I applied to Harvard Business School in early 1985. In April a thin envelope arrived from Cambridge. Not a good sign. Only thick packages offer admission. But it wasn't an outright rejection. I'd been put on the wait list. That meant for me to get in, other more promising students who'd been accepted to Harvard had to turn the school down. I hoped these students preferred the sunny California skies at Stanford to the cold Massachusetts winters. I waited and waited. No word for months. By late summer, I'd given up hope.
Finally, in the third week of August, I got a call from the dean of admissions that I had been accepted into the Class of 1987 at the Harvard Business School (HBS). I was thrilled -- but scared to death. Sure, I was a summa cum laude from San Francisco State University, but this was a whole different league of academic rigor.
I'd read that the incoming students were in the top 1% in their high school and undergraduate classes, and were not used to failure. But many of us would fail at Harvard. Since HBS grades on a relative curve, the bottom 10% "hit the screen" after the first year of the two-year MBA program. "Hitting the screen" means you are asked to leave because 90% of your fellow students are smarter than you. That's quite a jolt to the ego when you've always been on top. There are only three grades at HBS: Excellent for the top 20%, Unsatisfactory for the bottom 10%, and Pass for the middle 70%.
On a bright September morning, in my first day of class with 90 other students in the amphitheater classroom, our marketing professor confirmed it. "Look around the class today, because nine of you will not make it through the year." After the first week of classes I was convinced that I was the dumbest student in the school. I had never been around so much brain power in my life. I figured everybody was in the high-IQ Mensa association except for me.
My wife and I were newlyweds and were talking about having our first child. But I didn't want to start a family if I was about to get kicked out of Harvard. We agreed to wait and see if I survived the first semester before any earnest babymaking.
The next four months were pure hell. I had never studied so hard in my life and usually slept only fours a night. For the first time ever, I got a tutor. We had three or four case studies per day, each of which took up to three hours of preparation. They were about real-life business situations where we had to recommend solutions. In each class the professor started by randomly calling someone to present the case to the other 90 students for ten minutes. This was the "cold call" we all dreaded. A poor performance on a cold call could doom a student in the class. Nobody could be adequately prepared to present all three classes with equal quality, so we played the odds. You could hear a pin drop when a student was caught unprepared and whispered, "Pass." That brought a flunking grade and brought you closer to the screen.
I am happy to report that in February of 1986, after the first semester grades came out--we decided to start a family. I passed all my courses and even got the top 20% grade in my Organizational Behavior class. Our daughter Emily was born that November and she was in my arms as I walked across the stage to receive my MBA diploma in May of 1987.
