Dan Morrell: Hi, this is Dan Morrell, host of Skydeck. Nietzsche said it first: What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. There’s a reason that saying has legs, nearly 140 years later. We all, at some point in our lives, face challenges. How we react shapes our characters and, sometimes, the trajectory of our lives.

Deborah Farrington: The challenge, which at first seemed like a disaster, turned out to be one of the best things that happened to me in my career.

John Rice: I feel this work creates a level of complexity that makes our work a lot harder and requires us to have a lot of creativity and it requires us to try a lot of things that don’t work and make some mistakes but keep plugging.

DM: In this episode of Skydeck, associate editor Julia Hanna asked this year’s recipients of the 2025 Alumni Achievement Award to share a challenge they faced. Their answers offer a window into the different forms adversity can take and how those experiences can lead to new directions, greater self-awareness, and a deeper sense of purpose.

2025 Alumni Achievement Award recipients (from left) Bonnie Cohen (MBA 1967), Vittorio Colao (MBA 1990), Deborah Farrington (MBA 1976), Jeremy Grantham (MBA 1966), and John Rice (MBA 1992)
Photos by Susan Young

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Julia Hanna: In 1998, Deborah Farrington (MBA 1976) cofounded StarVest Partners, one of the largest women-owned venture capital firms in the United States. “No two companies are the same and no two people are the same,” Farrington says. “Adapting to that and finding the best way to make a company grow, make it prosper and make it be something sustainable, that’s the wonderful part of being a venture capitalist.” Among the firms many successful investments are Fieldglass, CrowdTwist, Veracode, and Insurance.com. In 2000, StarVest was a lead investor in NetSuite, when the firm had just $100,000 in revenues; Farrington served on the company’s board from NetSuite’s IPO in 2007 leading up to its $9.4 billion acquisition by Oracle in 2016. But before any of that, Farrington worked all over the world in investment banking … and a decade into her career, she hit a major speed bump.

Deborah Farrington: Probably one of the biggest earliest challenges I faced in my career was being fired from Merrill Lynch after 10 years. I had worked in international and recently transferred back to domestic investment banking. They were having a riff, actually quite a few, I thought, excellent people were then let go, and I was one of them. My first reaction was disbelief. I’ve had a great career at Merrill Lynch. I’ve run a division at a young age. I’ve lived and worked all over the world. How’s this possible? So I went in and they said, well, yes, you haven’t been back in domestic investment banking that long so we felt this was the right decision. I thought, well they’re wrong. And I went to some of my other friends at the firm and they actually offered me jobs in different areas, and one of them was the chairman of Merrill Lynch International.

I said, no, it’s time for me to go, because eventually I knew that I wanted to be a larger fish in a smaller pond. So I was offered a job at an investment bank that had been started by the former head of American Express International. And they were based in New York, Hong Kong, Singapore, some of my old stamping grounds. So I went with them, ended up running investment banking there and that was my first foray into small firms and actually provided a blueprint for me to start my own firm eventually, several years later. So I think that the challenge, which at first seemed like a disaster, turned out to be one of the best things that happened to me in my career. I went to smaller and smaller places, finally starting my own and making it bigger and bigger. One other thing to add is that the person who was running marketing at Merrill became one of our first major investors and has invested in every single one of our funds since. So there’s a silver lining to most things.

JH: In his second year at HBS, John Rice (MBA 1992) conducted a field study showing that many talented minority college students had less exposure to career opportunities in business than they did in areas such as law and medicine. That insight planted the seed for what would become Management Leadership for Tomorrow, or MLT. After leaving HBS, Rice held senior roles at the Walt Disney Company and the NBA, while on the side he raised seed capital and piloted MLT’s initial programming. Over the past 20 years, MLT has provided professional coaching and a high-performance playbook to 15,000 individuals and developed over 1,000 senior executive leaders across the private and nonprofit sectors, partnering with more than 200 leading employers as well as many major philanthropies. It isn’t easy work—but the challenge of shifting mindsets around complex topics keeps Rice moving forward in his work.

John Rice: I’ve faced a lot of challenges over the years that I think arguably have shaped me in different ways. But one that I think is a little bit unique to the work that I’ve been doing over the past 20-plus years, 25 years, that has shaped me in ways that I didn’t necessarily expect is that, I’ll try to capture it here. That challenge is about getting folks who are leading organizations and who are influencing the trajectory of organizations to be better informed about why we are where we are in this country with respect to racial disparities, racial wealth gaps, underrepresentation of people of color in the workplace and so forth. And I’ve learned how much work it requires to bring the most well-intentioned leaders, okay? The folks who are the biggest advocates for equity, the ones who actually are really committed to seeing everybody thrive, helping them develop the same command of why we are where we are and what we need to move the needle, what I would call kind of command of the problem-slash-solution on race as those leaders do on all the other issues that they face in the business world, on AI, on crypto, on interest rates, on complicated debt transactions, all those things.

And I think over the course of the many years that I’ve been doing this work, this is really hard, and it’s become, I think, my professional calling to take my best shot at bringing people along, at trying to shape an accurate narrative about these issues that are quite nuanced. There’s a ton more work to do, and that’s what I’m really excited about. But I feel this challenge that is probably the biggest intellectual challenge that I’ve faced over the last 25 years with respect to building my organization because it speaks to how we message, how we communicate what we do within the context of a more accurate view around problem-solution, but also how do we bring people along and meet them where they are today? From a brand marketing standpoint, from a comms and a messaging standpoint, that creates a level of complexity that makes our work a lot harder and requires us to have a lot of creativity and it requires us to try a lot of things that don’t work and make some mistakes, but keep plugging. And I say it shaped me because I live and breathe it every day and it motivates me to keep on pushing.

JH: During his tenure as CEO of Vodafone, Vittorio Colao (MBA 1990) transformed the telco into a truly global organization through organic growth and acquisitions, including the company’s purchase of Cable & Wireless; he also oversaw the divestiture of a $130 billion stake in Verizon Wireless. In 2018, Colao joined General Atlantic, a global growth equity firm, leaving in 2021 to serve the Italian government as Minister for Innovation, Digital Transition, and Space. Today, Colao is back at General Atlantic, as vice chairman of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. It’s been a long and successful career, in other words, and it’s not over yet. But back in the 1990s, Colao and senior leadership failed to anticipate the disruption caused by the introduction of no-contract phone plans.

Vittorio Colao: In the business life, I had many, I would say probably the biggest was a technological change that happened in the early phase of the telco world, which is something that looks stupid today. The introduction of prepaid phone lines in Southern Europe, which in a matter of two months changed completely the landscape of the market. There was no subscriptions and only prepaid, and our company was caught unprepared. And I have to say the common wisdom was that we could react in 9 to 12 months and instead, and here I really learned from my then-boss, he basically said, we don’t have 9 to 12 months. The company’s bankrupt in 9 to 12 months. We were full of debt. There was no way we could do it. And we created a program where everybody would do an extraordinary effort in every domain—network, information, technology, provisioning, finance, everything—to make it happen in three months.

I remember we were all considered crazy and people did not believe it, but this reminded me a bit of the military, I had a very simple military experience, but when you’re in the mountains and it’s minus 20 degrees and you had to take all of your company up to 3,000 meters or 2,000 meters, you really cannot make mistakes. And the amazing thing of that technology evolution was that in three months we did it because everybody did their job, probably 300 percent of the speed and depth of what they thought they were capable of. And so beyond the fact that we managed to make it, the incredible thing was a degree of self-confidence and self-awareness in all people of the company, from people who were doing very mundane things in administration and accounting to people in super important technology functions of the resources that we have, which if well-organized can be amazing. And then we ended up being the most profitable telco ever in Europe.

JH: How did you do that? Was it just inspiring people? How did you get everyone to work 300 percent of what they could do?

VC: I think it was a combination of two things. On one hand, people need to see your genuine involvement and commitment. And when I say genuine it means, you’re available 24/7. You share the problems. You don’t just delegate. You take responsibility for decisions. If there are mistakes, as happens, you share the mistakes and you fix them very quickly. One of the big problems in big companies is that when you make mistakes, nobody wants to touch them. Nobody wants to recognize their mistakes, and so they’re left there and the consequences kind of become worse and worse. So I learned in that case that the proximity of the boss to everybody in the frontline and the development departments and so on, is very important to enable the recognition of mistakes and the fixing and the moving on. That’s super important. Again, in the military, they teach you this.

And the second thing is the amazing difference between when you are in survival mode versus when you are complacent, and you feel safe. Again, without always being paranoid, but a little bit of paranoia about danger and displacement and disruption and dramatic change is healthy in keeping people on their toes because again, you’re humble. You listen to small signals. You need to really be constantly thinking about what can go wrong. Again, I was in mountain troops. What you do in the mountains, when every step can be very dangerous, can be fatal. So you have to be very careful where you put your foot every time.

JH: Over the course of a multifaceted career, Bonnie Cohen (MBA 1967) has held leadership roles in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. A few years out of HBS, after graduating as one of a handful of women, Cohen managed the United Mine Workers of America Health and Retirement Funds. In 1989, she was selected as senior financial officer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, later becoming the organization’s COO. In 1992, she entered the US government as Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Policy, Management and Budget, serving until 1996; and the next year, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright asked Cohen to be her Under Secretary of State for Management—in effect, the agency’s COO. Not long into her tenure, terrorists bombed US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than 200 people. For the following three years, Cohen oversaw a massive effort to upgrade security, partnering with host countries and investing in infrastructure. It’s one of many challenges she’s faced over the decades, but for Cohen, those moments, beginning with her experience at HBS, were ultimately energizing.

Bonnie Cohen: Has one particular challenge stayed with me? I think I’d have to say no, because on the whole, I have been challenged all along the way, and that’s what I’ve enjoyed. Starting with Harvard Business School, that was my first big challenge: being one of 11 women in a class of 600; three women in a section of one hundred. I was married at the time I went to business school, which was I think very fortunate because it would’ve been a distraction to be one of 11 women in a class of 600 men. I was also enormously fortunate. On the first day when I sat down, I don’t know whether study groups are still basic to your success at business school, but I thought, will I ever have a study group? And this wonderful guy who sat next to me, Mike Huke, who had graduated MIT—that’s very important because that meant he was probably smart—said, you want to be in our study group? And that made an enormous difference. Then, I think this will interest you, over the course of the year, the professors never called on the women, the famous thing was cold calls. I don’t know if they still have those, but the women never had to do cold calls. And that was a great relief to me. It was only years later that I thought actually it was a real disadvantage.

JH: After he graduated from HBS, Jeremy Grantham (MBA 1966) worked in consulting, which he didn’t love. “I asked my classmates how they were getting on, and by a very wide margin, those working in the stock market were having much more fun than anyone else,” he says. Grantham cofounded Batterymarch Financial Management in 1969 and in 1977, GMO, where he continues to serve as the long-term investment strategist and is part of the firm’s asset allocation team. On vacations in the early 1990s to areas like the Amazon and Rwanda, Grantham and his family all noticed the dramatic impact of human development on the environment—and a few years later, the reality of climate change. In 1997, Grantham pledged to give away the majority of his family’s wealth and founded the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, an organization that funds impact investing, research, and public advocacy, in addition to investing in early-stage green technology.

Jeremy Grantham: One of my biggest problems, difficulties, weaknesses, is a psychological, extreme unwillingness to initiate new things, new relationships in particular, to take the first step, to call someone up on the telephone, to send them an email. And even if I don’t know them, to reply to an email. And this has led me as a young person to be telephone-phobic to the extreme. For example, it used to be said in my first job that when the telephone rang, I looked at it like it was a snake hissing at me. And that of course, is a huge disadvantage. And if I could go back and change it, I certainly would. As it was, I had to ride with the punches. And what I found quickly was a good helper who understood and was sympathetic, and they’re not always sympathetic, particularly early in your career. But I was lucky enough to have a couple of long-term helpers who completely got my problem and had to develop a way of nagging me gently, but steadily until I did the critical things. If you have an irretrievable character flaw, recognize it and find a way of building around it. Get help and fill it in. If you can’t do something, get a partner who’s really good at it. And between the two of you, you can simulate one real hotshot. I’ve done that, too. And it works.

This episode of Skydeck was edited by Jocelyn Gonzalez from PRX Productions. Skydeck is produced by the External Relations department at Harvard Business School. It is available at iTunes or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. For more information or to find archived episodes, visit alumni.hbs.edu/skydeck.

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