What are you going to do with your lucky lottery ticket? That’s a question every MBA faces. A lot of time and money has been invested in you, and once you graduate you’re supposed to cash that ticket in for as much money and status as you can. Your parents and peers expect it. And you may feel that there’s really no other choice. You can’t risk wasting that expensive education. It’s the safe thing to do. Isn’t it?
Not necessarily. Mark Albion doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, but his unique perspective can help you find yours. There are other ways to look at potential risks and rewards, even when you have thousands of dollars of student loans to pay back. Money is important but it’s not the key to fulfillment. The “safe” choice, the most monetarily rewarding one, can carry enormous psychological and spiritual pain. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “Sometimes money costs too much.” [pullquote]“Sometimes money costs too much. – Ralph Waldo Emerson”[/pullquote]
In More Than Money, Albion redefines the typical way the risk/reward equation is written, using his own life story and those of the many entrepreneurs, executives and MBAs he’s met as both cautionary and inspirational tales. He introduces a framework of four crucial questions to consider when thinking about your career choices, as well as “lifelines,” principles that can help you answer these questions and guide you to construct your personal, strategic destiny plan.
A consciousness-raising book as well as a career guide, More Than Money encourages MBA students to give themselves permission to be who they really want to be and find their path of service. For, as Albion says, in the end “we won’t remember you for the size of your wallet as much as the size of your heart.”?
About the author: Mark Albion spent 18 years as a student and professor at Harvard University and its Business School. A seven-time social entrepreneur, he left Harvard to develop a community of service-minded MBAs, co-founding Net Impact in 1993. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Making a Life, Making a Living (2000), CD-Series Finding Work That Matters (2002), True to Yourself: Leading a Values-Based Business (2006), all at www.makingalife.com, and More Than Money: Questions Every MBA Needs to Answer (2009), at www.more-than-money.org, along with the animated movie, “The Good Life: An MBA Meets a Fisherman.” Profiled on 60 Minutes, his work praised by leaders as diverse as Ronald Reagan and Mother Teresa, Dr. Albion has spoken at more than 125 business schools on five continents, for which Business Week magazine dubbed him “the savior of B-school souls.” Known to his two daughters and silver-anniversary wife as the man who rode across Afghanistan on horseback, Mark’s 2008 video interview in Ukraine explains his philosophy.