Up to the Challenge: Martin Gonzalez
Quiet Courage
Photography by Robert Schoen
If I take one overall impression away from HBS, it's that everyone here has a powerful story to tell,” says Martin Gonzalez, a lanky Chilean whose own life story took a dramatic turn during his first year at Soldiers Field.
“Everyone here has a powerful story to tell."
A former long-distance swimmer and former member of Chile's national volleyball team, the trilingual Gonzalez had traveled widely, graduated from Catholic University in Santiago with a degree in industrial engineering, weathered a failed entrepreneurial venture, and worked in high tech in Silicon Valley before coming to HBS. Eager to get back into competitive volleyball after a two-year hiatus, Gonzalez began playing on the HBS student team early in the fall of 2000. “Since I had been on a national team, I thought that here, I would be the star,” he notes with a self-effacing smile. “But I met a number of amazing players who hadn't even listed volleyball as an interest on their class cards!”
Elated, from the start, at the level of competition, by November Gonzalez “began getting really tired.” “At first,” he recalls, “I just had to stop volleyball. But soon, I couldn't even ride my bike to class.” It took over three months and emergency abdominal surgery for doctors to diagnose colon cancer. “Ironically, we were told the results of my biopsy the same day we found out that my wife, Ana, was pregnant with our first son, Martincito,” he says. “It was the most emotional day of my life.”
A second surgery and an extended round of chemotherapy — every Friday afternoon from March through November 2001 — followed. “I felt the sickest over the weekends, so I was able to attend most classes and keep up with my work,” reports Gonzalez, who received strong support from many of his professors, MBA Program staff, and classmates. “Students who don't have the troubles I did go through this place without finding out who their real and true friends are,” he observes. “I found that I had many.”
In addition to completing his coursework, Gonzalez, a self-described “technology fanatic,” served as cochair of the MBA Technology Com-mittee, participated in the HBS Business Plan Contest, and spent the summer between his first and second year working with MBA Career Services to develop recommendations for better serving the School's international students. He downplays his ability to continue functioning throughout his medical ordeal. “It is much harder to watch a loved one go through something like this,” he says, quietly mentioning that his mother was found to have the same cancer shortly after his own diagnosis was confirmed.
In remission, and “feeling healthy,” Gonzalez has accepted a job in marketing with General Mills in Minneapolis, postponing for now his entrepreneurial dream — a venture that would introduce new engineering technologies to Chile — in favor of some much-needed stability, time with his wife and son, and a chance to contribute financially to his family back home.
Gonzalez has given much thought to the concept of leadership, in sports and in business, and describes it as “the glue for different opinions.” “Leaders need to listen and to value what each person brings to the table,” he elaborates. “Here at Harvard, it's not necessarily the cases or books or professors who teach leadership. It's getting to know and work with extraordinary people from all kinds of backgrounds who reshape how you think about the world.” Martin Gonzalez is certainly one of those people.
— Deborah Blagg (send e-mail to the author)
