Douglas Schofield (MBA 1969/DBA 1972)
(illustration by Gisela Goppel)

Douglas Schofield (MBA 1969/DBA 1972)
(illustration by Gisela Goppel)

Like many HBS alumni, I’ve experienced a number of turning points over the years. Some I initiated on my own; others were involuntary and quite traumatic. One of those less fortunate pivots was pretty standard stuff: After a change in leadership, I was unceremoniously fired at the bank where I had been promoted just a few days earlier. After a year of frustration and effort I gave up on the idea of a regular job and started my own “family-office” firm for a handful of wealthy families. That change gave me an extraordinary level of freedom to take part in our daughters’ early lives and to spend time on a number of nonprofit projects, some in Southeast Asia.

Then fate intervened again: In 2005, at the still-young age of 62, a minor medical exam turned up an advanced and highly aggressive cancer. Even with a hideous year of surgeries and chemotherapy, the best I could hope for was a 50 percent chance of surviving the next five years. I was forced into an abrupt fire sale of the business I had proudly built over the past 20 years. By the end of that year of treatment, I could barely function at all.

After considerable discussion with my wife, Janet, a psychology professor at the University of Pittsburgh, we decided to start over in a distant place with a very different context. This was a difficult decision that required balancing my desire for a significant “rebirth” against my wife’s giving up a highly successful career that she greatly enjoyed. We also wanted to go into a situation where both of us could be highly productive and effective, so finding a country where English is widely used was important.

Back in 1992, we had visited Bhutan, a tiny South Asian country located high in the Himalayas with a population of under a million people, which has undergone incredible advances in infrastructure and education since the 1960s, when the king abolished serfdom and instituted sweeping reforms, culminating in the birth of a new democracy in 2008. We had contacts throughout Southeast Asia thanks to past volunteer work; eventually we were fortunate enough to connect with Tenzing Yonten, an incredible Bhutanese with degrees from Berkeley and Yale, who was ready to launch Royal Thimphu College, the country’s first private institution of higher learning. His job offer—to serve on a highly effective and motivated five-member team launching a new approach to education in a very special country—was the start of an extraordinary rebirth for both of us.

Over the past 11 years we have tackled a multitude of new and changing aspects of the college, which in its first three years grew from a few holes in the ground to a thriving institution of 1,400 students and one of the largest employers in the country. Virtually all aspects of what we did required innovation and faced substantial opposition to change, both among our employees and from a variety of outside parties. We have, of necessity, been continuously involved at all levels, from setting and implementing strategy for the college and its place in Bhutan to negotiating contracts, hiring, updating IT systems, and overseeing chlorination of the water system.

With a broadly defined job description (“do whatever will benefit the college and the country”), we have also been free to take on additional roles, from government consulting work and advising the country’s nascent parliament to teaching English to young Buddhist monks living in a remote, spartan monastery. We have also taken a few mini-sabbaticals to range further afield, helping to expand a nonprofit peace organization in Cambodia, sailing around the world twice as professors with 500 college students on the Semester at Sea program, and accepting Fulbright program assignments in Poland and Macedonia, just for variety.

As I reflect on what all of this change and movement amounts to, I think of a Bhutanese friend who is a Buddhist rimpoche, a distant reincarnation of a 16th-century Buddhist saint—in other words, someone who knows a lot about rebirth. He summed it all up by saying that “each and every day, every one of us has an opportunity to change our lives in whatever directions are productive, useful to others, and fulfilling to ourselves.” Painful as my turning point was 15 years ago, it forced me to change my life in a way that has been fulfilling to a degree I could not have imagined and caused me to engage in work that (I hope) has been useful to others. Even disastrous moments in our lives, it seems, can be an opportunity for rebirth.

Douglas Schofield is on the management committee and is head of the Faculty of Business Studies at Royal Thimphu College. He and his wife, Janet, are eagerly awaiting the end of the pandemic and a return to Bhutan. In the meantime, please contact him if you have an interest in teaching or otherwise contributing in Bhutan.

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