Commencement: End of One Journey, Starting Point of Another

Jieying Zheng

December 9, 2009

Back in the USA after my internship with Volans, I was delighted this week to have received an amazing amount of curious enthusiasm from the audience after my oral defence of my MBA thesis. This focused on the sustainability and social entrepreneurship agendas, seen through the lens of microinsurance.

Having attended various business classes for over a year, I had been slightly on edge about my topic being “peculiar”. And it was, to some degree, very different from the topics chosen by many of my fellow classmates, most of whom were discussing specific areas such as marketing or operation management, their presentations full of matrices, economic assumptions and scenario planning on profits and losses.

Looking back, I had come to the MBA course largely hoping to become more “grounded” in business, but ended up on a quite unexpected trajectory.

The Pareto Law, I now see, applies with considerable force here. For me, at least, the learning that will have the most lasting impact has been condensed in a single course, around leadership and sustainability development. Of the 15 months of the program, the richest learning period was my 3-month Volans journey, where the pivotal moment happened when I met John. At the same time, all the small and seemingly irrelevant questions about the world’s future, the role of business, and the role of myself, which once had lurked somewhere at the back of my head, will now powerfully shape my future objectives and direction.

I do not mean to understate the value of courses such as Accounting (taught in the USA) and Marketing (taught in France), where – in both cases – I happened to top the class. However, at its best, business education can have a more profound impact, touching the mind and heart of future leaders.

As the Irish poet Yeats put it, education – again at its best – is not so much the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire. Hopefully the fire fed at the business schools – despite the gloom of the economic downturn – will fuel inspiration, ignite entrepreneurial spirits, and spark the sort of creativity that equips business talents to push the boundaries and tackle wider societal agendas.