The Naked MBA

I don’t want to be friends with my boss. And I’m not talking about Facebook--although there has been plenty of debate about whether you have to accept a friend request from your boss. I’m talking about flesh and blood, barbecue together on the weekends friends.

I know people who are friends with their boss, and I just don’t get it. I understand that these days work is life and vice versa; that it’s now totally normal to date someone from the office and that people who are friends with their coworkers are happier at work. But there are a number of reasons why I don’t want one of those friends to be my boss.

1. I don’t like to disappoint my friends.

The boss-employee relationship operates on the premise of the boss setting unrealistically high expectations, because, as a boss, that’s your job—to make people stretch. Your job is never to be completely satisfied, to always push the envelope and try to make everyone work just a little bit harder and be just a little bit better. In other words, to exist in a constant state of disappointment. This isn’t a negative thing—if my boss something I sent him with no feedback other than a big gold star, I would worry that I wasn’t working on an important project, or that he didn’t care about my development. From my friends, on the other hands, I expect lots of big gold stars.

2. I don’t want a hug.

If I’m having a bad day (or a bad four months) for personal reasons that have nothing do to with my job, I want to forget about it while I’m at work. I want to have something to focus on that takes me away from it and lets my mind rest from whatever turmoil is going on in other areas of my life. But if your boss is a friend then chances are they know that you’re going through a breakup, or that your son is having problems at school, or that your husband lost his job. Chances are they will ask you about it, and ask if you are ok and give you a hug. As a woman I’m already struggling to overcome the stereotype that I’m just a bundle of emotions, and getting a hug at work just undermines me.

3. It eliminates a degree of professionalism.

Say you’re having a disagreement with a friend over email—there is a certain tone and a certain way in which you’re communicating with each other. It’s probably not a very professional tone. Now imagine that friend is your boss, and imagine someone else at the office gets cc’ed on that email. You’re both going to end up looking bad but you’ll look worse because it will look like you’re mouthing off to you boss.

4. It doesn’t serve the organization best.

In the army, officers don’t fraternize with their troops because at some point they are going to have to ask them to do unpleasant things, and it’s harder to ask that of friends. The same goes for business--especially in these times of turmoil. Do you really want to lose a friend because your boss has to make some tough decisions about raises or layoffs?

I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t have any kind of personal relationship with your boss. Let’s face it: you probably spend more time with him/her than you do with most of your friends. And research shows that managers rated as exceptional are those who actually care about their employees on an individual basis. When Gallup asked more than eight million people to respond to the statement "My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person", they found that found that people who agree with this statement are more likely to stay with the organization, have more engaged customers, and are more productive. Fine. Just don’t give me a hug.

“O my Love's like a red, red rose
That's newly sprung in June;
O my Love's like the melodie
That's sweetly played in tune.”

- Robert Burns

I wanted to start this post with a quote from a famous business school love poem. The trouble is, there aren’t any. Apparently it wasn’t a favorite topic of Shelley or Longfellow. I can’t imagine why—late nights spent discussing discounted cash flows and buying each other rounds of Heineken at the local undergrad bar are so romantic. And between the job hunt, classes and extracurricular activities, you have so much spare time for candlelit dinners. Yet, amazingly, a lot of couples do meet in business school. (The only thing that remains to be seen is whether they stay together).

The high-stakes environment of business school causes you to bond quickly with your classmates. Since most work is done in groups, you learn to count on each other—first to get your project turned in on time, but then for friendship, moral support, and (if you’re lucky) romance.

I wrote before about how hard it is to maintain a relationship with someone who is NOT in business school. It’s easier to date a classmate (at least in the short-term) since they understand the pressure you’re under and the demands on your time. You are also ALWAYS together, because MBAs socialize in herds. It’s called “networking”.

Your network is the best thing you’ll get out of your MBA. It functions not only for business purposes, but for romantic ones, too. Even if you don’t date another MBA, there is a good chance you’ll date someone you meet through a classmate. For example, a bschool friend of mine met his wife at an MBA Halloween party that her friend had brought her too. They were a perfect match from the start; she was dressed as Marilyn Monroe and he was Sponge Bob.

At this point, most of you are probably muttering disparaging remarks about me, and telling yourself that you’re going to business school to land your dream job, not a husband or wife. But the truth is that some people do go business school to meet a mate. One friend of mine chose her school based on where she felt there would be more guys with whom she would be compatible (though for her it was a religious issue). And as a woman, the odds are finally in your favor. However, this also means that your love life gets more scrutiny than you may be accustomed to. My school newspaper ran a column listing all of the “date-worthy” MBA women and their relationship status. No comment.

Speaking of publicity, it’s important to know when to go public with your new flame. Due to the number of random hookups and the rumor mill, a lot of couples wait until things have turned serious before revealing their new status. One couple I know was in the same study group, so they kept their relationship on the down-low for a long time to avoid disrupting the group dynamic.

Your MBA is a formative time, both in terms of professional and personal development. Your goal is to graduate with a fantastic job, and an amazing network of friends and professional contacts. If you’re lucky, you’ll even pick up a new main squeeze. But if not, you can always go get a law degree.

In college I spent a year abroad in France, where I met my friend Cory. Cory was also doing a year abroad and had spent three years in the military before college. We got to know each other in a history class where the only grade we would receive was based on one oral exam at the end of the year where we could be asked about anything the course had covered--more or less everything that had ever happened in France in the last 250 years. Cory and I spent a week together before the exam, cramming 250 years worth of dates and battlefields in our heads. It was excruciating, but every time started I ranting about the French education system or got teary from our lack of sleep, Cory would put me in my place. “Knock if off,” he would say. “This is nothing compared to boot camp.”

A week later, after (barely) passing our exams, Cory and I and a group of friends hitchhiked 20 km outside of town to hike up Mount Ventoux. It turned into the April hottest day on record for the last ten years, and there was no real path to the top—just sharp rocks and heavy thickets of thorn brush. I ran out of water immediately since I’d only brought a teeny tiny bottle of water in order to make room in my backpack for the big bottle of wine I was planning to open at the top. “Stop whining,” Cory told me as I threatened to turn back. “This is nothing compared to boot camp.”

Cory and I kept in touch and years later when I got into to business school I remembered that he had started his MBA just a few months earlier on the West coast. I called him to see how it was going. There was a long pause. Then he said, “It’s worse than boot camp.”

Depending on your perspective, business school may not be worse than boot camp, but there is no denying the similarities. Both focus on developing your leadership skills. Both leave you with an incredible network of people you will know the rest of your life. Both involve a lot of testosterone (yes, I said it!). And most important, both are devoted to breaking you down and building you back up as a stronger, better person.

The numbers are in and they don’t look good. And this time I’m not talking about the economy. I’m talking about the fact that women MBAs are twice as likely to get divorced than the men with whom they graduate. As reported in the WSJ, according to a study Washington & LeeUniversity School of Law Prof. Robin Fretwell Wilson, 12% of women MBAs reported having divorced or separated as compared to 5% of male MBAs.

And why is this news?

There is a recent obsession with the “opt-out” generation, made up of women with advanced degrees who take a permanent detour off their high-powered career tracks to stay at home and care for families. For those women that remain in the workplace, struggling to succeed in a world where many high-achieving men have wives to take care of the details, we are left wondering how they do it. Wonder no more. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: they don’t.

The fact is that ambitious, career-driven women are not attracted to guys who want to stay at home and change diapers. They want similarly ambitious men in their lives. And a lot of ambitious, career-driven men think they want to marry high-achieving women. Think about how many couples meet in business school, for example. After a few years, though, men realize that marrying their equal was not such a good idea, because now there is no one to pack lunches in the morning or drive the kids to soccer practice. And women realize that marrying a man on his way to the top leaves them stuck holding the diaper bag. Divorce ensues. But why the uneven statistics—that is, more women getting divorced than men? My theory is that women hold on to the illusion that they can do it all longer than men do. Men figure out earlier that women can’t do it all. They realize they want someone who will do the things they can’t do while climbing the corporate ladder—like lunches and soccer practice. For example, I have a good friend from business school who had a thing for girls in suits. He always told me he wanted to marry an ambitious, powerful woman. He’s now engaged to a woman who works in child care and is ready to follow him wherever his job takes them. I think they’ll be very happy. He figured it out.

There is a huge emphasis on socializing in business school. But as you pack your schedule with happy hours, karaoke nights and student club activities, it’s easy to network yourself into exhaustion without feeling like you’ve made any true friends. The social pressure to meet and befriend as many people as possible kicks off at orientation week. I consider myself to be an outgoing person and I have never had trouble making friends, but at times orientation felt like a do-or-die friend-making competition, and I was definitely losing. Conversations lost their normal rhythms and took on an artificially sped-up tone where everyone was talking at once, trying to impress with their wit and self-confidence. People moved on minutes after they started talking to you if you didn’t immediately seem like one of the cool kids. Even I was doing it. At the end of each day I would fall into bed exhausted from socializing all day. And yet I didn’t feel like I was making friends--I felt like I was networking.

Orientation was successful in that by the time I started classes I knew a lot of people. But none I would consider a friend. I also felt like everyone else had already formed friendships and was having the time of their life. Turns out nobody really had. Even in the hyper-social world of business school, building friendships takes time. And it wasn’t like I was sitting home on Friday night--at first everyone socializes in a herd. Literally. Someone would pick a bar and later that night 350 people would show up. And after a while the speed-dating-on-speed feel to conversations is replaced by more normal interaction and you can get to the bottom of people’s personalities, not just their personas.

People also self-select through the activities they choose. The first friendships I forged were with people who chose, as I did, to be officers in a specific club. The cohort/block system also does a good job of putting you in daily close contact with a group of people so you can get to know each other better--but you have to make it work for you. In my block most people always sat in the same place for class, a practice I’ve always distained. Then one week I plunked down every day in the same spot and found that by the end of the week I chatted more with the people around me (who, by the way, always sat together), and that they started including me in all their lunch and weekend plans.

I also started making more friends when I became more open-minded about the people I thought I could relate to. I started business school in a very different place than most people, and I had an admittedly narrow view of who was worth being friends with. Then someone surprised me and I had to get more open-minded about who my friends could be. I graduated with friends from different countries, religions, professional backgrounds, races, political ideologies, and sexual orientations than me. It took time, but social life at the end of business school was a far cry from the frenetic networking of orientation week. Some of my very best friends I didn’t get to know well until my second year. But they, as with all true friends, were worth waiting for.

I think business school is overrated, but I also admit that I learned a lot from it. Not much of it was what I expected to learn, but it was all important knowledge nonetheless. Here are some of those lessons. 

How to navigate office politics

Some people argue that business school should do a better job of mimicking a professional environment so as to teach you how to navigate office politics. I argue that it already does. As Americans spend more time at work,the workplace has become a community. You have close relationships with your coworkers. You talk about your personal lives—just like business school. You have lunch with them—just like business school. You drink with them and obsess about your boss and your next raise with them—just like business school (only you’re obsessing about your professors and your next grade). And, just like business school, you date them. Or at least you should. In business school you date your classmates because you spend so much time with them that it seems natural. It’s the same thing at the office. If you’re spending as much time at work as most Americans, you’ll probably meet someone there you want to go out with. By refusing to date your coworkers you’re limiting your options and giving up the possibility of meeting someone great right now, as opposed to three years from now when you finally have time to go out again.

How to fake it

In business school it’s impossible to finish everything on your to-do list in the time you have to do it. This is also true in the workplace. Learn to cut corners. For example, my study group was good at dividing up the reading assignments; if four chapters were assigned each of us read one and typed up a detailed outline for the rest of the group. If I had to do a project for my valuation class on a company of my choice, I used the same company I’d done a strategy project on the semester before, thus recycling my knowledge. If I was struggling with part of an assignment, I didn’t wrestle with it all night so I could have the “satisfaction” of completing it all by myself; I asked someone who was a whiz at it to show me how they did it. Contrary to popular belief, this is not called “stealing someone else’s work”, it’s called “working smart”.  And if you do it at the office, just like you do it in business school, you’ll be much better off.

How to spin anything

I entered business school with no marketable skills to speak of and graduated with a job at a major Wall Street bank. How did I do this?  Ok, I got a few skills, but mostly I got good at spinning my previous experience to sound like the perfect candidate for the job. For example, I didn’t teach English in Europe for a year to avoid getting a real job, I “sought international work experience”. I didn’t set up conference calls; I “acted as the communication liaison for key clients”. I didn’t call every Italian restaurant in town to get a good deal for the office holiday party; I employed my “high-impact negotiation skills”. You get the idea. Spin is your friend. Use it.

How to communicate across cultures

About 30% of your classmates will be international. For many of them, the American style of socializing and doing business is new. In my study group we were American, Chinese, Korean and Peruvian--all cultures with different communication styles. I learned that in some parts of the world you voice your opinion loudly and interrupting is not considered rude. In others you don’t open your mouth unless someone solicits your feedback. Some cultures are consensus driven, whereas others place more value on individual contributions. Try to remember this before assuming that the guy who cut you off in class is a royal jerk. He may not know it was rude. Make an effort to learn about the other cultures you encounter, and share insights on yours. You’ll be wiser for it and you might even get invited out for a night of Korean barbecue or pisco sours. 

How to be self-centered

For two years it’s all about you. You won’t be able to talk about anything else but your classes, your job search, your study group, your interviews, your hangovers, etc. Your family and non-business school friends will be sick of you. They’ll complain that you’ve become a self-absorbed megalomaniac. Who cares? This is your time. Business school is a rare opportunity to spend time discovering your strengths, building on them, and forging a network that will stay with your whole life. For two years this is your full-time job. Then it’s over and you have a whole other set of issues to deal with. Make the most of this time. Your true friends will still be around in two years.

For me business school represented a fresh start. I was moving across the country, leaving friends, family and my job. It was a chance to wipe the slate clean and remake myself into a smarter, better person. There was nothing holding me back from being anything I wanted to be. Nothing, that is, except for the hundred-pound barbell shackled to my ankle by a thick chain leading all the way back to the Midwest. On the other end of it was the Boyfriend.

The Boyfriend and I had met three years earlier. We dated, fell in love and we were happy. We even decided to apply to bschool together--he coached me through the quant section of the GMAT and I edited his essays. We were the perfect team. Then due to extenuating circumstances he found out he needed to wait a year to apply to bschool. We were confidant we could handle it. It was only a year, after all.

The day I left for NYC we said a tearful goodbye, telling each other that a year would fly by and that we would soon be together again. Four months later we broke up and he mailed everything I’d left behind at his apartment to my parents.

What went wrong?

Two weeks after arriving at bschool I met a second year who wanted to go out with me. He was rich, handsome, Italian, and impossibly arrogant. I told him I had a boyfriend. "Ah, I see," he said. "Ok no problem. I will get your phone number now and I will call you next semester." No, I told him, I still planned to have my boyfriend next semester. In fact, he would be moving to New York the following year to be with me and we were planning to live happily ever after. Then Italy explained the Rule to me. The Rule states that if you start bschool in a relationship there is a 90% you will have broken up by the end of the first semester. Long distance relationships are most susceptible to the Rule but it applies across the boards with few exceptions. Being married improves your odds but not by much. I assured Italy that I planned to beat the system. He smirked.

In the beginning the Boyfriend and I talked every day, several times. Bschool was more intense than I had bargained for and he was my lifeline, pumping me back up when the world got me down Classes were intense, group projects even more so, and on top of school the job recruiting process took every spare minute of my time. I rarely slept, lived on Power Bars and coffee and devoted all my time to keeping my head above water in my classes and in recruiting. The Boyfriend, on the other hand, still had his whole world. The difference was that while I felt I desperately needed him to lean on, he missed me but didn't need me. Bschool is a grueling and formative experience. It’s impossible for anyone on the outside to understand what you are living day-to-day, much less why you have no time left for them or why you are stressed to the point of a nervous breakdown. Not the ideal scenario for a lasting relationship. By the time first semester wrapped up we called it quits, him telling me I was no longer the same person and me trying to prove that deep down I hadn’t changed. But of course I had, and that was the whole point of going to bschool in the first place.

I didn’t expect to like anyone I met in business school, let alone make friends. I resigned myself to spending two years surrounded by boring, money-driven, ultra-competitive wannabe investment bankers and consultants. I could tolerate and rise about it all for two years, I decided, because it was such an important investment in my future.

The first week of classes we met our study groups. This was a group of four other people to whom I was shackled for the next two semesters as we did all our group assignments for every core class together. Oh, and did I mention that every assignment in business school is a group assignment? My study group had the typical make up: finance guy, token international student, a guy from the law school, and the token woman (me). Jorge was the finance guy. He was an engineer before business school and now he wanted to be an investment banker. In our first group meeting his study materials were already color coded according to class and he had downloaded all the syllabi onto his Palm. I couldn’t even find the one highlighter I had purchased. He triumphantly loaned me one of the ten he had with him. Total Type A, I told myself. We set about dividing up the sections of the project we had to work on. I thought I should make some of the Excel charts and graphs because I needed the practice. He peered at me with a look I took for skepticism. “Okay,” he said, “but let me know if you need help. I’m pretty good with Excel.” Arrogant jerk, I thought. At our next meeting I showed up with two graphs that resembled the doodles of a seven-year-old with a ruler. “Hmm, he said. “I think you might need a couple of adjustments.” He hit a couple of keys and the schizophrenic lines suddenly fell in to formation like Marines. He’ll probably take credit for it now, I told myself.

Recruiting started up and soon we were all scheduling around the investment banking presentations that Jorge needed to attend. Often this meant meeting after 9 or 10 pm. One week in October we had a project due and had to schedule one of these post-presentation late night meetings. I couldn’t have been crabbier; it was my birthday. Not that I had big plans—school had only been in session for a few weeks so I didn’t have any close friends and I was so overwhelmed by the workload that I didn’t feel even feel like celebrating. But it was still my birthday and knowing I would have to stay at school past midnight once again to accommodate Jorge’s schedule put me in a foul mood.

At 8 p.m. I stomped out of the bschool building to the West Village to meet my a friend from the Midwest who had also moved to New York. I hadn’t seen her in a month because I had been too busy with group projects. Over pad thai and Sapporo I raged to her about the inconsiderate investment banker who was ruining my birthday. At 9 p.m. I stomped back to school, late for my study group meeting. As I approached the meeting room I noticed the lights were out but saw a soft glow coming through the frosted glass window. I opened the door. “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you!” My entire study group was serenading me as Jorge finished lighting the candles on the cake he was holding. I hadn’t even said anything about it being my birthday. “How did you know?” I blubbered, nearly in tears.

“It was Jorge’s idea,” said one of my group members. “He noticed your birthday on the information sheet we have about everyone.” I stared, dumbfounded, at Jorge.

“I remember when I first moved to Chicago and had my birthday a few weeks later,” he said, shrugging. “It really sucked because I didn’t really know anyone, so no one marked the day for me. I didn’t want you to feel that way.” He smiled.

I’m not a fan of morals, but as lessons go I think this is an important one. It turns out I was the one making generalizations and writing people off before I got to know them. I was wrong about Jorge and I would have been wrong about so many other people had he not reminded me to be more open-minded. Jorge is one of my best friends from business school. He always remembers my birthday. He works in finance and he’s pretty good with Excel.