Dan Morrell: On May 29, a fresh crop of MBAs will receive their diplomas and go off into the world to begin a new chapter in their lives. But before they walk across the stage on Baker Lawn, Dean Srikant Datar will introduce this year’s recipients of the Alumni Achievement Award. All five of these exemplary alumni once sat in the same place as this year’s graduating class before going on to make a difference in the world. With the benefit of time and perspective, in the following interviews recorded with Julia Hanna, they share some advice and takeaways from their HBS experience with this year’s class that might resonate with you, too. Have advice and takeaways of your own to share? Send us an email to magazine@hbs.edu, and thanks.

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: Deborah Farrington’s (MBA 1976) advice was hard-earned: ten years into her career as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch, she was laid off. But as Farrington relates in a previous episode of Skydeck, that experience laid the groundwork for her to cofound StarVest Partners, a venture capital firm with many successful investments, including an early partnership with NetSuite when the firm had just $100,000 in revenues. A pioneer in the field at a time when few women were involved, Farrington offers some practical pointers that anyone can use.

Deborah Farrington: I would say not everything is going to go the way that you want or the way that you envision. Be prepared for that. You have the best education from the best school that you could possibly imagine. You’ve got the credentials, use them. So when there’s a setback, stand back. Use it as an opportunity to think about what you really would like to do. Don’t jump into the next thing right away. Think about it and then go ahead and take the plunge. You’ve got the goods, use them.

One of the biggest takeaways from my HBS experience was the importance of effective speaking: how to present your case, how to command respect, and really, how to command the room. This was very important. And what I give as advice, especially to young women who come to me, is in a meeting, be one of the first three people to speak. You will be known, you will not be viewed as ‘What is she doing sitting there?’ and you will have helped chart the conversation from the beginning. And I think that is one of the things that HBS taught me in terms of being effective. The second thing is the importance of continuing the important relationships that you developed at school. And I’ve done that through my activities in the visiting committee, the Alumni Board, and then the Harvard Business School Club of New York, which I chaired for the last couple of years. So I would encourage people to remain involved, take advantage of your network, and remember the lessons you learned, especially in the first few days of class.

JH: Jeremy Grantham (MBA 1966) devoted the first several decades of his career to investment management, founding Batterymarch Financial in 1969 and GMO, where he continues to serve, in 1977. Here, he downplays the significance of that work, and his success in doing it: An early advocate for commercial indexing, Grantham has also identified market bubbles and investment trends with remarkable accuracy, predicting the 2000 tech bubble, the 2008 financial crisis, and climate-related economic risks. That financial acumen produced results that made it possible for him to act on his real passion. In 1998, he founded the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, a role that often draws on one of his HBS takeaways: the ability to make a strong, data-driven argument.

Jeremy Grantham: Well, I feel a bit of a hypocrite because I didn’t really take my own advice. I went out to do something that sounded like fun, which is pretty shallow, and it didn’t have an enormous amount of social redeeming feature, managing other people's money. I like to think of it as just shuffling bits of paper around. You don’t create any value, but you can beat the other guys playing the game. And the only redeeming value is to do it better than the other people. And that’s pretty good advice. That’s always kind of entertaining in itself. It gives you a goal and it gives a little bit of dignity even to something like money management. But better yet, it took me 30 years to get there, find something that is genuinely valuable. And what I did was I picked protecting nature first of all, and that morphed quickly into climate change, and that turned on the business side into becoming a serious student of all the big problems that we humans like to duck.

Anyway, back to the question. Find something that’s really important and one of the things you’ll notice is you’re dealing with people who are just more agreeable people and have a wonderful time dealing with them. It’s a sensational way to spend your older years. It gives you a sense of real purpose and it’s enjoyable.

JH: That’s excellent advice. Looking back on your own time at HBS, I wonder if you could tell me what’s the takeaway for you from your time as an MBA student?

JG: Well, obviously friendships play a big role for everybody. And then the other aspect was just the fun of debate. There were quite a few contrarians who would sit on the back row and snipe away at the hotshots, and I was one of them. And it was great fun, made everything exciting. After a few months, we only picked on the strongest students who could slash and burn back. [Laughs.] So you only made a point when you thought you had a good point to make. But that was great experience at public speaking under stress where you knew you’d get whacked if you made a mistake and also an opportunity to learn to speak fast and pile on the data in your half-minute or your minute of time. And they were a couple of the real pleasures of being at business school.

JH: For MBAs just leaving the HBS campus, John Rice (MBA 1992) has some simple advice: Come back when you can. The founder of Management Leadership for Tomorrow, or MLT, Rice often credits HBS connections he made after graduation with providing support as he got the nonprofit off the ground and beyond. Under Rice’s leadership, MLT works with 3,000 predominantly low- and moderate-income college students each year to help them achieve economic mobility and partners with more than 200 major companies on their talent strategies. Over the past 20 years, MLT has developed 1,000 senior leaders, with 15,000 alumni following in their footsteps; and 50 percent of minority students at the top US business schools completed its MBA prep programs.

John Rice: What advice would I have for this year’s graduating MBAs in this crazy world? I think the first thing would be to come to every reunion that you can. And I think not just the obvious: friendships are so important over the long haul, life has its ups and downs and they’re critical to helping us all navigate through the ups and downs of life. But it’s also really important to maintain and to build those critical business relationships that I found can actually in some cases start 5, 10, 15 years after business school, not just reconnecting with friends who you were close to on campus. So don’t miss your reunion. That’s number one. I think the second one would be don’t leave HBS without being really clear with respect to what the bar is for the kind of senior executive role that you aspire to 10, 15, 20 years down the road.

Obviously HBS is fantastic at putting students in the shoes of senior executives. But you do have to get there. And there actually is a very clear framework that senior management teams and the executive search firms that advise them and help them with talent, that they use to evaluate candidates relative to that hiring and promotion bar. It’s team leadership, it’s results orientation, it’s strategic orientation, it’s collaboration and influencing. And the things that you can potentially do to build a compelling story around results orientation, how you’ve transformed a division of an organization or how you’ve launched something new and so forth, the things that you need to build toward actually is a little bit different than just solving for being a high performer, getting a good performance rating every year and getting promoted every two or three years. And you can easily be convinced that you’re on the right trajectory, doing all the right things, and years down the road realize that on one or two of those competencies, you don’t have a compelling story, and it’s harder to go and build that to make up that ground if you start late. So I would encourage the folks coming out of school now to start with a long view, understand what the game really looks like down the road when you’re competing for the types of general management roles that everyone is aspiring to, and then work back to today and think about how to build toward those competencies in periods of three to five years. Evaluate where you are and try to put together a set of experiences that make you competitive and make you compelling.

JH: Bonnie Cohen (MBA 1967) was among the earliest women graduates of HBS, after the MBA program went coed in 1963. When she arrived at Soldiers Field, Cohen was shocked by the ratio of men to women, but quickly adapted, making friends and joining a study group with some of her sectionmates. A graduate of Smith, the women’s college, Cohen had her first real experience of learning in a predominantly male group, and valued the diversity of viewpoints, just as she had when growing up in her hometown of Brockton, Massachusetts. A leader in the private, nonprofit, and government sectors throughout her decades-long career, Cohen most recently served as a trustee for the DC Public Libraries and chair of the DC Public Library Foundation. Her advice for this year’s class is a classic and always bears repeating: Go the extra mile.

Bonnie Cohen: Well, it would be pretty presumptuous of me to offer advice to these people who are generations younger. But as I look back, what advice I wish someone had given me and taken myself was to work harder and learn more. I think that would’ve stood me in good stead all along the way. And it’s easy to learn as much as you need to and work as hard as you need to, but it’s good to go the extra mile.

I grew up in a small town in Massachusetts—Brockton—a very diverse, middle class, or aspiring, and you knew the value of the friendship of everyone there. And then when I got to business school—I really had never been in a group of men like that. And I learned so much from all of them. And I made such strong friendships. And I think the important thing is to appreciate the value of everyone you come in contact with.

JH: Vittorio Colao (MBA 1990) discovered his love of media and telecoms as a consultant at McKinsey, where he worked before and after graduating from HBS. When he read The Death of Distance by Frances Cairncross, a 1997 book detailing the technological changes coming in how we communicate, he was intrigued. Colao followed his curiosity, launching a career in telcos that culminated in 2008, when he was named CEO of Vodafone Group. Now vice chairman of EMEA at global growth equity firm General Atlantic, Colao is still driven by the simple impulse to follow what interests him—and advises others to do the same, while also reminding them to stay humble and keep a listening ear open to others.

Vittorio Colao: My advice for graduating MBAs is really twofold. On one hand, follow, really, your deep interests. I don’t want to use the word passions because passions come after interest, but your deep interests, and don’t try to force yourself into jobs or positions or stuff that is not necessarily aligned with your interests. And the second one is on every matter, especially these days, scratch well beyond the surface, get to the depth of the substance of what you’re dealing with. There’s an amount of superficial knowledge out there. The true successful people will be the ones who can go beyond the first and even sometimes the second message.

For the HBS ones in particular, is never be arrogant in your life because unfortunately, we come with a certain reputation and I think humility and being approachable is a great recipe for success.

The point is, I came out from HBS with a very good understanding of the importance of not just communication, but also convincing other people about your reasoning and seeing other people’s point.

Every time I come back to HBS for seminars or classes, I am amazed by the quality of the orchestration of the class discussion because that’s the real learning. And the best thing that students will remember years after is discussions with my classmates in a safe environment when I can test myself and learn how to communicate, and take people with me, and see their points. And in the current world where it seems so difficult to see each other’s points, this is going to be an amazing asset for the young graduates.

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 on 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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