Expanding Insight—and Impact

What brought you to PLD?

One of my mentors told me that the core responsibility of a social entrepreneur is change—that whatever you do should have a substantial impact in 30 or 40 years and really change the way people think. After receiving my Ph.D., I wanted to make an impact like that. I started a business in 2007 and grew it to 10 clinics that touched 100,000 patients. I was asking myself how I could grow the enterprise to 150 clinics, but I also wanted to see how I could go way beyond what I'd done and have an even broader impact.

I had come to HBS for one of the shorter programs—Strategic Perspectives in Nonprofit Management—and found it very inspiring. I knew I wanted to keep learning, and the HBS team suggested PLD.

What are the key benefits of PLD?

PLD was very intense, but very, very engaging. The program structure was designed to accommodate the time limitations of working professionals, simulating a full-time MBA experience without requiring you to take so much time off.

I came to HBS with very sharply defined expectations for what I wanted to learn, and I had chosen PLD because those topics were in the syllabus. PLD is distinguished by everything that comes with the curriculum—the people, peers, alumni, and faculty. All of the pieces are brought together in a very deliberately designed format to strengthen your business thinking and also help you evolve as an authentic leader. That's a very powerful combination.

How did your living group enhance the learning?

The living group was one of the most surprising things about the program. Living groups are structured to bring together people of very different backgrounds. I found it overwhelming in the beginning, very humbling in the middle, and extremely fun and empowering by the end. The living group is what truly differentiates PLD from other programs.

By the end of the first on-campus module, our living group had begun to behave like a team. Then we were thrown into the alumni challenge during the off-campus module, where eight people from eight nationalities and six time zones had to work together on a tight schedule. Some of us had worked in global teams, but others had not, so that was a valuable experience. We had to address questions like how do you work together? Who's the leader? How do you hold each other accountable? This exercise brought together the entire HBS experience.

The process of eight people starting PLD as a group of strangers and becoming a group of friends—forming a team and then becoming a high-performance team—was very special. I'll definitely stay in touch with the people in my living group.

What were your impressions of the case method?

Because we had gone through so many cases—35 in the first on-campus module and then roughly the same in the second—the other participants and I began to think in a new way. By the end of the program, the business problems stopped overwhelming us because we knew how to approach them.

Cases are selected to be very counterintuitive. What feels like the right answer at first is never the right answer. We analyzed the outliers in an industry in great detail, which really made us think. These cases are definitely going to stay with me for a long time.

Do any particular cases stand out?

I learned a lot from cases that were outside my comfort zone—finance cases, for example. We spent a lot of time understanding the U.S. financial crisis, the securitization model, how the housing bubble was formed, what led to the collapse, and who were the different stakeholders that played a role in helping or worsening the situation. Those are things I don't think about on a daily basis. My living group members played a key role in helping me understand the issues in those financial cases, since my background is in health care.

Do you have a favorite PLD moment?

The Dash project was one of my favorite exercises. The inspiration is simple: You have no control over your date of birth or date of death—but between those dates on your tombstone is a dash, which is the part you do control. We pulled together the stories—the dashes—across all of the participants in a very short time frame, and shared them. This wasn't part of the program—it was just something we wanted to do as a group to show the strength of the cohorts HBS brings together for PLD. It was a really nice experience.

Who impressed you most among the faculty?

Professor Tushman was like a conductor in an orchestra. He came in and said, "Listen, when you are looking at a business organization, these are the six elements that I want you to focus on." Then he brought his wonderful expert faculty in to help us think through strategy, marketing, managing people, culture, performance—a whole range of topics. And he came back at the end and brought it all together. He does the job brilliantly—with unbelievable elegance.

How are you applying PLD lessons back at work?

I can now look at questions I've been struggling with for a while and find new answers, which sometimes seem obvious in retrospect. I'm hoping to use ideas from the program to spark some change—to put in place some essential growth elements that we were missing. I'll refocus the organization on priorities. For example, it's easy for some fundamental things—like developing people and fostering a strong culture—to get overlooked in a small organization, and I hope to address that.