The three stonecutters and why you need to understand it

One universal advantage that an MBA from a top school will give you, especially Harvard Business School, is a new perspective on the world. If an applicant does not show that they have already taken at least one step toward this transformed perspective, then he will find himself woefully unprepared to succeed in his application. The school will simply think you are not the right kind of person. Tragically, all it takes sometimes is a 30 minute conversation, or even reading the right article, to point the candidate towards the right path, and that can be a fork in the road that makes a lifetime of difference. This article could possibly be that difference for you.

To see where clients are on this spectrum, I run the following exercise:

I ask "If you could change one thing about your organization, what would it be?"

Often the answers relate to improving a paperwork process, overcoming some process inefficiency, or making personnel changes in key positions that immediately affect you and your peers. One thing that all answers almost always have in common is that they are about the client's own unit. The applicant interprets "your organization" as his Platoon, Battalion, Wing, Department, or perhaps Ship. The question is intentionally vague. Focusing on one's own unit is the wrong approach for someone with ambition to attend a top business school.. not just from a tactical application point of view, but from a strategic mindset.

When interpreting this question, your "organization" should be construed as the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marine Corps, or perhaps the Department of Defense itself. Perhaps your answer is even above that, citing national policy changes which must take place in order to truly improve the DoD where it matters most. As junior officers or enlisted however, we are not trained to think that way. We can't change unit structure or unit missions. If a junior Naval officer was asked by the President how he would improve his organization, the Navy would expect you to answer by how to make your Department better, or maybe your ship, but would not expect you to answer with how the Navy as a whole needs to adapt better as a whole to the 21st century or how many ships it needs. A place like HBS does however expect you to think exactly that way. The training wheels should have come off a long time ago.

The military is so dogmatic that even flag officers have challenges bringing about significant reform, so junior officers have often been conditioned to not even think about that kind of change. However, when you want to attend a school who's lofty mission is to educate leaders who make a difference in the world, you must begin thinking on a global level. Thinking big is a common hallmark of HBS students and alumni, and thinking small is a sure way to get your application earmarked as non-HBS material.

What do you want to change about the world? Why do you do the things you do in your life? How do these all connect? These are all things that successful applicants are prepared to address in their essay and in their interview, whether directly or indirectly. If it sounds like you're not prepared for this, then fear not, for practically not a single applicant that begins the process is ready either. Putting in the time and effort to figure this out through the application process itself is what leads to success.

A lot of this mindset is nicely captured through the parable of the three stonecutters, told here in 2008 by Harvard University President Drew Faust. The following are excerpts (you can read the full article here). Top business schools are looking for the third stonecutter... don't get stuck in the second stonecutter category....

A man came across three stonecutters and asked them what they were doing. The first replied, “I am making a living.” The second kept on hammering while he said, “I am doing the best job of stonecutting in the entire county.” The third looked up with a visionary gleam in his eye and said, “I am building a cathedral.”

The first stonecutter is simply doing a day’s work for a day’s pay, for the material reward he receives in exchange for his labor. The substance of his work, the purpose of his work, the context of his work do not matter.

The second stonecutter has higher aspirations. He wants to be the best. We know him well. Harvard does an outstanding job of producing students like the second stonecutter. Yearly, each of our schools enrolls a highly talented student body, and we entrust them to a faculty working at the very frontier of human knowledge. We demand that these students and faculty be excellent, for we see Harvard’s own excellence reflected in them and their achievement. HBS is no different. It admits a small fraction of its thousands of applicants and turns out graduates who command the best jobs in finance, banking, consulting, and marketing. Brilliant, analytical, highly trained, and driven, they are creative and pragmatic actors who have helped to bring about one of the most sustained and extraordinary periods of prosperity in our history. Now many of these graduates are to be found in the midst of this crisis—and in the midst of the efforts to resolve it.

The second stonecutter is an unshakable individualist. He believes in the power of the human mind, and its capacity for reason, in the drive for quality and results, and in the usefulness of reducing complex reality to a simple equation. His world is competitive and meritocratic. It is cosmopolitan; he measures himself against the “whole county” as the story has it—even the whole world.

Yet somehow the vision of the second stonecutter is also incomplete. The focus on the task, the competition, the virtuosity, is a kind of blindness. Consumed with individual ambition, the second stonecutter misses the fundamental interconnectedness of human kind, of societies and of economies. This stonecutter fails to see that there would be no stones to cut if there were not a community building a cathedral.

The third stonecutter embraces a broader vision. Interesting, I think, that the parable has him building a cathedral—not a castle or a railway station or a skyscraper. Testimony in part, of course, to the antiquity of the tale. But revealing in other ways as well. The very menial work of stonecutting becomes part of a far larger undertaking, a spiritual as well as a physical construction. This project aspires to the heavens, transcending the earthbound—and indeed transcending the timebound as well, for cathedrals are built not in months or even years, but over centuries. A lifetime of work may make only a small contribution to a structure that unites past and future, connects humans across generations and joins their efforts to purposes they see as far larger than themselves.

The third stonecutter reminds us that the individual is not enough, that we want to make a difference in and for the world—as it is today and as it will be in the future.

Business education that takes advantage of such a setting has the opportunity to produce not just leaders who make a difference in the world but leaders who make a difference for the world. That should be the goal for both HBS and Harvard University in the century to come.