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Paul Shafer, HBS, '79
In this Alumni Perspective, Paul Shafer, class of 1979, shares his career experience with readers and confers several revelations based on 30 years of IT practice in corporate America. We will start with a brief introductory Q&A followed by key lessons Paul learned.
Harbus: Before we dive into things, would you introduce yourself, please.
Shafer: My name is Paul Shafer. I entered the MBA class in 1977, when invited. I graduated on time in 1979, likely in the middle third of the class. Since my career started in 1975 (before HBS), I have worked as an information technology (IT) practitioner, mostly for the Fortune 500, with very few breaks. In recent years I have risen to the role of principal architect of project management standards that are being enforced across a multi-billion dollar IT practice.
Harbus: Why come forward to share some of your HBS and career experiences with our students now?
Shafer: I believe HBS students are managing their careers at a historically dysfunctional time. Unless things have changed since I was there, students may not be hearing the truth about what awaits them once they earn their MBA degrees. They may be in for greater hard knocks than they deserve or expect, once they graduate. Far from receiving favorable treatment, they may not even receive a fair shake, and worse, find that their hard-won paper makes them a target. What I relate here is something I deeply wish someone had had the decency to share with my classmates and me when we were deciding whether to invest in HBS, or at least, once we got there.
Harbus: If you are sure of your story, why not cite names of people and companies involved?
Shafer: The purpose of this text is not to indict specific individuals years after the fact, but rather, to share important truths with those who may value them here and now.
Lesson #1:
A degree from HBS does not guarantee, nor even correlate with, a high salary and a corner office.
It is a very natural and healthy thing for young, high-potential people to want to distinguish and prove themselves. It is a very sick and dysfunctional thing to exploit them by stroking their egos and otherwise making them think they can readily achieve their goals when, in fact, if they achieve them at all, it will be through their own innate attributes against the odds imposed by a toxic corporate environment and not by anything as artificial as an expensive piece of paper. Consulting literature has reported over the years that a huge number of people, with and without expensive degrees, have left industry out of sheer disgust, to do their own purely entrepreneurial thing, join the nonprofits, or just opt out of corporate management and "getting ahead". My own experiences across many industries, even in companies rated "best to work for in America," bear this out.
Current HBS students face an additional obstacle of recent years-an economy in which tens of millions of jobs have been outsourced, and not just junior or blue-collar jobs. As only 1 example, in the 2003 timeframe, a major Wall Street investment bank announced that it was forsaking its traditional connection with Ivy League schools to get interns from India, thus saving 60 percent of the associated labor costs. After all, dollars trump traditional ties-as another door slams in the faces of those starting their careers.
Lesson #2:
All HBS graduates are not created equal. There is a difference between an "HBS grad" and a "Harvard MBA". People coming from money and connections will always walk in where others are uninvited, and merely being an HBS grad does not narrow that gap.
An MBA degree's impact on careers is much more situational than HBS wants students to know. The three groups it most benefits are those who need it least .................
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