Ebele Okobi-Harris: Death Intervenes

This is supposed to be the entry where I tell you all about the first few weeks of class. Unfortunately, I missed the first few weeks of class because my dear father-in-law passed away suddenly the night before what was supposed to be my first day of class. His name was Richard Harris, Jr., he was 60 years old, and if you knew him, you'd know what a shock it still is that he is not here.

It sounds like such a stupid thing to say, but he was one of the most "alive" people I've met. He loved family, Brazil, Harleys, "Blazing Saddles," singing, raising orchids and telling very bad jokes. He'd been in high-tech sales for over 30 years, from before it was "high." He'd just quit his most recent position at Microsoft, and spent the last year and a half traveling. He went to Egypt, to Thailand, to Australia, and was in Paris to watch Lance Armstrong's last ride. This past summer, he took me out to lunch before I left for France. I hinted around the question I'd been asking him for the last half year of his sabbatical, "So, Dad, what's next?" Now, I must interject that I am a huge fan of the "big quit." I've done it myself, and I highly recommend it. But I was starting to worry (unnecessarily) about him. He was too young and had too much energy to retire, I thought. And what about benefits? During that conversation, he told me that what he wanted people to say about him was that he did what was important to him, that he lived his life exactly the way he believed.

That conversation, along with his amazing son, is the best of many gifts he gave to me while I knew him. On the face of it, it sounds like a mundane statement. Who wouldn't say that they want to live life according to what they thought was most important? But frankly, how many of us have the courage to actually do so, or the insight to know what is most important to us?

Business school, as with any other gathering of smart and/or ambitious people, is filled with signals about what is important. The right clubs to join, the best internship, the perfect job – it's a festival of options. The thing is, no one can say which of the options is best for you, and the kicker is that just because something is the most prestigious thing, or the thing that everyone else would give their left...eyeball to do, doesn't mean that it's your path. My conversation with my dad reminded me then, and will always remind me that it takes work to discover one's path, and it takes courage to stick to it.

Before business school, I was a consultant at Catalyst, and as part of my job, I went to what now seems like millions of conferences on leadership, personal effectiveness, and organizational behavior. One of the trendy statements that reared its head at many of these conferences was "bring your whole self to work." As in, companies should create environments where people can "bring their whole selves to work." The theory was that the company benefits from the diversity of employees' entire life experiences, and not just from the knowledge that is specific to work. It also posited that employees should be free to be authentically themselves, and that people work better when they can fully express themselves at work. I must make a confession, one that had I discussed it more widely at the time, would probably have gotten me excommunicated.

I didn't want people to bring their "whole selves" to work. There, I said it. I wanted them to only bring their work selves to work, and to leave their other, messier selves at home, with the dog, the kids, and the dirty laundry. This may come as a shock, given my clearly lefty-liberal leanings, but there you have it. Actually, to be precise, I felt that one could bring whatever self one wanted to work as long as it did not interfere in any way with one's ability to work, and as long as it was cheerful. My philosophy was that if your non-work self is entertaining, or funny, or irreverent AND productive, then by all means, bring it to work, and I'll take it out for a drink afterwards. But sad or otherwise messy? A thousand times no. As a great man once said, "There's no crying in baseball!"

My philosophy took a beating the first semester. I came back to school after almost a month at home. I was still grieving, and being far away from home and my husband wasn't an adventure anymore, it was just painful. I had a million classes, and had absolutely no idea what was going on in any of them. Worse, I could not care less. My whole self was leaking out all over the place, and my work self was not...working.

I was, and still am, overwhelmed with the amount of support I received from my classmates, professors, and the administration. My amazing group members all pitched in to give me notes and offer to tutor me. They pretended not to notice on those days when I was incapable of adding any value whatsoever to the group meetings. Other classmates offered their class notes, sent me letters, and just listened.

When I look back on the first semester of my MBA experience, large chunks are a blur. Even if you promised to pay off my massive student loan debt in exchange for a correct answer, I could not tell you how to simulate the future financial activity of Sportex or what to propose to its management concerning new capital increases. Apparently, we covered Sportex' plight while one of my selves was actually in class.

I did learn the following, all obvious things, I suppose:

Life is short, but work is an eternity if you are spending your days living someone else's dream. I learned this before, but I was starting to forget. There is something about options that makes it easy to forget.

I thought I'd done all the work I needed to do to find my path, or to determine what's next –- I haven't.

Life is just…messy, sometimes so messy that it leaks into the carefully constructed world of work. Things fall apart. It takes a superior manager and an excellent team to provide support for each other, and to take the weight when necessary. It takes a truly creative, phenomenal employer/work environment to build into the system mechanisms that anticipate this inevitability and provide employee support.

Sometimes keeping it together means you have to rely upon the kindness of complete strangers. If you're used to and enjoy doing everything yourself (like me), this is a revelation.

So there you have it. As I look forward to next semester, I have a copy of an e-mail my father-in-law sent to me when I told him I was going to write a BusinessWeek Online journal. It said "Kick a**, girl!" I'm trying, Dad. I'm trying.