What I Learned at Wharton
Paul Graham is a renowned technologist, computer scientist, investor, and impressively down-to-earth human being who writes like he talks. One of his essays is about learning and reflection, called How You Know:
Reading and experience are usually “compiled” at the time they happen, using the state of your brain at that time. The same book would get compiled differently at different points in your life. Which means it is very much worth reading important books multiple times. I always used to feel some misgivings about rereading books. I unconsciously lumped reading together with work like carpentry, where having to do something again is a sign you did it wrong the first time. Whereas now the phrase “already read” seems almost ill-formed.
There is a lot of evidence for the value of reflection as a tool to reinforce learning and memory, and Graham alludes to how tools like this blog or innovative software like Notion might help us re-experience our past in the same way that we might grab a familiar book off the shelf.
I think the key is in capturing something both meaningful now and worth revisiting later. Some of my best friends and I have now graduated from Wharton into strange times — why not seize the opportunity to say something worthwhile that we might revisit ten years from now? I hope it will prove useful to others along the way.
First, a question might be lingering in the back of your mind…is an MBA worth it? I would answer by saying that I don’t know, and it depends, but yes. Wharton was a transformative experience. I am a career-switcher. I left the United States Marine Corps in 2018 after serving for six years as an infantry officer. The content of a business school education exists at little or no cost on the internet or inside libraries and companies. Wharton provided the right structure, relationships, and experiences for me to walk the path towards knowledge. Wharton let me build upon my interests in finance, strategy, and entrepreneurship. I got unprecedented responses to my cold emails and phone calls as a Wharton MBA student. Wharton opens doors, but you have to do the walking. Credibility, skills, and character matter above credentials. Wharton helped me find a great firm where I am proud to work full-time after graduation. I have met and worked with awe-inspiring people. The GI Bill and Wharton’s participation in the Yellow Ribbon program provided me a tremendous opportunity that I will pay forward. My wife and I made sacrifices and spent significant time away from family. We made a lifetime of memories.
It was worth it. Wharton changed the way I think.
Kevin Kaiser gave me a deeper understanding of value versus price, probabilistic theories of decision making, the biological foundations of fairness norms and investment decisions, and the origins of capitalism, along with so many other takeaways. Distinguish illiquidity from insolvency, and expectations from predictions. Lead by example, and publicly hang liars and thieves. If you want your people to eat, be prepared to fire your farmers. The value of a tractor is worth what a hundred ex-farmers could do. No sacred cows. Independent and rigorous judgment is powerful. Cash is king. Manage value, not accounting proxies. Bad kings must be distinguished from bad systems. Be a steward of sustainable competitive advantage, not the owner of a moat. You work for them. I don’t know, and it depends.
Emil Pitkin taught statistics, but what I will remember is the joy and total focus he brought into the classroom — he said every lecture was his favorite and most important lecture of his life, and you felt it. Clarity of speech leads to clarity of thought. Emil combines his academic work at Wharton with being the CEO and co-founder of GovPredict, a YC-backed government analytics startup. I think his life illustrates some of Nassim Taleb’s “barbell strategy” or the book Range — there are asymmetric payoffs whenever you draw from an array of experiences across different risk profiles and domains.
This archetype seemed to appear again and again amongst some of my best teachers at Wharton. Asuka Nakahara orchestrated a real estate development course with an incredible “real-life protagonist” in attendance every week to discuss the development case study with our class. I admire his ability to integrate teaching with his executive and investing experience and to transmit life lessons along the way. Character counts. Asuka is a role model.
Bob Borghese changed the way I think in Legal Aspects of Entrepreneurship. He found ways to integrate his own experiences as a legal advisor, board member, and entrepreneur with weekly video guests from the Wharton alumni network who shared their stories in every domain of entrepreneurship, from bootstrapped side hustles to VC-funded tech unicorns to boring business juggernauts to biotech to DTC to small business acquisition strategies. Don’t judge a business by its cover. Innovation is for the rich. Beware a love of money. Focus on control and autonomy. Replication beats innovation. Profit beats growth. Structure beats size. A distorted view of risk will be your biggest impediment as an entrepreneur. Indifference is the position of strength. Risk is not the same as opportunity cost. Businesses create value; legal and tax structures secure value. Buying new is worse than buying secondhand which is worse than leasing which is worse than renting which is worse than salvaging which is worse than receiving a gift which is worse than being paid by somebody to take their asset. Equity spreads risk, debt concentrates it. In nature, predators do not take risks.
I learned why so few Silicon Valley founders grew up poor. I learned how to be successful. I have a better understanding of networks and influence. In his famous class on influence, Cade Massey discussed the value of a “boundary spanner” — the bridge between two different organizations or closed systems or networks. When people hear about the benefits of “the network” at Wharton they might think about grimy social climbing and awkward striving, or perhaps the friendships that result from partying together for a couple of years. In reality, it’s more about the principles of Dilbert, not decadence:
“Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success.” Adams says you can raise your market value by being “merely good — not extraordinary — at more than one skill.” Adams told me his career is an example of the success formula in action. “I’m a poor artist. Through brute force I brought myself up to mediocre. I’ve never taken a writing class, but I can write okay. If I have a party at my house, I’m not the funniest person in the room, but I’m a little bit funny, I can write a little bit, I can draw a little bit, and you put those three together and you’ve got Dilbert, a fairly powerful force.”
Play your own game to serve others, rather than someone else’s game to serve yourself. Choosing a single, specialized, and highly-competitive domain will be stressful with a high probability of failure. So change the rules and create your own domain (perhaps something that doesn’t scale). I might not be the best writer, farmer, financier, or entrepreneur, but if I can be in the 90th percentile in each of those four things, I can create differentiated value. Find the missing links and blind spots in your communities and become the “go-to” subject matter expert. Expand your circle of win-win relationships. Look to serve others, assume responsibilities, and acquire new skills.
I will never forget Nancy Rothbard and Sigal Barsade and the others who invested so much in MGMT 610 and the development of better ideas around teamwork and leadership, and the Leadership Fellows and Vets and ETA pioneers that defined my Wharton experience. It’s the people.
Wharton faces real challenges. Two of them are really important to me.
I believe the first challenge is the dominance of “Adam I.” This phrase comes from David Brooks’ book The Road To Character, as he describes how in Genesis we see “two sides” of Adam on display. Adam I is career-oriented, ambitious, analytical, transactional, optimized, and driven towards victory. Adam II is oriented towards virtue and character and the quiet sense of doing good by being good. Historically, our universities were founded on the principle that knowledge and character, Adam I and Adam II, were intrinsically linked. Consider Socrates’ “examined life” or Joseph Wharton’s 1881 proposal to the Board of Trustees at the University of Pennsylvania:
A classmate of mine at Wharton was born into grinding poverty in rural Afghanistan. We once had a long conversation about our ideals, and he shared with me that for most of his life, he had been so necessarily focused on survival, that there was little to no room to contemplate his mission, purpose, and values. In 1960, Wharton charged $1,250 in tuition; equivalent to about $11,000 in 2020 when you adjust for inflation. Today, tuition and fees altogether at Wharton are set at ~$80,000 per year.
Scott Galloway is a serial entrepreneur and marketing professor at NYU. He discusses wealth, happiness, and the architecture of the American Dream with Sam Harris in this excellent podcast (go to 23:00). Galloway paid $1,500 in tuition at Haas for the last year of his MBA in 1992. His starting salary out of school was $90,000 — representing 60x his tuition. Now, MBA starting salaries at elite schools cluster around $150,000. The starting salary multiple on one’s debt-financed annual tuition is an uncomfortable 2x. Let’s not talk about housing in SF and NYC. There might be some gains from all of this stress. Students have incentives to succeed and secure income to service their debt and provide for their families. It is possible that students would squander some of the freedom purchased by a lighter cost structure in elite education.
Wharton is part of a broader trend in elite education since the 1970s where institutions capture an ever-increasing share of the value they create. Much of that value creation stems from the signal of a competitive admissions decision, and the network effects of building relationships within an elite network and a rigorous program. But as the knowledge and the elite network faces competition (whether from competitor business schools or Y Combinator), Wharton’s moat is increasingly comprised of its brand and exclusivity. Universities increasingly resemble a rival luxury good, as opposed to a hallowed place to build Joseph Wharton’s pillars of the State. Will such an institution earn the loyalty and philanthropic support of its alumni? Of society at large? Escalating financial costs and student debt burdens increase students’ anxiety and decrease their capacity for risk-taking. In a time of crisis, Adam I negotiates and asks questions about President Guttmann’s $4 million salary. Adam II looks to lead and serve. Wharton will be at its best when both Adam I and Adam II are present, else the center cannot hold.
The second challenge that Wharton faces is the tension between truth and unity, between a sports team and a family. Last fall, I attended the ETA Conference at Harvard and the Harbus student newspaper caught my eye when I was walking the halls between panels. Harvard and Wharton both contain multitudes of a certain archetype: Burnham’s HENRY managerial elite. Many students currently possess or are likely to eventually wield significant wealth and power in corporate, media, and state institutions. As described in the Harbus, letters were submitted anonymously by Harvard Business School students for an event called Perspectives. Students shared that if they were honest and transparent with one another, they fear punishment and unemployment. Among powerful students at the elite universities of the most prosperous and free society the world has ever known, the intellectual environment is one of fear and precarity.
I do not believe that Wharton’s ideological climate is as lopsided as it is at Harvard, but there are similarities. A close friend told me that friendship would be impossible with someone who did not share her political views on abortion rights. That was in the back of my mind when I gave a six-minute speech on personhood and human dignity for one of Wharton’s Return on Equality events this spring, but everything went well, alongside numerous challenging discussions I have had at Wharton. Pressures to conform are human and often pro-social, but self-censorship remains a real problem. We won’t always get it right. We are human, after all. But we live in peril as a society if our most elite, educated, and powerful people are systematically afraid to speak the truth. “Live not by lies” remains the phrase to live by.
So what is next? I think my classmates and I will live through a revolution. Capitalism, surveillance, and the “horn of plenty” mindset will be shaken to their foundations in our lifetime. It is time to build. That means overcoming NIMBYs to maximize urban density and walkability and bike-ability and human flourishing in our cities while reinventing transportation and urban mobility. That means Strong Towns. That means our schools and universities need reform and resilience. Back Row America deserves dignity. We can abolish our throwaway culture. Many of our leaders are still lost in The Great Nap. I will measure my success in the next decade in the following way: have I made myself, my family, my community, my city, and my country more antifragile than it is today? There is hard work ahead for all of us. Let’s go.
I remain inspired by so many Wharton men and women who I am proud to call my friends and fellow graduates. I will close with their reflections below.
Regina Lee on worldview:
Having traveled to more than 70 countries, I thought that I had seen a lot. My Wharton experience brought my level of appreciation for people and thoughts from diverse backgrounds to another level. Thanks to my cohort, my group project teammates, several event co-organizers, and many others, I have been constantly inspired in the past two years. They showed me so many possibilities of life and they have encouraged me to proactively pursue meaning in life.
Chantee Butler on resilience:
Positivity and resilience can make or break your situation. Your outlook on life can often determine whether you achieve your goals. This challenging moment in time has taught me to be grateful for the small things in life, and to be optimistic about the future, regardless of how it may look at the time.
Ravali Parsa on achievement:
No one will know everything you have accomplished. It’s ok to show your network how far you have come and to ask for help! It’s the most unlikely people who often help the most.
Arpit Mittal on a bias for action:
I found that my classmates are extremely committed towards their goals in life even though they’re at a top business school. Everyone around has a bias towards doing more than less. Whether it is this initiative, Wharton Food Club supporting Penn Frontline workers during COVID, classmates giving up comfortable jobs to try entrepreneurship example Frutero, keeping the chin up even after graduating to find their dream job are all instances that has pleasantly changed my perspective.
Qian Xue on the pursuit of attributes, not passion:
Everyone wants to stand out when placed with their other 800+ Type A friends. While following some herd mentality, we search for our unique identity. After this journey of 1.75 years, I was able to see what others are good at and where my own limitations are at. Passion is difficult to chase. I choose to pursue attributes instead of a passion when I contemplate which paths to take and what milestone to set next.
Sid Radhakrishna on confidence:
Reflecting on these two years, Wharton has instilled in me a newfound confidence. I no longer have to ask for permission to wear my convictions on my sleeve. I have gained the license to be uncommon amongst uncommon people. My message to you, Class of 2020, is that you never know how soon it will all end, as the past few months have made painfully clear. Life is too short to let fear stop us. So let’s not wait a day longer. Seize the moment without regrets. Do what makes you come alive.
Akash Ranka on resilience:
Resilience is the one thing that brings all of us together. All Wharton MBAs seem to have gone through some form of adversity, and the way we dealt with it has defined, and will continue to define, our success. The only way we can continue to move forward is to embrace adversity, to acknowledge that there are going to be setbacks. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and do not take no for an answer.
Matt Diephuis on being human:
Be present. Treat people with grace. Be patient. Show up for people, even when they don’t ask you to. Be open to changing your perceptions. Be forgiving (to yourself too). Invest your time in people. These reminders will stick with me more than any strategy framework or valuation method. Meditation, Ethics, and Influence classes…P3, Power Labs, and Leadership Fellows…Storytellers, guest speakers, and everyday conversations with classmates. These experiences have reinforced simple, yet powerful lessons on how to treat people, and have made me a more thoughtful friend, partner, and person — for that I am immensely grateful.
