The Road from Business School, Less Traveled

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It was useful to have on paper the feelings and rationale that drove me to do what I did. I referred to it a lot.

The other thing, which sounds so obvious, is to do something you know about. An academic study of successful new ventures conducted in 2000 showed that 71% "replicated or modified an idea encountered through previous employment," 20% were "discovered serendipitously," and just 4% arose from the "systematic search for business opportunities." The same study found that 41% of these ventures had no business plan, 26% had a rudimentary plan, and 28% had a formal plan.

The lesson from this is that it's not the plan or the search for opportunity, the things most business schools teach, that leads to success.

It's an ability to improve on what you can do already and then execute.

Everyone knows what they're best at, but often they think it's of no value. I felt like that when I graduated from HBS, and I was wrong. It took a while to straighten myself out.

Whenever you take a risk in life, whether anticipated or not, the audience around you seems to be shouting two things. One half is screaming "don't." The other is shouting "live the dream," "do what you love." Neither is being very helpful.

Paralyzing fear and blind optimism aren't the only alternatives. There is a route through the middle that recognizes that with risk comes reward, that insecurity is uncomfortable—but then, so is going to the office on someone else's behalf. There's no universal answer here, just a personal route to navigating between these two feelings, which can only be found by setting sail in the first place.

Tragedy Is a Motivator

The trigger for taking this route is not always desirable. Not everyone who ends up an entrepreneur wanted to be one. Many found they had no choice. Perhaps they came out of an MBA program in 2009 without a job. Or they could not sleep at night working for someone else. Or they were desperate to succeed on a far greater scale than their peers. Motivations can be dark, but that's O.K.

What is important is that once the trigger has been pulled, what do you do?

It's a fact that people often wake up to the most significant facts about life at moments of tragedy. When a close friend, a sibling, or a parent dies, you suddenly realize that you want your own life to really count. You want to spend your time on your own terms, with the people you love, doing the work you enjoy. The greatest fear becomes the prospect of getting to the end and thinking, well, that was a waste.

For me, the tragedy occurred on September 11, 2001. I reported from Lower Manhattan that day and saw the towers fall from much too close. I remember looking up and seeing the bodies pinwheel through the air from the upper floors as people leapt to escape the heat. In the days that followed, I could not help selfishly thinking, what if that were me? What if everything were to end for me like that, without the slightest warning—would I be happy with the life I had led?

It may sound ludicrous to link my own journey through business school and back to writing to such a monumental event. But when I think about it, that was my trigger. The moment at which my motivations and ambitions changed for good. Letting them guide me has not always been easy. But it has been better than trying to deny them.

Philip Delves Broughton, the former Paris bureau chief for Britian's Daily Telegraph, graduated from Harvard Business School in 2006. His account of his time there, Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School (Penguin Press, 2008), is out in paperback this week.

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