collageToday, living HBS MBA alumni are a 47,000-strong community that contributes skills and knowledge to spur the growth and excellence of various organizations around the world, some of which they themselves launched or incubated.
Many, nearly two-thirds of them, build their careers in the US. Financial services, consulting, and technology are now the top industries for most HBS MBAs.
Whatever it is that interests them, and whatever their pursuits, HBS alumni seldom seem to ignore the question that their alma mater taught them to ask themselves: What difference will you make to the world?
For many of the around 900 MBAs who graduate every year from HBS, “making a difference” is a life mission.
Here, we look at the career paths of a few of them, some usual and some unusual.
Life after Harvard MBA: What do HBS graduates do?
Veteran behind a start-up
A veteran management wizard who has served in top positions at Walt Disney, DreamWorks, Procter and Gamble, and eBay for many years is now the spark behind a start-up.
Meg Whitman (MBA, 1979) is the CEO of Quibi (from “Quick Bites”), a short-form mobile video platform, which hopes to transform cellphone storytelling, come April 2020.
In the venture launched by Jeffrey Katzenberg, former chairman, Walt Disney Studies, she looks for support from Tricia Lee (Head of Product, MBA 2013) and Greg Gioia (Financial Planning and Analysis, MBA 2015), among others as they race toward the deadline with a budget of $1 billion.
About all the stress and expectations, Whitman says she doesn’t feel risk the way most people do. “I think it’s because of my mom,” Red Cross Volunteer during WWII Margaret Whitman.
Investing in society
John Paulson (MBA 1980) was a successful entrepreneur at 19, employing 50 people in his father’s home country of Ecuador.
When his business outgrew his skills, he decided to do a BS in Finance at NYU’s School of Business and went on later to HBS for MBA.
After stints at BCG and Bear Sterns, he launched his own investment fund, Paulson & Co., in 1994, which attracted $6 billion under management by 2006.
Inspired by his mother, he focuses on “giving back”: he has made a landmark contribution to the Central Park Conservancy besides supporting educational and cultural initiatives in New York.
“Central Park is the heart and soul of New York. People of all ages, income levels, races, and nationalities walk through the park every day. Everyone is smiling and it’s all free,” Paulson, for whom the HBS School of Engineering and Applied Science is named after, for his historic contribution, says.
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