocabulary and little experience with finance concepts, let alone Excel. When she arrived at USC’s Marshall School of Business, she was wary of public speaking — even with an advanced degree in communications.

University of Maryland’s Tiffany Chang

“I was terrified at the idea of having to raise my hand to share my thoughts in front of my 75 classmates or study group. I was worried that my peers would make fun of my French accent or that I would have a hard time expressing my opinions in English. Not to mention, my fear of being cold-called by my Strategy professor,” Caron says. However, she absorbed the initial embarrassments and gained confidence, with her experience punctuated by completing a successful internship at Mattel and graduating with a 3.81 GPA. “I learned that I should never hesitate to speak up and share my ideas.”
How are students like Rouch and Caron able to overcome their fear of risk and excel? The University of Maryland’s Tiffany Chang practiced a rather Spartan lesson: Make personal change a daily habit. “Every day, we risk falling back into the same comfort zones. Business school is designed to be challenging and there are definitely days where we are tempted to go the easy route. However, I have found that I learn more and evolve faster when I keep change and challenge top of mind and resist doing what I always do.”

Georgia Tech’s Trevor Clark, a lieutenant in the U.S. Coast Guard, was inspired by the transformative nature of business education. His biggest lesson echoes the purpose of any educational endeavor. “Never stop learning,” Clark counsels. “Never lose that childhood sense of curiosity, which makes you excited to get out of bed in the morning. I will always follow my curiosity into new problems, new topics and will continue to ask why.”

To read other important lessons gained by this year’s “Best & Brightest” MBAs, go to the next pages.

DON’T MISS: THE BEST ADVICE GRADUATING MBAS HAVE FOR NEW B-SCHOOL APPLICANTS or THE BIGGEST SURPRISES AWAITING YOU AT BUSINESS SCHOOL

Sonie Guseh, Columbia Business School

BE DELIBERATE IN YOUR CHOICES

“Take every opportunity seriously, from interview choices to experiential learning. No matter where you get your MBA, there will be boundless opportunities for professional development (networking events, case competitions, student involvement, Global Immersions, community impact), and I learned that the opportunities that you choose to take and experience will define and shape your network and career path.” — Lexie Cegelski, University of Florida, Warrington College of Business

“Focus on depth rather than breadth in what you involve yourself in. I made the rookie mistake of taking on too many channels of involvement my first few weeks as an MBA. Everything will sound enticing to you, but it’s critical that you buckle down and decide what will likely hold the greatest meaning for you down the line. As time continued, I found myself investing my time in activities and positions I knew had the greatest capacity for me to leave a legacy in my community and make an impact on my growth as a leader.”  — Rahul Sharma, USC, Marshall School of Management

“Business school is a balancing act between coursework, club meetings, part-time internships, and getting to know peers better — you’ll find that your time is incredibly valuable. I learned to be thoughtful about how I spend my time each day, which is a lesson I’ll continue to carry with me as a manager. Even though no week is the same in business school, I found that it was important for me to find my own rhythm and craft some sort of consistency in my schedule. It was helpful to have regular time with some of the friends I’d made in school to unwind and bounce ideas off of each other — whether it was exercising with running club members or grabbing dinner and wine with the ladies in my cluster. These regular activities were crucial parts of my business school experience, and helped me get to know my peers in creative ways outside of the classroom.” — Sonie Guseh, Columbia Business School

Yale SOM’s Sarah Esty

IDEAS ARE THE EASY PART

“For me, the core of business school can be distilled to two key principles: (1) use data to drive decision-making and (2) establish intentional structures (processes, HR policies, org charts) to achieve specific goals. I will definitely take this approach forward into everything I do.” — Sarah Esty, Yale School of Management

“I learned that business ideas are small and inconsequential when put in context of all of the moving parts associated with building successful businesses. I believe much more weight should be put on building quality products, the strategy of delivery, and the finances needed to stay afloat.” — Ian Folau, Cornell Tech

“To approach a problem with an open mindset and think holistically about the challenge. I’ve learned so many different methods to think about a problem set and I’ve seen that there are no particularly best strategies to employ. You have to be open-minded about everything and think critically to arrive at the best possible solution.” — Wyatt Batchelor, Columbia Business School

University of Virginia’s Jean-Marie Menga

NEVER HESITATE TO ASK

“I have learned to use simple questions that will help effectively identify root causes and quickly arrive at solutions in different situations. This might not seem like the biggest thing one learns from an MBA, but having gone through so many cases in class and learning to manage the rigor of the program, I have learned to maximize my resources by asking questions. We can’t remember every concept that we have learned when faced with a particular problem, so breaking down the problem by asking the right questions helps create a better understanding of the issue and simplifies it. My classmates offer a very diverse range of perspectives that I can draw from as I approach complex issues. We need a lot of information to make the best decisions and I can do that by asking thoughtful questions to myself and others.” — Jean-Marie Menga, University of Virginia, Darden School of Business

“Success comes from being generous enough to teach and humble enough to accept help.” — Devon Weiss, Georgetown University, McDonough School of Business

EMBRACE PERSONAL GROWTH

“It takes a very high-pressure, high-talent environment to really see where your strengths lie. I’ve come to learn now that my strongest asset is how quickly I can process information and find links between concepts. It wasn’t a talent I would have listed in my entrance essay, but it’s the core of my new career trajectory.”  — Sean Heisler, Cambridge Judge Business School

H. Kyle Hebenstreit, Indiana University

“Surprisingly enough, I learned not to sound like a ‘business person.’ The entertainment industry is very informal and different than traditional corporate environments.  Coming into school, I felt I had a lot of catching up to do, and I tried to overcome self-perceived shortcomings through using ‘business’ vernacular. Only after several interactions with really smart ‘business people’ did I realize that the best and brightest are able to use conversational language, even when describing high-level and complex concepts.” — H. Kyle Hebenstreit, Indiana University, Kelley School of Business

“The lessons at Tuck are everywhere, and they come in small and large packages. Most instructive were the instances when I missed the mark somehow. I can still feel the sting of those moments: realizing I was underprepared for a negotiation exercise; sharing unwanted feedback with a classmate; dropping the ball when my study group counted on me. These skills — preparation, tact, follow-through — are much harder to master than many of the textbook skills you learn in the classroom. Thankfully Tuck fosters a community where I’ve always felt safe to stretch while honing these competencies and my authentic leadership style.” — Whitney Flynn, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth

“Feedback is a gift. Before school, I would get anxious about performance reviews or discussions that led to critical evaluations. In the last two years, I’ve learned to appreciate and seek out every opportunity to get feedback, as it has helped me grow tremendously.” — Kristin Horvath, University of Michigan, Ross School of Business

Duke University’s Jessica Davlin

DEVELOP YOUR LEADERSHIP STYLE

“Maybe it’s the over-the-road touring musician in me, but I have come to believe that the scarcest resource on Earth is someone else’s attention. Business school’s biggest lesson has been what to do with that attention once you have it.” — Peter Mathias, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth

“Know your weaknesses and surround yourself with those who excel in those areas.”  — Jennifer Thomas, University of Texas, McCombs School of Business

“I’ve learned so much during the past two years, but the biggest lesson I’ve gained is the importance of the ‘soft’ skill set, specifically teamwork. During our first year we are assigned to small teams and work on every case, assignment, and presentation with that team. In order to be effective, team members need to have good relationships, understand each other, and trust each other. This may seem obvious, but taking the time to get to know your teammates pays dividends and the investment in cultivating relationships early on can often be overlooked. As we get ready to re-enter the workforce, the vast majority of us will be working on teams for the remainder of our career. Knowing how to relate to others, how to work well with others, and how to create an environment of trust will be critical to our success.” — Jessica Davlin, Duke University, Fuqua School of Business

“I learned how to better coach and lead incredibly talented people. I was a relatively young manager at Grant Thornton. One of the skills I knew I needed to work on in business school was learning how to manage high-performing teams, especially when something goes wrong. Working with my peers in student groups and coaching others through consulting and tech recruiting, I’ve grown much more comfortable giving difficult feedback, giving up ownership of tasks, and trusting my teams.”  — Emily Ruff, University of Chicago, Booth School of Business

“It’s all about networking. I think networking gets a bad rap sometimes because it makes people think of cronyism or something along those lines. But it really is important to know a wide variety of people both personally and professionally. Towards the end of my first year, I had been working part time in Columbus but really wanted to spend my summer with an NGO in Africa. I wasn’t sure where to start but a casual conversation with a staff member in the Office of Global Business led to a connection that led to a phone call that led to me spending the summer in Africa! Networking and making connections is so important to get to the places you want to go.” — John Petersen, Ohio State University, Fisher College of Business

Emily Claire Palmer, University of Washington

“The more authentic I can be, the more valuable I become. For a while, I thought I needed to become someone else to make the switch from music to business. Now I realize that my background gives me a unique set of experiences that informs the way I see the world. And the same is true for every one else on the planet. In business, as in life, it is good to have people around you with different perspectives. If we all saw everything the same way, we’d all have the same blind spots, and we’d never find a solution to our problems.” — Emily Claire Palmer, University of Washington, Foster School of Business

“Through all my classes and experiences at Berkeley-Haas, I have learned what it takes for me to be an effective and authentic leader. It has been a very personal journey. The two years have been like an ongoing and intensive experiment where I was able to constantly take risks and make mistakes. It was hard going at times, but it provided so many worthwhile adventures. All of it has laid the groundwork for me to achieve my ultimate career ambitions.” — Jen Fischer, UC-Berkeley, Haas School of Business

“I think the biggest lesson I learned in business school is that everyone has a strong background and has most likely learned more from their past experiences than they ever give themselves credit for. While working with students on their resumes who were preparing to answer that all-important first interview question of ‘Tell me about yourself,’ I continually had students come to me who said they wanted to go into consulting but didn’t feel like their background would suit them for it. An equal number of students took it one step further and said they thought their backgrounds, such as work in human resources or the clergy, would in fact be contra-indicators to firms that were reviewing their resumes. What really hit home for me is that we frequently end up getting so caught up in our positions that we focus on only the big picture perspectives and forget what we’re actually doing — we forget that though we may be working at a big firm doing a job we didn’t want to be doing, we are gaining a multitude of skills, from communication to leadership to innovation. That led me to even further understand the strengths people bring with them to a team even if, at first glance, their backgrounds do not seem to support it.” — Austin Ayres, Southern Methodist University, Cox School of Business