• Leadership-Focused Essay: What experiences have shaped how you invest in others and how you lead? (up to 250 words)
Background Information: The applicant's lack of access to digital infrastructure growing up, inspires him to lead a rural infrastructure project in South Africa.
Problem: The government is caught in a catch-22 scenario. If they invest heavily in rural digital infrastructure and the short-term loss overshadows the potential to develop high-potential sub-urban centers, the cycle of poverty will continue. By facilitating private players to invest in the region, the government made the development worse as telecom operators with declining voice-service revenue and market-share loss to third-party apps have become heavily reliant on voice-service and FinTech revenues.
A market with low income and poor access to information discourages scaling FinTech operations, perpetuating a vicious cycle of underdevelopment.
Solution: A cooperative that is dedicated to rural infrastructure development
Roadblock: The governing body in South Africa that grants licenses to ISPs initially was reluctant to offer a fee waiver to the cooperative. On top of that, telecom giants couldn’t accept a heavily subsidized cooperative operating in their market.
Leadership Trait: Persuasion, Creative Problem Solving
Leadership Trait (Explained): The applicant visited the key decision-makers and presented the potential for rural South Africa to transform itself into an entrepreneurial hub. For the telecom giant, a revenue-based fee for backhaul infrastructure (wireless to wired) convinced them to partner with the cooperative. The passion project has helped the applicant explore the motivations of multiple stakeholders and understand the systems and incentives that need to be created and communicated to ‘lead the change.
Theme: Creativity, Communication
Theme (Explained): Creativity and leadership are often never used together as most of the leadership traits are around managing people and influencing stakeholders. But a missing link in many leadership narratives is the importance of a creative solution in persuading a stakeholder. For the essay, the creative solution is to find a a new revenue stream that persuades the competing ISPs to withdraw a complaint against the cooperative.
Profile: Consultant
Industry: Non-Profit, Telecom
MBA Essay Strategy: The strategy is to share why the applicant values no distraction in a child’s home for optimum education experience. Then I highlight the many roadblocks the applicant’s non-profit faced in receiving fee waiver for their cooperative run ISP.
Opener: Instead of talking about the problem, I wanted to strategically include an exposition about the applicant’s education (Stanford), and a similar predicament rural America faced in the 1940s, before presenting the problem and how his leadership led to a creative solution that appeased all stakeholders.
Sample Harvard MBA Leadership Essay – Establishing a Cooperative and Transforming Rural Education (250 Words)
When I shared about the walk to reach school, the pitiful roads, and the fight for running water, my engineering friends at Stanford recalled similar stories their grandfathers would tell about rural America of the 1940s.
Joe's intervention through <Y_non_profit> by removing all distractions from the child’s daily schedule transformed our education. However, the government was caught in a catch-22 scenario—invest ...
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