Stirring up nutritious meals: On one of his frequent trips to Rwanda, Bill Wyman participates in a class that teaches mothers how to prepare healthy meals for their children.

Photo courtesy Bill and Ro Wyman

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Bob Gannon (OPM 16, 1990)

Diana ("Dido") Harding (MBA ’92)

David Miller (MBA ’03)

Allison O’Kelly (MBA ’99)

Amos Schocken (MBA ’70)

Mike Stone (MBA ’88)

Tom Tiller (MBA ’91)

Ammara Yaqub (MBA ’05)

Editor's Note: The new Executive Education Crossroads program has been postponed and will be rescheduled.

At the pinnacle of his career, 57-year-old Bill Wyman (MBA ’65) felt like a misfit at the bustling consulting firm he cofounded — Oliver Wyman. Increasingly, the human side of consulting that he thrived on took a backseat to the analytical side that clients demanded.

Sensing her husband’s growing unease, Ro Wyman directed his attention to a fortuitously timed mailer from HBS that pitched the benefits of an Executive Education program designed to help restless alumni answer the question, “What’s next?” “I went, and it just blew me away,” Wyman says of his 1994 experience with the Age of Options program.

After a seven-year hiatus, the program returns this summer with a new name, Crossroads, and a renewed sense of purpose — helping alumni identify and build a plan for achieving personal goals. “Our focus is to help people plan their lives, not just their careers,” says HBS senior lecturer John Davis, who chairs the program. Participants gather on campus for a week in August and off campus for a week in September.

Wyman’s aha moment seventeen years ago came when program participants were challenged to take colored pens and draw their lives. “Mine was a two-dimensional graph in black, and that’s when I realized I’d squeezed all the emotion out of my life,” he recalls.

Within months, Wyman exited the firm, but several years passed before he found his new calling, what he regards as the transformational outcome of his HBS experience. Building on their previous experiences in Rwanda, the Wymans launched a nonprofit to help the country develop a self-sustaining and replicable model of health-care delivery for rural villages.

The new Crossroads program, like its predecessor, aims to attract alumni who are searching for greater personal or professional satisfaction, or who are seeking effective strategies for making fundamental career and life changes.

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