Why did I come to business school?
Tonight I was at a networking event sponsored by the Association of MIT Alumnae (AMITA). The alumnae there shared a plethora of career and life experience. One of the women there said that I should write my story, so as I made my way home I thought about what I would say.
I passed four people on the Kendall Square subway station platform. There was a young woman who pirouetted, and I thought: there's a ballet dancer. There was a guy staring at a poster with "Improving the fight against cancer" written on it and I thought: there's an oncologist. I passed a woman with a pale face as she stared at the floor in deep introspection. I thought: there's a psychologist. I passed another woman looking intently at the Sylvania white ecologic fluorescent lights (made in Canada). I thought: there's a photonics engineer.
Years ago when I was in China, I understood for the first time what the word global meant. Pollution and changes in the climate were not just occurring here. The polluted Charles is not the only polluted river. Pollution, waste, climate change is global--it's in everyone's backyard.
So, I changed jobs. I transitioned from a technical role to one as a "researcher" in central Mexico. I wasn't paid to be a researcher, and in no way was I officially a researcher. If you were to ask the director of the ecological center what my role was, she would not have said "researcher".
Whatever she'd originally thought my role should be, on my first day she handed me a stack of papers and said, "translate these". They were technical briefings from the World Water Forum, and for me they were an introduction to the ecological consequences of global climate change. At that time I was also editing a compilation of my grandfather's recommendations for real economic development, and witnessing first-hand the widespread pollution, water-scarcity, and economic problems of the region.
The ecological center was once nearly surrounded by a river. About fifty years ago, the river had been tall and mighty enough that a wall of earth, carved-through and bare, stood exposed to us bystanders standing more than 30 feet below. There just was no water. It only took fifty years for all of it to evaporate away. In fifty years the region was semi-desert, due to the mismanagement of the lands around it.
The area had been almost completely deforested. It's pretty hot in central Mexico, so you can imagine how quickly the deforestation accelerated the evaporation of rainwater. As soon as the water hit the hot dry dirt, it changed from liquid to gas, leaving the town and its inhabitants thirsting for the underground aquifers that each year yielded less and less water.
When the river dried up, someone came up with the idea to use the carved out space as a landfill. So, where the river once flowed fifty years ago is now piles of rotting trash with an unimaginable smell. Broken plastic tray toys, crumpled and saggy sheets of newspapers, empty and sometimes broken green beer bottles, rounded used diapers, sometimes the hollow carcass of a dead black and white cow, countless plastic bags waiting for their chance, years from now, to decompose in the sun.
The worst part of it, believe it or not, was that when it did rain, the river would flood, rushing all of that stuff with it downstream to the more populated areas and towns. To top it off, the chemicals that factories would dump in the "river" would also swell up with the tide, and weave and gurgle their way down past the homes of the people who live along what once was the river.
All these experiences came together for me in one simple question about incentives. Why would a company or companies, a town, a society, be incentivized to waste? How could a country develop in a way that doesn't destroy its natural resources? These questions led me to MIT Sloan.
Tonight, an undergrad asked me if I'd found the answer to my question, because, she said, "no one ever teaches us about that. We never think to ask why companies pollute."
Perspective matters.
Last fall, three friends--a biologist, a stock and commodities trader, and a sociologist and I--had a discussion over the ideal economic system in which to live. As the intensity of our debate rose from amused chuckles to serious droughts of silence, I found myself contrasting Adam Smith's ideology and the U.S. entrepreneurial spirit with my many eye-opening experiences abroad. The deepest source of disagreement among us seemed to be on the role of individuals within society. But what about companies? What about the economic and social systems of organization within which the individual operates?
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) addressed two "errors of pessimism" in his essay "The Economic Possibilities of our Grandchildren." At that time, the world was also facing a drastic economic depression. According to him, the first error was “the pessimism of the revolutionaries who think that things are so bad that nothing can save us but violent change," and the second was the "pessimism of the reactionaries who consider the balance of our economic and social life so precarious that we must risk no experiments.”
Why did I come to business school? To focus, to learn, to change.
