I have a secret: I used to be a poet. Don't worry, I'm better now-I have an MBA-but once upon a time, I was different. I was artsy. And I made $32,000 a year. Hello, my name is-well, never mind what my name is-and I'm a recovering poet.
It was great while it lasted. I lived a funky, nonprofit lifestyle, with an apartment in a sketchy neighborhood, a motorcycle, and a scuffed-up leather jacket. My idea of a hot night was a poetry slam, a woman in a black turtleneck, and a couple of $8 bottles of Chilean Cabernet. I felt smart and, more important, pure: My world centered on thoughts and emotions and words.
Of course, it's tough to make a living being a poet, so I worked as an editor of trade publications, where the writing was limited to two-syllable words and the present tense. When that became unbearable, I found an outfit that made grants to arts organizations. It was an important job, I told myself, because what could be more important to society than culture? And what could be more noble than to support the Jackson Pollocks and F. Scott Fitzgeralds of the future?
It was noble, indeed. But frustrating, too. Some of the best arts organizations I dealt with went belly up, while mediocre ones thrived. Some produced great work with minimal budgets, while others churned out boring, expensive junk. And while some of my writers struck gold, others slaved in obscurity, with nonprofit "literary" publishers who didn't seem to have a clue about marketing. One day I was venting my frustrations to a friend. She had a suggestion: "Why don't you go to business school?"
I laughed. But a few days later I started thinking: Maybe I could do a better job running these organizations. Maybe I should start making the decisions. Maybe, at the very least, I could negotiate a decent raise. Soon I was taking GMATs, just for the hell of it. Or so I told myself.
To my complete shock, and despite a so-so undergrad GPA, a barely respectable GMAT math score, and a completely useless master's in American lit, I was accepted to a top-five MBA program. The school, it turns out, was looking for candidates who planned to go into nonprofit management. That was me. I'd said so, right there in my application. Nonprofits all the way.
That plan lasted about six weeks. In retrospect, it was probably doomed from the moment I was accepted. The school had a fine nonprofit-management program, but everything else steered me in other directions. For the first time, I was surrounded by smart, pragmatic people whose aim was to make money. It wasn't just money they were after, though. Most of them had already spent time in the corporate world, and they saw B-school as a necessary punch on their ticket to a life of power, prestige, and, eventually, a top spot in a major corporation. This wasn't a bad thing. Unlike a lot of my art world friends, I'd never minded money; in fact I kind of liked it, although in the past I hadn't had very much. And while my classmates and I weren't actually earning any yet, there was an expectation of affluence that I'd never known before. I'd always planned on being poor.
One big difference I noticed: In the nonprofit world, when we'd go to a bar and the check arrived, everyone would put in what they thought they owed-and we'd always be 15 percent short. When a bunch of MBA students went out, we'd invariably end up 20 percent over. So we'd hit one more bar on the way home. What really grabbed me about school, though, were the case studies. You know how they go: You're the CEO of AT&T; should you dump your cable business or grow it? It sounds corny, but I found this exhilarating. I'd never run anything bigger than a soccer team. Now I was in charge of AT&T-and I liked it. The week after the AT&T gig, I was at the helm of Coca-Cola. Then came Ford, then Sprint, each case as intriguing as any novel I'd read. My favorite case, believe it or not, involved Crown Cork & Seal-I'd never realized what a complex business bottling could be. That one came up on the final, and I nailed it, getting the highest score in the class.
My progress in the real world wasn't as stellar as my imaginary CEO career. This became clear by February of my first year, when I was hunting for a summer job. A nonprofit gig, I realized, wasn't in the cards-there weren't any that appealed to me. I decided on media and entertainment consulting-media and entertainment being at least distantly related to the arts, and consulting because it sounded prestigious.
Though I didn't bomb the interviews, I wasn't getting any offers either. Instead, I saw a lot of curious, polite smiles. I'd taken out my earring and put on my good tie, but I was still faking it-and they could tell. I'd make it to the second round then get rejected. After the sixth or seventh time this happened, I called one of the friendlier recruiters I'd met with and asked what I was doing wrong. Without pausing, he replied, "You need to get a big, fat corporate name on your resumé."
That's when it hit me: I was being initiated into a kind of tribe. Its members spoke a common language, dressed more or less alike, and they looked out for one another. And like any tribe, it was suspicious of outsiders. It wasn't conformity so much as a commonality. They shared certain mannerisms and opinions, similar experiences, and a common view of their place in the world-which is to say, they ran it. I was a late arrival to the feast, but there was still time. By some miracle, I landed a summer job with a huge media conglomerate.
The reach of the tribe became clear that same winter, when a group of classmates and I did a class project on the Asian telecommunications industry. We focused on one company, and we needed a lot of information from top management. It amazed me that these guys not only returned our calls, they gave us meetings. We flew over for a week of on-site work, trooping in and out of executive offices in our shiny new suits. And it was all fine with them because my classmates and I were members of the tribe.
It didn't take me long to realize that B-school can confer an exaggerated sense of self-importance. At recruiting time, it starts with the swag, the little freebies that start popping up in your mailbox on the day you arrive: cookies from Kraft, razors from Gillette-enticements to attend the presentations . . . and collect more swag. But I also walked away with something less tangible: that rosy feeling that comes from being wanted. Adoration is seductive. There's really no other word for it. And the effect is all the more powerful when someone wants you more than you want them. But as in love, you have to be careful. Otherwise you'll end up in an interview room explaining how you've always wanted to be a brand manager for White Rain shampoo.
I hadn't forgotten the arts, or poetry, or my old nonprofit pals. But I'd tasted capitalism, and I wanted to finish the meal. I headed to consulting. I told myself that consulting had the attraction of variety-a new project every few months. Maybe I'd become hugely successful and donate my fortune to the arts.
As a newly minted tribe member, it wasn't hard to land job offers, and I spent my last semester feeling like a prince, with many admirers. The most attractive was a Very Large Consulting Firm (hereinafter referred to as VLCF). It was a glamorous gig on the West Coast, where it was strongly intimated that we'd be hobnobbing with stars.
But they hadn't merely offered me a job. They wanted me. The firm sent me champagne, chocolates, and a book with a thoughtful note from the managing partner, who followed up with a phone call just to chat. He called again from an airplane, which impressed me. He was an intelligent, tough-minded guy, and I liked him. Of course he knew I would take the job, but he wanted to make sure.
The wooing reached its peak when VLCF held a dinner for the recruits at one of the best restaurants in San Francisco, with a squadron of West Coast partners flying in from L.A. and Seattle. As we sat down, the lead partner not so casually asked the sommelier what was the best champagne in the house and then ordered three bottles for the table. This is how you're going to live, the message went. Large.
The lead partner then gave a speech, telling us we were "the best of the best," the world was ours to conquer, and we were going to really make a difference in the way business was done. It sounds hokey now, and we knew it was hokey then, but we were fired up anyway. I drank a lot of champagne and went home-tanked, in a chauffeured car-feeling wanted, needed, and on top of the world. It was a feeling I'd never had as a poet. I was sold.
In my first year out of business school, I paid more in taxes than I had ever made. Right off the bat, I spent six weeks on a project in Japan, where my colleagues and I ate enough sushi to depopulate SeaWorld. The work was a lot like those case studies, only now it was real, and instead of a professor and classmates, I was talking to senior executives directly, often while their own staff cooled their heels in the hall. Going in, I wondered what a green MBA could offer these people, who'd been in business longer than I'd been on earth. Soon, I marveled that such poorly run companies could exist at all.
The best was the Swedish Project, which became legendary as the cushiest assignment in the company. Not because of the location, which was beautiful, or the hotel, which was five-star, or the work, which was the now-expected grind, but because of the lawyers, who had determined that for visa reasons we had to leave the country every weekend. It didn't matter where we went, as long as it wasn't in Sweden. And by the way, the client was paying. One of my colleagues had a guide to Europe's best hotels. On Tuesday or Wednesday, she'd open it almost at random, and that's where we'd head on Friday. We hit Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw, the Swiss Alps. I submitted expense reports that topped $20,000-every penny legit, at least by the rules of the game.
The Swedish Project was the peak; it never got that good again. VLCF decided to consolidate its operations, and my office lost much of its autonomy. I found myself taking orders from someone who wasn't terribly bright, in my opinion-worse, she wasn't even an MBA. I was also feeling an entrepreneurial itch, so I left VLCF for a new venture by a big company, which promptly imploded. Then I leaped headlong into a dot-com start-up, which sounded too good to be true, and was. Even as our business model was crumbling, my new boss spent thousands of venture-capital dollars to have his office wall moved 18 inches-so that his would be the biggest in the place. A few weeks later, I got laid off, with only a company laptop as "severance."
As you read this, I'll be in Bali, Thailand, or possibly New Zealand, traveling around the world with my new wife.
Even though I don't have a job to come home to, or even much of a plan, I'm glad I went to business school-and not just because I got to make, and save, a lot of money. I have a framework for understanding the world now, how things work. Business school taught me that most things are transactional-even a conversation with your mom. And every successful transaction achieves a kind of balance.
Looking back, the arts world taught me an important lesson: There can be no poetry without money. Business school, and the jobs I had afterward, helped me realize the opposite: That money without poetry is not worth much. It's an unbalanced equation.
When I get back, I'll be looking at various options, which range from opening my own consulting shop to finding a top management job in an arts organization. In the meantime, I'm helping out on the board of a small nonprofit press.
