Harvard Business School Professor Debora Spar wants you to zigzag through life

Xfund’s brilliant faculty advisors bring a diversity of experiences and expertise to their roles — and Debora Spar’s career is more varied than most.

Currently, she is the Jaime and Josefina Chua Tiampo Professor of Business Administration and Senior Associate Dean at Harvard Business School. Altogether, she has spent more than two decades on the faculty at HBS. Debora’s research examines the intersection of gender, technology, and social structures. Her latest book is Work, Mate, Marry, Love: How Machines Shape Our Human Destiny.

Previously, she served as President of Barnard College and as President and Chief Executive Officer of Lincoln Center. She is a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, a director of Thermo Fisher Scientific and Value Retail LLC, and a trustee of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Here, Debora talks about her “zigzagged” career path, the value of a liberal arts education, and the unique perspective that liberal arts founders have to offer.

What brought you to Xfund?

Patrick was my student many years ago. We stayed in occasional contact, and then reconnected when I came back to Harvard Business School in 2018. He had an opportunity to tell me about the work of the Fund. I was already a big fan of his and became a big fan of the work the Fund was doing as well, so it was a very easy decision to agree to join.

What specifically prompted you to come on board with Xfund?

I’ve spent my life in academia, particularly but not entirely in business academia. So, an opportunity to be involved even slightly with an organization contributing to the future of higher education, and doing it with a pipeline of projects that are coming out of higher education, was very appealing.

How have you seen entrepreneurship change as a discipline in business academia?

Entrepreneurship as a subject area, and as a hot subject area, is really something that’s happened over the course of my career. There was much less focus on entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship when I started at HBS in the early 1990s. So, it’s really something that has evolved and been manifest in business schools and business education over the past 20 to 30 years.

Certainly, I’ve seen a change in my students over the decades. Once upon a time, everybody wanted to work for one of the great manufacturing companies. Then it was the investment banks, then it was the management consultants. These things move in generational waves.

A huge number of our students at HBS want to be entrepreneurs, either right out of business school or at some point in their lives. It’s become part the societal fabric, the extent to which people want to behave as and see themselves as entrepreneurs. That’s relatively new.

Also, in the 10 years I was away from HBS, I was the President of Barnard College. As a liberal arts college, it doesn’t have a business program. But even there, the interest among the young women in being entrepreneurs, in figuring out what it takes to be an entrepreneur, and imagining themselves in founders’ roles was very prevalent. It’s something that is relatively new in the history of U.S. capitalism, and it’s been interesting to watch that develop and flourish.

In addition to your work in academia, you’ve also been the CEO of the Lincoln Center and served on the board of Goldman Sachs. What’s it like to have a career that spans so many different worlds?

It’s confusing at times, but it’s been fascinating. I’ve now reached an age where I’m looking back at my career as much as forward, and I keep doing a zigzag motion.

That was true even when I was an undergraduate at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, where you have to major in foreign service. Somehow, at the age of 17, I managed to convince them to also let me double major in English, which no one had ever done before. So, I wrote two senior theses. One was on U.S.-Soviet nuclear verification, and the other was on Charles Dickens’ novel Bleak House. Never have there been two projects with less in common, but that sort of encapsulates my career.

I’ve been lucky enough to have that kind of zigzag-y career, where I’ve done a considerable number of different things, and I’ve found it fascinating. I’ve always been someone who worries about getting bored, so I’ve put myself in a position where I’m constantly doing new things. That way, you never get bored, and you’re always challenged. And it gives you an opportunity — I know it’s trite to say, but I’ve really found it true — to constantly be learning.

That’s part of the attraction of being involved with Xfund. I am learning, even peripherally, about amazing new work going on in areas of science that I don’t study, but I can learn a little bit about.

Hopefully, you pick up nuggets of wisdom, or you start to see patterns that can be useful, even when you’re operating in an area outside one in which you have true expertise.

Xfund supports liberal arts founders, in addition to those with the more typical science or engineering background. What’s the value of that liberal arts background?

As someone who was the president of a liberal arts college, I am not surprisingly a devoted fan of the liberal arts. I think my respect for and affection for the liberal arts goes beyond the subject matter to the actual pedagogy of education.

One of the beautiful things about the liberal arts, as it’s practiced today in the United States, is that at some basic level, we are saying, “We don’t think 18-year-olds know enough yet to know what they want to do.” That’s quite an American conception.

In the liberal arts, the environment and the curricula force you not to make up your mind for a little while — to take poetry, even if you’ve never been interested in it, or to take calculus, if you’ve always been terrified of it.

I think that makes people smarter and more interesting, and it ultimately gives them the ability, not only to choose what they want to do at 22, but to have the sort of flexibility of mindset where they can do something for 10 years and then something different for 10 years after that.

That training of the mind is exactly what contributes to being a good entrepreneur. It’s a certain cross-training, if you will, that enables you to think about patterns and to see connections in very different ways.

How do you approach advising would-be entrepreneurs at the graduate level?

I still give the same advice to my MBA students, particularly when they’re choosing courses. I always say, “Take things outside your comfort zone.” There’s a certain poignancy when you’re in graduate school, because you’re kind of reaching the end of your education. I always like to pause on that moment, because it terrifies people. But it’s true — once you leave your MBA program, you’re likely done with school.

So, I always advise students to take a Russian literature course, or to take an ethics course. Stretch your brain a little bit. Find out what else you’re interested in, and figure out how to keep learning. Even when you leave school, there are always ways to keep learning.

Originally published at https://blog.xfund.com on January 9, 2022.