I will teach you how to bring your life stories to essays faster with F1GMAT's essay guides. Download below or subscribe to F1GMAT's Service and work with me - Atul Jose, Author/Editor/Founding Consultant, F1GMAT(16 Years of helping applicants gain admissions to M7 and Top 30 schools) Our curiosity is driven by internal motivations - desire for new information, openness to novel stimuli, finding the last piece of the puzzle, and a strong urge to escape boredom.
For Harvard MBA application essay on curiosity and growth, thrill seeking and curiosity to escape boredom has limited relevance.
Your essay examples should convey one or four combinations of motivations for curiosity – innate desire to fill the information gap, positive association with unraveling world’s mysteries, genuine interest in peers, customers & beneficiaries, and acceptance of uncertainty that comes with exploring new ideas.
Tone and Examples: These motivations can be captured either through examples or the tone with which you narrate the problem, the solution, and the growth you experienced pursuing your curiosity.
Among the many examples I have read, 6 use cases cover most of the curiosity and growth narrative:
2. Curiosity and Cultural Change – Organizational Growth
3. Communication and Curiosity
4. Curiosity, Courage and Growth – New Product Ideas
5. Learning Goals and Curiosity
1. Exploration of Solution
Most innovation happens after persisting through bad ideas, pivoting at the right time, finding an idea that is an evolution of the original idea or a completely different stream of ideas that has no connection with the original idea.
In Harvard MBA essays on curiosity and growth, sharing the process of how you reached a solution conveys the authenticity of your trait as a curious problem solver.
Technology and Financial solutions are some of the best examples where exploration of solutions can be tied to curiosity.
In Technology, proof of concept or prototyping is a classic example of curiosity leading to a germ for an idea that became a new product or became an entry point for a new market.
In Private Equity, I read of an idea to enter a new geography purely by innovation in how certain data was evaluated. The data existed for 30 years. Even with machine learning and analytical tools, no one bothered to look at the data with a context on the stability of the political system and loan rate in the country. With the applicant’s innovative thinking, leveraging the country’s low borrowing rate for global acquisitions became a standard practice. Make sure that recommenders unambiguously credit you for any industry innovation.
2. Curiosity and Cultural Change – Organizational Growth
In corporate culture where productivity is king, introducing processes, frameworks and systems that encourage greater autonomy can be a challenge.
Capturing the challenge and finding a system or framework that is a negotiable middle-ground to balance productivity with autonomy are some of the believable narratives I have read.
New Framework: I remember an operations manager who had systems in place for optimizing the productivity of each factory worker. Despite documenting and optimizing for each movement, the improvement in productivity was marginal. To understand the gaps in his understanding, he introduced a digital forum where everyone, from the worker on the floor to the middle manager, can offer feedback without any repercussions. Because of the variation in education across the teams, written communication was a challenge for factory workers. He introduced an audio messaging option that brought in feedback from floor workers. Some of the feedback was crucial in recognizing gaps in his own understanding of the factors that limit productivity at a worker level.
His curiosity to unearth the productivity gap by introducing a new communication framework was crucial for changing the organization from a rigid hierarchal to an open culture.
New Learning Systems: An applicant who was a manager, shared how his curiosity to find the reasons for a string of deal failures led to the creation of a library of ‘case studies’ for his business development (BD) team.
By encouraging the team to author cases by engaging with top BD persons, every deal details – strategies, templates, context around the offering, and reasons for wins and losses were documented. Instead of a generic how not to write a proposal, the losing and winning cases offered a much larger perspective on factors that matter in a deal.
A discussion forum around the cases also became active, leading to internalizing best practices in proposal creation and communicating with clients.
New Process: Even in flat organizations, there are processes on how a deal is closed, how to send a proposal, how to communicate with clients and so on.
Any examples that curiously questions accepted norms that have become irrelevant in new paradigm of doing business are excellent examples of an applicant’s curiosity influencing an organization’s processes.
For an office where work from home had become a unique selling proposition for retaining star performers, entry level employees were finding it challenging to fill the skill gap that the star performers had mastered.
Instead of interrupting the star performers, who had systems in place to maximize their productivity, the applicant – a team lead developed a screen sharing option with the trainees to demonstrate how the star performer researched and built a case for a deal.
By keeping the privacy of the screen sharing to two viewers with an option to ask questions at the end of the research task, trainees learned the critical part of due diligence, while star performers could share their strategies with minimum interruption to their work.
The new process was an innovation in training for the startup.
Related Download
3. Communication and Curiosity
The second important skill after conflict management in a team is communicating values. Instead of sharing an example of demonstrating curiosity, you may share an example where you reinforced curiosity as a value in the team.
Curiosity as a Value: The challenge for a boutique consulting company was that the edge the boutique firm had in offering specialized consulting solutions were replaced by a culture of generic advice and obvious conclusion. Recognizing the change in the culture, an applicant – the CEO, introduced a performance metric where a person’s engagement in a team meeting was also measured.
What started as a high resistance to changing the culture turned into a study on how even the habit of asking questions can lead to deeper insights, creativity and higher sense of well-being.
Networking and Career Opportunity: Getting job opportunities from an interaction in a pub to an Uber driver suggesting a technique to fine-tune a media proposal to networking through a non-profit engagement, the paths to finding opportunities for career transitions or closing a deal are diverse.
Sharing your attitude towards networking and how curiosity is driving you to find opportunities from unconventional sources are one way to reiterate your unique quality.
The applicant who found a better way to stand out in the proposal converted an advertising pitch to an acquisition.
The applicant who commented on the techniques of the football players in the pub received an offer for a career change.
The networking technique the applicant employed to attract a high-profile investor impressed a peer in a non-profit so much that he recommended the applicant to his firm. A change in career from Technology to Venture Capital ensued with no additional degrees.
Networking and Curiosity – Fundamental to Better Questions: The number of LinkedIn requests I get with a transactional goal could very well be interpreted as a problem of networking in modern times. But on reflection, such networking strategy from professionals is from lack of one quality - curiosity.
A better networker will find ways to ask deeper questions and understand the other person’s perspective, priorities and thoughts on what is ailing their industry. Often such deep questions build relationship that go beyond transactional requests. Once the foundational relationship is built and frequency of communication is established, it becomes much easier to ask for help.
The best examples of outreach through LinkedIn all involve spending hours understanding the person’s journey, values and even perspective about controversial topics.
For one applicant, networking through LinkedIn with a contact started as a bridge to reach a superstar fund manager. The person she reached had around 15 persons in the network, but among them were three superstar fund managers. From this data, she could infer that the link to the high-value leads had an interesting life of her own. Without a manipulative strategy to request for connecting to the superstar fund managers, she started asking questions about real estate – the niche the contact was specializing in. After a week of discussing some of the evolving issues on taxation and regulation, the contact revealed that she was the wife of the fund manager. Without any requests for connection, she suggested that her husband would be of better help in guiding the applicant with advice on investment strategies.
Deeper connections are established with deeper questions.
Deeper questions cannot be formulated without curiosity.
Share one such example of curious questioning that led you to a path of professional growth.
4. Curiosity, Courage and Growth – New Product Ideas
Model T: The classic case of curiosity driving growth and fear of challenging the status quo limiting product innovation is the example of Model T. From a new design in 1908 to mass production in 1913 to selling half of all the cars in America in 1926 to stopping the production in 1927 on Edsel Ford’s insistence are timelines that mimic many of the current product lifecycles.
Henry Ford revolutionized the mass market adoption of cars by focusing on markets that were hesitant to consider the ‘luxury’ product.
Farmers and rural residents found cars to be a threat to their livelihood with increased competition for horse and buggy, and migration to their neighbourhood with easy access to roads. It is only when Ford revolutionized the design with lightweight materials, and assembly line manufacturing that cars became affordable across income groups.
The same curiosity that expanded the markets for cars from a status symbol to a utilitarian device faded away when Ford had over 50% market share in 1926. With customer preferences changing, it was only a matter of time before the market dominance would diminish.
Edsel Ford recognized the new market reality and pushed for a more modern design.
Any example of product innovation, if you are in Finance, Technology, or in an advisory role for a large consumer goods brand, can be narrated through the two dynamics – curiosity and innovation and fear of change limiting risk-taking.
5. Learning Goals and Curiosity
Prior Knowledge and self-awareness of prior knowledge determine, to a large degree, how you learn.
Curiosity from learning at HBS and customizing the curriculum to achieve your post-MBA goals with learning goals are measured by how realistically you evaluate your learning milestones.
Standardized tests and GPA offer insights on your learning progression, but to truly leverage the HBS curriculum, curiosity is essential.
For one applicant, who had acquired significant domain expertise in Finance, the case study method was a tool to acquire business knowledge, cultural intelligence and a framework to make decisions, and not just functional knowledge. But he was deeply aware of his knowledge gap.
Applicants convey this vulnerability through the tone of their narrative or in reflecting on a gap that led to a failure.
For a growth narrative, explaining a failure and how you curiously broke down the cause of the failure could lead to unique essays on learning.
6. Diversity and Curiosity
Several of the solutions to build diversity of ideas, perspective and talent in a team revolves around hiring and recruitment practice.
The influence of diverse talent on reaching new markets (product), strategy (marketing), and solutions (technology) is evident in the recent DEI research at top consulting firms.
For Harvard, applicants must tweak the traditional DEI narratives phrased at Stanford or Columbia, where the narrative is often from a historical perspective. A mix of historical perspectives but, more importantly, the business case for diversity works better for HBS.
Curiously finding solutions that reimagines traditional talent sourcing techniques is a common strategy to connect diversity and curiosity.
For one applicant in Talent acquisition, the strategy was to include a list of traditionally African American names in LinkedIn search using the ‘OR’ operator to shortlist talents that are often overlooked in traditional referral based hiring where the predominant ethnicity in the company determines the newly available talent pool.
References
• Curiosity: The neglected trait that drives success
• End of Model T
• THE MODEL T - Shari Eli Joshua K. Hausman Paul Rhode
