Photo by Allison Sepanek

Not long after Joseph Fuller (MBA 1981) cofounded the consultancy Monitor Group in 1983, a competitor made it known that pigs would fly before the firm succeeded. “That became our rallying cry,” Fuller says. He hung a terra-cotta flying pig from the ceiling of one of Monitor’s conference rooms. Clients, friends, and later, students, also gave him flying pigs over the years, too. Lots of them.

About a third of the collection, estimated at 50 items, has found a home in Fuller’s office in the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship. The pictured few include a sleepy—possibly jet-lagged—pig in the foreground, given by a former Monitor colleague: “He and I made transoceanic flights dozens of times. The rolling pig just behind it was from a client who teased me about how much the story had traveled, hence the wheels. The piggy bank element was a nod to how expensive the client thought we were,” says Fuller. “My wife, Ruthanne Fuller (MBA 1983), spotted the debonair, crowned fellow at the front of the pack in Krakow, Poland,” he notes. The pig bringing up the rear was a gift from one of the first sections of the required course The Entrepreneurial Manager that Fuller taught at HBS.

At Monitor, Fuller served as CEO and in other leadership roles until it was acquired by Deloitte in 2012. That same year, he joined the HBS faculty and is now professor of management practice in the General Management and Entrepreneurship units. Fuller gets to tell his story when students ask about his office décor, and he finds that alumni invoke it often. “I’d like to think that reflects their understanding of it as a vehicle for aligning an organization behind the values of determination and perseverance,” Fuller says. “But they also just find them amusing.”

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