Family Business dynamics can go either way.
One group of MBA applicants is eager to uphold the legacy of the parent’s business with innovation, technology, and a mindset fit for the AI and the Creator generation.
The second group of MBA applicants, like many 2nd generation entrepreneurs from the 18th century, wants to get out of the shadows of their parents’ business.
I have come across many clients who have consciously chosen industries and functions that are not even remotely connected to the parent’s industry or legacy. It is the applicant’s way of rebelling against the parent.
For Harvard Business School, which has a history of encouraging legacy admissions, this strategy will work if your parents are not HBS graduates themselves.
To break away from the family business narrative, follow these 3 strategies:
1) Capture the Good and the Bad
If you ask any aspiring entrepreneur about the life of an entrepreneur, they will share a glitzy life of Ferrari cars and flying from New York to Paris and Back to New York all in a day’s work. The Jetsetter life is mostly waiting in hotel rooms, sitting in airplanes blowing out the left ear with the dreaded sound of the engine, and going through boring slides and Excel sheets, all to earn the good old $.
The highs are often followed by extreme uncertainty where the business loses a client, the demand for the product goes down, and competitors eat away most of the market share. Such uncertainty and downs are never captured in popular media.
For the Harvard MBA Sample Essay - Family Business, I chose to capture this uncertainty in the opening paragraph itself.
Then, when the switch to a win happened, the admissions team was taken from the low to the high while also expecting the applicant’s perspective on Family Business and business in general.
2) Wisdom and Success
The move away from the family business need not be acrimonious. The client chose a modern e-commerce business as his path instead of the father’s auto-parts business. Even then, we captured a moment to show that the client received counsel from the entrepreneur father about prioritizing the customer over every other distraction that are typical of ‘marketing’ and drinking one’s own Kool aid.
Instead of elaborately citing the motivation for not continuing in the family business, the applicant pivots to the Ad Tech business narrative with a milestone – an acquisition captured in the middle. Whenever wins – small or medium are captured for an Entrepreneurial applicant, the admissions team always wonders about the need for an MBA, even if it is a Harvard MBA.
If the acquisition is by a Top 5 technology company, the admissions team will wonder even more. You must be careful not to make the acquisition the central focus of the essay. It should be a pivotal moment to the What more can Harvard MBA offer concluding paragraph.
3) Case Study Method and Value
For the Sample Harvard MBA Essay, I connected the importance of contrarian opinions and the Socratic method of teaching. By citing an example where the applicant was guided away from a path of distraction by peers and subordinates who were given the freedom to question his decisions, he found a culture that was like what Harvard was offering.
The connection can turn trivial if you don’t have the professional experience to support the narrative.
