Business for Non-Corporate Types

I love hearing from applicants with whom I crossed paths in years past. Here's an update I just received from a soon-to-be JD. It's a great reminder not to tack on graduate degrees willy-nilly, but to think hard about how a more general degree (like an MBA)  stacks up against more specialized ones.

In my last email I told you that I was considering getting a MBA because of my interest in working for the Justice Department or the SEC. I am no longer considering pursuing a MBA because I found a graduate program that is more suitable to my career interest. After [X Law School], I am going to get a Masters in Forensic Accounting at Georgia Southern. I want to tell you about this program in case any of your clients have an interest in pursuing white collar prosecution. Georgia Southern is one of three universities in the country that offer a Masters in Forensic Accounting (Cornell University and Washington University are the others).

What makes Georgia Southern good for me (aside from location) is that Georgia Southern agreed to waive the GMAT requirement because I have demonstrated that I can handle a graduate workload. After completing the Masters in Forensic Accounting, I will be able to sit for the CPA; the school uses the Becker model (I am not sure who or what that is, but I hear it's effective) to teach the CPA. I will also take the CFE [Certified Fraud Examiner] exam after I finish the program. I hope this information helps.

I'd love to hear from others who are choosing (or have chosen) among general and specialized degrees. What makes the most sense for you? Please share your thoughts.

Are law schools and business schools, as well as applicants, obsessed with interdisciplinary education? In my experience, yes, and I have cautioned against what Judge Easterbrook called "Cyberspace and the Law of the Horse" ("put together two fields about which you know very little and get the worst of both words"). Getting interdisciplinary education right is hard.

Now Jeff Lipshaw, a professor at Suffolk Law School and all-around smart guy, has published a paper arguing that interdisciplinarity isn't enough anyway, because someone has to make the judgment call about what goes into that intersection, and how to solve those complexities:

The relationship of pure and mixed business and legal judgment can be modeled in a Venn diagram. The question is who is capable of making judgments in the overlap. Businesspeople are not competent to assess the legal implications, and not inclined merely to trust the decision to lawyers. Lawyers, on the other hand, are usually successors to a particular method of organizing the world, and members of a closed discipline. By nature of the very concept of a judgment, it must occur privately in a single conscious mind, no matter how the judgment is ultimately communicated, shared, or adopted by others. The implication for lawyering and legal education is that some of the old canards about leaving business judgment to the business people must fall away....

Business judgment depends far more on the argument from merit, versus legal judgment, which depends far more on the argument from authority, and a particular kind of authority at that. What, then, does it means to be an expert in the overlap of the diagram? We need to define a new professional discipline: the field of metadisciplinarity. Being a metadisciplinarian takes one to a higher order skill than mere interdisciplinarity: it means being an expert in the making of interdisciplinary judgments.... 

Read more here.

For more casual readers, I asked Jeff how this all boils down, and here's what he said:

There's a skill in deciding things you don't know much about.  Unfortunately, it's not a skill taught much in law school, nor anywhere in academia where strong disciplines govern.

Your point is correct - getting the second degree doesn't help much.  You also have to jump across the divide to make good business/legal judgments, whether you have the second degree or not, just as doubling down in academic disciplines doesn't do much except co-opt you in both orthodoxies!

Those of you who work or teach in one or the other discipline, or at the intersection of both, we'd love to hear your thoughts. Please share.

A very cool non-profit, Imagine H2O in San Francisco, is seeking to come up with solutions for the country's water problems.

They are looking for an interim director of operations as well as a permanent COO, and it occurred to me that there is currently no shortage of attorneys being offered the opportunity to go work for a non-profit while receiving a stipend from their current/future employer.  I said that I would put the word out and see if if there's someone out there who is suitable to join this exciting non-profit on either a temporary or a permanent basis.

If you know of anyone in the San Francisco area (or willing to relocate) who might be appropriate for either of these opportunities, please send them the links below.

P.S.  I realize that the job listing refers to MBAs, but I'm told that they are specifically looking at JDs as well.

1. Interim Director of Ops (looking for someone who wants to take a leave of absence, or has been asked to defer their start date post law school or MBA):

2. COO

Last week, 900 students gathered on a sunny day in Boston, 100 years after the founders of Harvard Business School determined that they would create a school to professionalize the art of management.  It was an honor being among those who received a diploma, but the afternoon session the prior day offered a different kind of special feeling.  After the class heard Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, talk about life lessons and a greater responsibility to local communities and society, several hundred graduating students gathered in the business school auditorium to take an oath to live up to a higher standard as managers.

My experience with business ethics started during my undergraduate years at the University of Notre Dame.  There, the faculty and administration were among the leading proponents of business ethics, not least because of the Catholic nature of the school.  As I was preparing to enter the working world, I wondered how all of this ethical focus was going to tangibly affect my decisions.

I got a clearer answer when I sat for the CPA and CFA exams, which each have a large ethical component as well as a code of conduct by which members are expected to act in their professional and personal lives—if these are broken, the penalties are severe, and can lead to loss of credibility and accreditation.

So, after several years in the management consulting world, I came back to graduate school to study business and public administration at Harvard.  While I was surrounded by both capitalistic and public/non-profit peers and inundated with businesses cases across sectors, I have always wondered how the lessons we learned in my classes would bear on our day-to-day actions.

That is why I was so enthused when a classmate of mine told me about an idea he had for a ‘hippocratic oath’ for MBAs, just like doctors take.  In my mind the idea of both having an ethical framework as well as adding professionalization and accountability to the MBA graduate cohort was a great thing. 

Twenty-five of us have been working on this for the last month, and we have received a huge response from the current HBS graduating class (more than 50% signed the oath), graduating students at other business schools, alumni from several business schools, as well as several national press outlets.  While the press coverage and blogs have ranged from completely against/skeptical of the Oath to completely backing the effort, it has been a great thing to get a balanced discussion going on business ethics and how we as a profession and as a society need to learn from the current financial crisis.

A couple of the highlights from the Oath include:

Goal: Our long-term goal is to transform the field of management into a true profession, one in which MBAs are respected for their integrity, professionalism, and leadership. We hope to see hundreds of thousands of MBAs take the MBA oath, or something like it, as a step towards realizing this vision.

Preamble: As a manager, my purpose is to serve the greater good by bringing people and resources together to create value that no single individual can build alone. Therefore I will seek a course that enhances the value my enterprise can create for society over the long term. I recognize my decisions can have far-reaching consequences that affect the well-being of individuals inside and outside my enterprise, today and in the future. As I reconcile the interests of different constituencies, I will face difficult choices.

So, what does this mean for all of those folks out there preparing to apply to schools this fall.  There are several questions you should consider and attempt to answer:  What am I expecting to garner from a prospective business school in terms of business ethics education and institutional knowledge about the causes of the financial crisis or business failures in general?  Do I see a value in having accountability for my actions as an MBA?  What sort of ethical code to I live by and aspire to?  Knowing that the Oath and its tenets are top of mind for many business school professors (and likely admissions committees), how can I relay these thoughts successfully in my applications?

While many bloggers have criticized the Oath for lacking teeth or any process for accountability, I am confident that this aspirational first step has been necessary to get the word out there.  I see a strong possibility that, like an MD, JD, or CPA, the MBA will begin to take on a stronger meaning and will embrace accountability standards that will reward and punish ethical and un-Oath-like behavior, respectively.

To learn more about the Oath, go to http://mbaoath.org.

Below is a selection of national news media on the Oath:

New York Times – “A Promise to be Ethical in an Era of Immorality”

Financial Times – “Harvard MBAs Pledge to Do Good”

The Economist – "Forswearing Greed"

CNN - “MBA Students Pledge to Serve the Greater Good”

BusinessWeek – “MBAs – First, Do No Harm”

Please share your thoughts and comments! 

 

Originally hailing from the Midwest, Paul Buser attended the University of Notre Dame for his undergraduate education. There he studied Finance, Accounting, and Public Policy while tirelessly cheering (in vain) for a Notre Dame football championship. After graduating summa cum laude in 2003, Paul worked as a management consultant at the Boston Consulting Group in Chicago and Thailand, specializing in operations and strategy. He has also directed a non-profit consulting team in Cambodia, Kosovo, and the U.S. through the International Business Council. Paul is a CPA and holds a CFA charter, and he just graduated with combined degrees from Harvard Business School (MBA) and the Kennedy School of Government (MPA). As part of the Ivey Consulting team, Paul works with business school and public policy school applicants.

Just two weeks ago (a Tuesday to be exact), I was in my law school class, constantly stealing glances at my computer screen to check if there were any new messages. I was anxious.

"Any news?" I typed, then clicked send.

"Nope, not yet."  Rohini replied within seconds.

Rohini and I are part of a five-person team. Earlier in the Spring Quarter, we had decided to participate in a venture capital competition sponsored by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business - the "New Venture Challenge" (NVC).

"I just got asked how we spell our company name. That might mean we're in…?" Rohini was hanging out near the Polsky Center, where the judges were finalizing their results; she too was obviously anxious.

The suspense was driving me crazy, so I turned off my laptop, and tried to keep my mind focused on my law professor. I didn't turn on my computer again, until after class. When I open my email inbox, I found a message from Ravi (another team member): "WE'RE A FINALIST!"

Business Plan Competitions

Practically every big name business school in the nation hosts some form of annual business plan competition. Hundreds (perhaps thousands) of entrepreneurially minded students from all walks and disciplines submit their ideas in hopes to get a chance to stand before venture capitalists, who may invest in their ideas and help them realize their dreams.

Some of the representative business competitions out there, by region, are:

West Coast
E-Challenge: Stanford's Business Plan Competition (see here)
UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition (see here)

East Coast
Harvard's Business Plan Contest (see here)
MIT Entrepreneurship Competition (see here)

The South
Moot Corp Competition McCombs School of Business (UT) (see here)

The Midwest
New Venture Challenge (NVC) (see here)

NVC Selection Process

There are essentially three levels in NVC: Phase I, Phase II, and Final Round.

During Phase I, hundreds of entrepreneurs from all across the nation submit a feasibility summary (basically, a brief summary describing the business concept, financials, and management) to the business school. 29 teams are selected to move onto Phase II.

During Phase II, the selected teams have the opportunity to create their business plan (a document introducing the business concept, marketing strategy, management team, and financial milestones) and practice pitching their slide decks before a panel of venture capitalists. Based on the business plan and pitch, 10 teams are selected to move onto the Final Round.

During the Final Round, selected teams submit their business plans and pitch their ideas to 30 high profile venture capitalists. One winner is chosen. The winner gets a cash prize. But the real prize is the glory that follows from winning and the invaluable investment relationships built throughout the process.

But it’s probably best to think of the competition as something akin to American Idol. There is only one winner, but many participants, especially those in the Final Round, get noticed and "picked up" by some investor. In short, just because a team doesn't win, doesn't mean it won't get financed; many losing teams from the past are now extremely successful businesses.

The Beginning of NVC

My team consists of 3 MBAs and 2 JDs. It's quite an amazing bunch. Collectively the team has experience in virtually every single industry imaginable (e.g., i-banking, IT consulting, law, restaurant management, etc.)

I personally have no background in finance or economics. But long before attending law school, I was fascinated with venture capital ("VC") financing. Venture capitalists ("VCs") basically invest in ideas. An entrepreneur who approaches VCs needs to convince them that his/her business plan (a.k.a. the idea) is worth the VCs’ time (~5 years) and money (millions of dollars).  The thought of being funded to realize an idea as well as investing in the next brilliant idea (not stocks, bonds or real property) is so exciting to me.

Because of that long-standing interest, naturally, during the beginning of my 2L year, I took a law school course called "Entrepreneurship in Practice" with John Rodkin. The class was basically a course on how to successfully obtain venture financing. As an experienced entrepreneur and venture capitalist, John made a point to help us experience the VC world by running through case studies. These case studies often forced us to role play and act as either the entrepreneur's lawyer or as the VC. The final exam was to conceive a business, draft a business plan, and present the business.

After my classmates and I finished presenting our businesses, John encouraged us submit our business plans to NVC. That was the beginning of my NVC journey.

What is a Business Plan?

A business plan is basically the blueprint of the business. The objective is to draft a persuasive and easy-to-read document that will convince anyone reading the plan to agree that the idea proposed in the plan is a sure winner.

But the process of drafting a good business plan is long and arduous. First, for my "Entrepreneurship in Practice" final exam, my teammate and I had to find a venture-finance worthy business proposal. Most VCs invest only in easily scalable business models that will bring huge returns in fewer than five years (e.g., Google, Facebook). After bouncing ideas back and forth, we eventually found an entrepreneur in Florida who had developed "Peelable Paint." Although I can't discuss the details due to privacy concerns, suffice it to say that my teammate and I were convinced that this cutting-edge paint would have any VC going gaga.

Now that we had an idea, we had to create our pitch deck (= PowerPoint presentation). Writing a great business plan is a lot like drafting a great legal brief: the writing has to be clear, concise, persuasive, and to the point. The process of creating a pitch deck forces people to focus and clarify their thoughts. Guy Kawasaki, a VC godfather, preaches the 10-20-30 strategy for creating a successful pitch deck:

1. No more than 10 slides;
2. No presentation more than 20 minutes; and
3. No font smaller than size 30.

My teammate and I faithfully followed Kawasaki's advice. The most difficult aspect, for me, was creating financial projections: cash trough, earnings, growth in EBITDA, etc. This is where it helped to have an MBA teammate.  

After creating the pitch deck, we finally got down to writing our business plan. We stayed up many a night - one night we worked 20 hours straight - drafting the "perfect" business plan.

To make the long story short, we received very high marks on our final exam. My teammate eventually submitted the business plan to Tuft's business plan competition, where it won a cash prize.

Tune in for Part II tomorrow! Please share your comments, reactions, and experiences.

David Yi attended Middlebury College and graduated with a degree in Political Science and Chinese. A Peace Corps volunteer in the People's Republic of China, he also acquired extensive experience teaching and training college and post-college level students in China and Korea. David then returned to the United States, where he founded oneAsia, a non-profit organization committed to encouraging unity and volunteerism among Asian nations. He soon had two jobs: running a non-profit by day and teaching the LSAT by night. David is currently a 2L at the University of Chicago Law School and works with law school applicants as part of the Ivey Consulting team.

There's a nice collection of articles in today's WSJ for aspiring lawyers and JD/MBAs:

Creating a Shorter Path to a JD/MBA: This is a good discussion of the pros and cons of the 3-year joint degree. I would add that the 3-year program is too short unless you have a fair amount of work experience and very targeted goals for the joint program (and what comes after). You would need to hit the ground running as soon as you get there, and be very smart about mapping out those three years and the summers in between. Most law school applicants and many business school applicants I cross paths with don't have that much focus yet. They are going to graduate school to figure out what they want to do with themselves, and they are not really the ones who would benefit from the fast-track joint degree.

Law Firms Embrace Business School 101: Law firms are realizing that their attorneys lack management and business training and are therefore sending them to executive ed classes at business schools ("We realized our associates don't have an inside view of how our clients work").

Lawyers Often Lack the Skills Needed to Draw, Keep Clients: They don't teach you business development or client relations in law school, and I often remind law school applicants who tell me they're "not interested in business" that at a minimum, if they hope to advance as lawyers and own an equity stake in a law firm one day (whether at a large firm or as solo practitioners), they will have to learn how to think like business owners and learn how to run a business.

Hand in hand with client relations, it's also important for young attorneys to learn how to interact appropriately with more senior associates and law firm partners. Here's a recent example, in the form of an email exchange, of a junior law firm associate who needs to learn those skills (tone, content, spelling, judgment). It's a good reminder that going to a top law school is not the same thing as knowing how to succeed in the working world.

Thoughts? Comments? Please share.

BusinessWeek just launched a year-by-year guide to get you on track to apply to business school in five years. This is perfect for recent college graduates.

Here's their plan for Year 1, with special emphasis on your first job out of school.

Recently I posted my reactions to a new book about Harvard Business School called "Ahead of the Curve," by recent alum Philip Delves Broughton. Philip thought I had misintepreted his reflections in the book, and he was kind enough to elaborate on his experiences as an HBS student and let me pick his brain. Here's our email exchange about the value of an MBA for career changers, the HBS culture, teaching leadership and ethics in the classroom, being a humanities guy in an Excel world, and more:

 

AI: I got the sense from your book -- I think you even say so expressly -- that you weren't terribly clear in your own mind about what you were hoping to do with your MBA before you embarked on business school. It sounds as if you went to business school hoping to take more control over your life, and you assumed you'd be able to work out the specifics of a career change while you were there. That didn't seem to come together as neatly as you had hoped -- by the end of the MBA program, you were still trying to sort out what you wanted to do, and you were finding the job search harder than expected. In hindsight, do you wish you had done more planning or soul-searching before starting business school?

PDB: No, I was pretty clear about why I was going. I needed to be. I left a great job to go to business school. The challenge was remaining clear about it under the kind of peer pressure you find at a business school. I wanted to be able to pursue my own interests while controlling my own P&L. I didn't want an employer. I wanted control over my time. Now this is pretty different from a lot of people at b-school. I didn't want a "career change" so much as more power to decide my own personal and economic fate. It's different. The book is not about my failed job search. It's about my struggle to remain on the path I set out on while pulled in various directions.

AI: I've been somewhat skeptical about the value of business school, even a top business school, for career changers, for some of the reasons you mention in the book, and also because the recruiting schedule starts so relentlessly early that you don't really have any time to navel-gaze about your career once you get there. I'm thinking in particular of the hiring interview you did with the Washington Post (pretty dispiriting), and the following:

"But I was not alone in struggling to change my career. Luis, the Franco-Argentine, complained to me that many people felt HBS failed in its promise to give people a new start. 'They say this is your chance to change industry, but very few are succeeding. You see, the problem is that the path of least resistance is to do banking or consulting. Now, if you wanted to do either of those, you probably could. But if you wanted to get out of them, you really have to fight.... If you don't have experience in an industry, they don't want you, so you end up going back to the industries you do have experience in."

Do you think career changers should go to business school? If yes, what can they do to make their time there, and the job search process, less difficult?

PDB: Career changers need to do a couple of things. The first thing, as you say, is to start thinking early about what you want to change to. Even if you're not sure, you must have a vague idea. Then use every resource - especially alumni - to help you do that. The second thing is to regard your first job out of b-school as a bank shot. You go into one of the standard b-school professions - banking/consulting - in order to drop into the career you want in a couple of years. Lots of people do that successfully. But simply hoping the MBA magic dust will transform you into the dream candidate in the career you're after is delusional. The final thing I'd recommend, is to go to places where people know you already, your home town for example - then your career to that point, plus the MBA, plus trust and familiarity will make a career change easier.

AI: In hindsight, do you think you were naive about the HBS culture (I know I was pretty tough on you in that regard in my initial blog posting), and what HBS would be able to do for your career change? Aside from reading your book, what would you recommend applicants do to educate themselves about whether business school is a good idea for them, and whether a particular school is a good match?

PDB: I wasn't so much naive as ignorant of what HBS would be like. I didn't come from a profession where lots of people went to business school. I wasn't surprised that people were like they were - but given all that we heard from the most successful business people, Buffett/Paulson/Whitman, about work-life balance, I thought people should have taken that stuff more seriously. As I say in my book, I made a lot of very good friends at HBS and admired a lot of my fellow students. Anyone reading the book as a whole - and not just the reviews - will see that. I think the best thing to do to educate yourself is find people who have been to business school and ask them. Also ask people you admire - would I benefit from this? Match only really matters if you're fortunate enough to get into a bunch of schools. Otherwise, you go to the best one you can.

AI: You write about some of the difficulties you had as a humanities guy with no quantitative or business background. How can other humanities or liberal arts types best prepare themselves if they think they want to pursue a management or business education?

PDB: Oh, this is just practice. I hadn't done math since I was 16. I had never opened Excel. You have two years to figure this stuff out, which I did. It's a hassle at first, but short of taking an Excel course before getting on campus, there's not much you can do. You pick it up pretty fast once you're there - but just have to swallow your ego while you're trying to catch up.

AI: HBS says its mission is "to educate leaders who make a difference in the world." In your book, Ben asks, "I wonder why the school can't just admit that its job is teaching people how to run profitable businesses? Why does it even think that leadership is best taught through courses on business? I mean, if it is really leadership they want to teach, why don't they have us taking history or religion courses or spending the weekends with the Marine Corps?" Do you agree? Do you think leadership can be taught in a classroom?

(I do know your thinking process changed, and that you found that valuable: "Despite my frustration at being so far behind my classmates technically and in my basic knowledge of business functions, I knew that my intellectual apparatus had toughened. I saw things in the world that I had not seen before. I looked at facts and numbers a different way" -- but that's arguably different than leadership skills.)

PDB: Yes, leadership can be taught. Not in the sense that you're teaching people how to be Churchills or Roosevelts or Napoleons even. Just in the sense of helping people think about managing organizations. Every CEO we heard from said that people management was the biggest part of their job. And this didn't mean making big speeches. It meant hiring and firing, establishing a culture, setting the right incentives - and there is a large academic component to that, in addition to any personal qualities a leader might have.

AI: You took a somewhat dyspeptic view of the HBS culture, which in parts of the book sounds like a cross between American Pie fraternity antics and some kind of EST/Maoist reeducation camp. Do you think that's unique to HBS vs. other business schools? And was perhaps your age a factor? Your non-American-ness? I got the impression throughout the book that the other non-Americans were similarly nonplussed by those parts of the HBS culture. Thoughts?

PDB: Yes, being older made me look at it differently. I was married with a child - therefore not going out to Boston nightclubs midweek. Yes, I'm British, but I've lived in America since 1998, except for 2.5 years, and my wife is American, and my grandfather, aunt and cousins are American.... so I'm not entirely "not American." Yes, I think the foreigners did find it strange. American college culture is somewhat startling to foreigners. I know it's not unique to HBS. But perhaps the contrast between the seriousness in the classroom and the frat-ishness of much of the social life was more glaring. But again, I think this exists in business culture more broadly - you have companies preaching corporate social responsibility in the morning and then doing quite irresponsible things the rest of the day. Would the more exotic nightlife of Las Vegas exist, one wonders, without business expense accounts? I think people outside business are more sensitive to this hypocrisy.

AI: In your book, your classmates come in for quite a drubbing on the ethics front. I'm thinking in particular of the "financial aid BMWs" and the large proportion of the class (3/4 or thereabouts) who thought it ethically permissible for applicants to seek access to an admissions server that they knew to be unauthorized. There seems to be a big disconnect between the values of Dean Clark and his students. Thoughts on that? And do you think ethics can be taught in the classroom?

PDB: Ethics can certainly be discussed in the classroom - but can the ethics of students in their mid-late 20's actually be changed? Not so sure. I did find the discussions thought-provoking though. I'm not sure I give my classmates a "drubbing" about ethics. I'm in no position to do that! What I do discuss, however, is the contrast between what I describe as the rather excessive - and unrealistic - piety of business ethics as we discussed in class and the reality of how most people, business students included, actually behave. HBS took ethics extremely seriously - and kind of sets itself up to be beaten up when its alumni cause the collapse of Enron, and now have their fingerprints all over the current financial mess.

AI: You write in the start of the book that it was not intended as an "inside raid." I hear that some people at HBS nonetheless took it that way. One could argue that you wanted the upside of the brand and the network, but then violated a tacit compact with the HBS community by writing an exposé. In the book you express a lot of appreciation for the power of the HBS network. Do you think you've compromised the value of that network (to you) because you've written the book? Has there been any other kind of fallout? Am I wrong entirely -- perhaps it has increased the value of your network? Why did you write the book?

PDB: I wrote the book because I thought it would be interesting and useful to do so. And because I was offered an advance by a publisher. I knew elements of my experience were shared by many of my classmates. And I think at both HBS and many big firms, one is expected either to be a 100% booster, or a bitter critic. The truth is one can be ambivalent. I say that HBS was about 80% great and about 20% weird. Most people I know who went there agree. I know some people are upset. That's fine. I don't think I violated any compact. I didn't become a Free Mason when I went there. I attended an educational establishment and paid handsomely to do so. And I wrote a book that is honest and true. For every attack I've received from the school, I've received messages from classmates and other alumni thanking me for being so honest about the experience. So I'm ok with that.

AI: You acknowledge that "the Harvard Business School classroom is a safe learning environment, a place to experiment and make mistakes...." and that's why you cloaked the identities of your classmates. You decided not to do so for professors, because you think that they have a "public role." That's not as clear to me. Don't they experiment and course-correct as well? Aren't they entitled to some expectation of privacy in the classroom?

PDB: No. They are paid extremely well for their work at HBS and earn even more from outside gigs linked to their role as HBS professors. Most professors come off well in the book. I'm only actually critical of one. They can experiment and course-correct, fine, but I was paying the school $100 per class. I think I'm entitled to do what I did with the experience.

AI: How would your wife reflect on your MBA? Is she glad you went? Any advice she would give prospective business school spouses?

PDB: My wife enjoyed it, I think. We met lots of interesting people and I was around a lot when our second son was born. The only challenge was going back to a student life and budget after living like grown-ups for so long. But that was pretty easy, and rather refreshing. Advice? Be prepared for your other half to become a navel-gazing egotist while going through the process.

And a nice bonus for people working on their Round 2 HBS essays right now: Philip also had some advice for people writing the "career vision" essay (optional this year, but in my opinion still highly recommended):

PDB: I don't think HBS wants to hear "I want to make VP at 30 and MD at 35 and partner at 40." They want to hear that you have some sense of where you want to go: do you want to be in finance, do you want to manage a factory, do you want to be entrepreneurial? Or in my case, do you want to take your proven skills in writing, journalism and being a foreign correspondent, add on some business know-how and go write your own pay check - somehow. Anyone applying to business school should be able to come up with something which is consistent with their life and professional ambitions.

In other news... I'm excited to welcome a new member to our team. Jennifer Lee will be offering career coaching to college students and graduates who are considering business careers (finance, consulting, etc.) and/or MBA degrees. Below is her bio, which gives a sense of the interesting twists and turns one's career can take. Jennifer spent eleven years as a cello student at Juilliard before attending Harvard College, where she played varsity lacrosse, founded a conductorless orchestra and double majored in Music and Anthropology. She earned her M.Phil. in Musicology and Performance at Oxford (Lincoln College) and currently attends Harvard Business School for her MBA. She spent a year at a music conservatory in Freiburg, Germany, and her solo and ensemble performances have taken her to France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Japan, and South Korea. Prior to HBS, she worked as both a for-profit and nonprofit management consultant. Most recently, she has worked at JP Morgan in London as an investment banking summer associate in the Technology, Media, and Telecom Group. Jennifer is conversant in German and Korean.

It's rare that I hit on a topic that allows me to write about issues of importance to both MBA folks as well as law school/aspiring policy wonk types. You'd think that not many people would care about the special tax treatment received by partners in private equity firms and hedge funds (in particular, the capital gains treatment for their "carried interests"), but two opinion pieces in today's NYT demonstrate why the issue should matter to many more people, including many who read this blog.

First up: "The Under-Taxed Kings of Private Equity" by Alan S. Blinder, professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton, former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, and adviser to Democratic politicians. His piece lays out in very understandable terms what that "carried interest" is, why it matters, and what kinds of dollar amounts are at stake for the public treasury.

Next up: "The Hedge Fund Class and the French Revolution," by lawyer, law professor, writer, actor ("Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?"), economist, and Nixon speech writer Ben Stein. Stein takes Blinder's argument one step further and asks about the policy implications behind a tax law that has hedge fund and private equity gazillionaires paying a much lower tax rate on their income than normal people:

We are in a war. We are apparently not winning the war. The military is desperately shy of funds, to the point where our fighting men and women are being shortchanged in training and equipment.

We also need more money for our soldiers’ pay, so their families do not have to live like church mice while their spouses are deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan. In these circumstances, is it fitting and morally right for the richest of the rich to be paying either very low taxes or no tax at all?

Is it right or even admissible in the human conscience that while teachers, emergency room technicians, police and firefighters are taxed at full earned-income rates — and often underpaid — that the highest-earning people in this country should pay at either very low tax rates or none at all?

Stein is no class warrior, so coming from him, this argument lept off the page (screen) at me.

Why does or should all this matter to a big chunk of my readership? For the following reasons:

1. For my MBAs and aspiring MBAs, so many of whom are itching to get into private equity: I've written before about how the economics of PE are very possibly about to change, and how that doesn't bode well for their career prospects, or at least their earnings prospects, in PE.

As Blinder puts it, "If we tax Activity A at 15 percent and Activity B at 38 percent, a free-market economy will give us more of A and less of B." If we start taxing private equity incomes at 38% rather than 15%, expect to see less capital and less top talent gravitating towards private equity.

(And the issue of capital gains treatment of their income doesn't even touch the problem of what happens to the buy-out market once interest rates rise, as they inevitably will. Could be a perfect storm brewing.)

2. For my law school types: I would guesstimate that a solid majority of law school applicants seek a law degree because they want to effect change on a policy level and make society better. (And they usually misspell "effect" as "affect," a spelling faux pas from which spellcheck won't rescue them.) In the same breath, when I ask them more specifically what kind of law they want to practice, they start rattling off the kinds of law they're certain they don't want to study. High on that list: tax law. That they don't realize how intertwined tax law is with the fundamental policy choices we make as a society and the give-and-take that happens through the legislative process suggests to me that most applicants have no idea what they're talking about.

Stein's article is a reminder that if you don't know anything about tax policy like carried interests and amortization of goodwill during an IPO, you're going to have a hard time making a rational or convincing argument about whatever activities you would rather have the government encourage, or what programs we should be funding over other ones, in a world of finite treasury resources.

Care about AIDS or cancer research? Global warming initiatives? More subsidized health care? Better life-saving equipment for our soldiers? Fancy technology for national security efforts? Those all take federal dollars, and if you want some of them for whatever your preferred cause might be, better that you start understanding things like the policy argument behind capital-gains treatment for carried interests.

Which leads me to my final point for law school types: Don't graduate from law school without having taken financial accounting and being able to read a financial statement. It could be the most useful class you take in law school, even if -- and I would argue especially if -- you're a policy wonk at heart. And if you retort that you're "just not a numbers person," you're not going to be as effective an advocate for your cause.