Three days before giving birth to her second daughter, Parul Somani (MBA 2009) felt a lump in her breast. Still unable to walk from her C-section, her husband wheeled her to the breast clinic for an ultrasound and biopsy. On her newborn’s one-week birthday, Somani learned she was in the early stages of a particularly invasive and aggressive form of cancer. Her maternity leave suddenly turned into a medical leave to accommodate 10-plus rounds of chemotherapy and multiple surgeries. Five years lat...
Jun 10, 2021•15 min
Ed Hajim has had a legendary career in finance, including high-profile stints at E.F. Hutton and Lehman Brothers and 14 years leading Furman Selz. But his success came against very high odds, which Ed chronicles in his recent book, On the Road Less Traveled: An Unlikely Journey from the Orphanage to the Boardroom.
May 25, 2021•11 min
While Ken Friedman (MBA 1983) was at HBS, he and a group of about a dozen friends would get together regularly to play cards. The group vowed to continue to do so after graduation, and would hold annual weekend get-togethers to catch up. It became a brotherhood, Friedman says. But almost fifteen years ago, one of the members of that group was diagnosed with cancer, ultimately passing away after a 15-month battle. It was a wakeup call for Friedman. He’d had a successful career in investment banki...
Mar 31, 2021•14 min
Niren Chaudhary (AMP 191) has spent most of his career in restaurants, working in leadership positions at Yum Brands and Krispy Kreme donuts before becoming the CEO of Panera Bread in May 2019. In this episode of Skydeck, he speaks to Ranjay Gulati—his former college classmate and his eventual HBS executive education professor—about how Panera has faced the myriad challenges of the pandemic, the leadership values that guide him, and how a deep, personal loss became a pivotal part of his life and...
Mar 01, 2021•26 min
Jacqui Adams is CEO of a communication strategy firm that she launched after more than two decades as an Emmy award–winning CBS news correspondent. Bonita Stewart is a VP at Google, overseeing the company's global partnerships with US publishers. Together, they're co-authors of A Blessing: Women of Color Teaming Up to Lead, Empower and Thrive. The book uses existing data, as well as the authors' own original research to offer what they call an optimistic playbook for progress. And in this episod...
Feb 18, 2021•12 min
In 1963, Bob Rosenberg’s (MBA 1963) father asked him to become CEO of Universal Food Systems—which included a regional brand known as Dunkin’ Donuts. He was just 25 at the time. He recalls this moment in his new book, Around the Corner to Around the World: A Dozen Lessons I Learned Running Dunkin Donuts.“ Up until that point,” he writes, “the only thing I had managed were a couple of donut shops—replacing managers for their summer vacations—and a short stint supervising a cafeteria. My father’s ...
Feb 11, 2021•14 min
This is the third and final episode of “Out of the Valley,” a Skydeck mini-series that explores the past, present, and future of entrepreneurship. We started in the whaling capital of the world: New Bedford, Massachusetts in the 1800s, where we saw the roots of the venture capital industry. Then, of course, we found ourselves in Silicon Valley, where so many of the brands that shape our daily life got their start in humble garages. Silicon Valley has been the global hub of tech innovation since ...
Jan 11, 2021•19 min
Welcome to the second episode of our Skydeck mini-series “Out of the Valley.” Today’s episode starts in Jakarta, Indonesia, in the late 2000s. The city looked nothing like Silicon Valley in those days. There were very few VC-backed startups and not much of an entrepreneurial ecosystem. It was what author and venture capitalist Alex Lazarow would define as a “frontier market”—a place where entrepreneurs face significant constraints on funding, infrastructure, and talent. A place where the Silicon...
Dec 15, 2020•12 min
It’s trendy to say that Silicon Valley is over—that this place and the philosophy that it became is past its apex, and all signs point to its impending collapse. That prophecy has become even more popular as the COVID-19 pandemic has made both the Valley’s products and its real estate prices seem ever more impractical. But if those dire predictions come true, it might not be because of inflated valuations. It could be because Silicon Valley has lost its monopoly on its superpower: Innovation. In...
Dec 02, 2020•15 min•Ep. 1
Earlier this year, as the coronavirus pandemic swept across the globe, the MBA Class of 2020 faced the daunting prospect of graduating into an economy battered by widespread shutdowns and hiring freezes. To offer some perspective, we reached out to alumni who had confronted similar challenges—including the OPEC crisis, the Vietnam War, the Financial Crisis of 2008—and we asked them how they made it through those difficult times. And in this special edition of Skydeck Voices, they share their sto...
Nov 02, 2020•16 min
In the wake of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in 1992, Willie Woods (MBA 1993) was part of a group of HBS students who traveled to the city with their Competition and Strategy professor Michael Porter. The group thought it would be a good opportunity to take some of Porter’s ideas about what makes a nation competitive and apply those on a city level. Two organizations spun out of that experience: The Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, a nonprofit focused on improving urban economies,...
Sep 14, 2020•11 min
In April of this year, Sanchali Pal launched Joro, an app that works like a fitbit for your carbon footprint. Joro assigns a carbon score to users’ credit card purchases and then connects users with offsets they can buy to mitigate their footprint. Part of Pal’s motivation for building Joro was that she wanted a tool that would not only allow her to better measure the impact of her lifestyle on climate change, but that would also give users a step-by-step path to make a difference in the face of...
Aug 21, 2020•14 min
In mid-June, weeks after protests against racial injustice spread globally, the Leadership Now Project—founded in 2017 by HBS alumni to fix American democracy—released the Business for Racial Equity Pledge. Spearheaded by six Black HBS alumni, the pledge asks business leaders to promise that they will pursue anti-racist initiatives in the areas of policing reform; safe ballot access and civic participation; and economic inclusion. Among the alumni authors of the pledge is Lisa Lewin (MBA 2003), ...
Aug 04, 2020•16 min
Angela Ruggiero is cofounder and CEO of the market research firm the Sports Innovation Lab, and when we spoke in May, it was the week after the Bundesliga—Germany’s premier soccer league—began to play without fans in the stands. Outside, that is, of some cardboard facsimiles of fans that were purchased as part of a pandemic relief program. It’s an imperfect—albeit necessary—set up for fans. And Ruggiero, who is a four-time women’s hockey Olympian and gold medalist, knows it’s also not an ideal s...
Jun 08, 2020•12 min
Artist and activist Madame Gandhi got her big break in the music industry when she was invited to join the group MIA on their world tour—which launched at the same time as her first semester at HBS began. She decided she could do both, which mostly meant going to class during the week and touring on the weekends. But there was one week in November when Gandhi had to fly back and forth between Boston and New York every day—she’d be in class until noon, then on a 2 o’clock flight back to LaGuardia...
Jun 05, 2020•15 min
The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting Era of Zoom has physically changed the way we work. But according to Rachel Greenwald (MBA 1993), some of the core tenets of interpersonal communication that were important in the office remain just as important in our new digital workspaces—we just need to adjust our techniques. Greenwald is a matchmaker, New York Times-bestselling author, and a business communication consultant, and in this episode of Skydeck, she tells contributor April White about the ...
May 18, 2020•13 min
Sheryl WuDunn (MBA 1986) is the author of several books with her husband, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, most of which have focused on poverty in developing countries. But in the Pulitzer Prize-winning duo’s latest book,Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, they turn their lens on working-class communities in the United States—communities that have been decimated by job loss and drug addiction. In this episode of Skydeck, contributor April White speaks to WuDunn about what led to t...
Apr 27, 2020•13 min
Ayr Muir always had an interest in the environment. After HBS, he thought he’d find a job in wind power—until a friend gave him an alarming UN report detailing livestock’s impact on CO2 emissions. With the average American consuming 3.1 servings of meat daily, Muir realized that food was a place he could make a difference. In 2008 he started Clover Food Lab with the goal of making vegetables irresistible for people who love to eat meat. Now a chain of more than a dozen fast-casual restaurants in...
Mar 02, 2020•16 min
Eric Schultz was working as an executive chairman for a tech company, and on his way home from a fundraising presentation at a venture firm when he had an epiphany. A longtime executive with a personal interest in history, he had been struggling with how to frame a new book he was working on about the history of innovation in America. But sitting around a makeshift bar with some of the other executives who had just laid out rosy scenarios and hockey-stick returns to potential investors, the trut...
Feb 07, 2020•18 min
Fifty years ago, as a senior at Abington High School in suburban Philadelphia, Stephen Schwarzman got waitlisted Harvard College. So he found the number for Harvard’s dean of admissions and called him up to plead his case directly. When told by the dean that no one would be admitted from the waiting list that fall, Schwarzman told him that he was making a mistake. It was all for naught, but this chutzpah was a bit of a hallmark: A year earlier, Schwarzman spearheaded a successful effort to get A...
Jan 17, 2020•15 min
Amy Jen Su is managing director at executive coaching form Paravis Partners, and she’s been hearing some consistent themes in the trenches these days. Increasingly, her clients tell her, they are facing a serious time crunch while, at the same time, their organizations are becoming more global and complex. And these pressures, coupled with internal pressures to succeed, leave these executives feeling like they are getting in their own way. This chorus of executive worries led Su to write her new...
Jan 08, 2020•12 min
Monica Dodi on diversity as a competitive advantage for VCs
Dec 03, 2019•14 min
Nov 14, 2019•9 min
How the CEO of a Chicago charter school network picked up the pieces after a leadership crisis
Oct 23, 2019•13 min
Space entrepreneur and investor Laetitia Garriott de Cayeux on how to search the skies for profits
Oct 03, 2019•15 min
Where and when alumni do their best thinking
Sep 12, 2019•8 min
How Seni Sulyman and Andela plan to turn the continent into a computing hub
Aug 21, 2019•16 min
Patrick McGinnis, who coined the term “fear of missing out,” on how it increasingly drives our personal and professional lives—and how we can manage it
Jul 30, 2019•17 min
Jul 11, 2019•17 min
Denise Murrell traded finance for fine arts—and cast a critical new eye on iconic paintings
Jun 18, 2019•15 min
