Who Is Mark Albion?
I am a “conflicted achiever.” Maybe you are, too.
Like many of you, I worked hard to get the best education I could find and then took the highest-paying, most prestigious job I could get to build a career platform from which I hoped to leap into work that I’d really love. What I found out is that it wasn’t that simple and that there was a price to pay for taking that path. And I probably wouldn’t have had to pay that price, even taking a similar path, if I had been more aware of who I was and what I really wanted.
The first half of my life was Harvard. I began Harvard College when I was fourteen years old. Not actually, of course, but it was true in my mind. I’d meet girls and tell them I went to Harvard to impress them. I thought they believed me. Maybe not. Maybe they did by the time I was sixteen. I don’t know. I just know I didn’t care back then. I knew that when the time came, I was going to Harvard, and that was that. There was never a question in my mind.
I’ll bet you too have a “Harvard” in your life. “Harvard” represents reaching your dream, showing everyone how good you are, how accomplished you are, how special you are. It’s society’s confirmation that your life on earth counts—counts more than the lives of most other people.
I needed that confirmation, that identity. My parents divorced before I could remember, and I had barely seen my father. Maybe I thought that I was the reason for their breakup or the reason Dad rarely saw me. I don’t know. But
I knew one thing: my mother loved me, and if I went to Harvard, my father would surely love me, too.
That’s all I really wanted: to be loved. And respected, I might add. Everything else was simply a facsimile of this truth. Maybe that’s your truth.
My father had gone to Harvard (he was even buried in 2007 wearing his Harvard Class of 45 tie). So in 1969, where else could I have gone to college? Dad picked my major (economics) and one of his real estate properties served as the basis for my undergraduate thesis. I felt that those choices would bring me closer to Dad, but my heart wasn’t in it.
As graduation loomed, it was a slow period for selling real estate, so instead of going to school or working, I backpacked around the world for a year. It was a “socially unacceptable” choice, but it would be the most important experience of my young life.
I learned that I could take care of myself and that there were many ways to live a life. I learned about compassion, something lacking in my previous education. I worked with children in impoverished areas of India and the South Pacific. I supported myself by arranging an import-export business with Dad. It paid for the trip and made Dad good money, too.
Back home in the United States, however, I felt the irresistible attraction of Harvard once again. I visited the head of the joint business-economics doctoral program between Harvard Business School and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Professor John Lintner. He dismissed me because my college grades were too low. But I refused to leave, returning each day, sitting outside his office, getting to know his secretary.
I did eventually get Professor Lintner to give me a chance: take a full load of his handpicked graduate economics courses for two semesters, he told me, and if I got all As, he would consider my application for the following year.
I buckled down and worked harder than I had since high school. I lived six days a week in the library (I actually had a bed in the stacks). I had a lot of catching up to do. Catch up I did. That next spring, I received an acceptance letter for the joint PhD program. I still remember the moment as if it were yesterday. I cried, and cried some more. I’d won! What I had won I was not sure.
The next three weeks I was bedridden, exhausted and ill from seven months of nonstop work and pressure. But I was back at Harvard again, the way I wanted it to be. I had paid the price through tireless study and poor health for a few weeks—a trade for something I so deeply wanted that I was happy to make it. It was a trade to make me feel good and look good in the eyes of others. What I needed was to be good and do good.
I enjoyed my six years as a graduate student, including three years as an undergraduate economics adviser and instructor. I wrote a book and a few journal articles as well. But I struggled with values. In my graduate economics courses, we studied how to make markets work better, how to make the world a better place for all. At the business school, we studied how to make the market work in your company’s favor, how to make the world a better place—for me. Public purpose versus private profit.
What did I do? I chose not to pay attention to my heart, my passion for market equity and social justice. When I finished my joint doctoral work, I didn’t become an economics professor but instead became a professor at the business school—it paid better. I did enjoy the stimulating colleagues, motivated students, and seemingly limitless research and consulting opportunities. I made money beyond my expectations and even garnered my fifteen minutes of fame.
In many ways, the achiever in me loved it. But the conflict in me grew. Where was the person who had helped poor children in India in 1973? Where was the writer, the adviser, who wanted to help students create a life of contribution and fulfillment after college?
I would have to leave the business school in 1988 to pursue what I would later call my destiny. I couldn’t articulate my destiny yet, but I knew what it wasn’t. The defining moment came one evening on my way to the school parking lot to get my car and go home.
It was around 10:00 P.M. when I walked by the window of Professor Lintner’s office. In my graduate school years, we had taught together and spent many hours discussing our mutual love of research. He had become my mentor. I looked up at that window and thought of the man who occupied it.
Here was a man I greatly respected, even loved. Here was a man at the top of his profession, a Nobel Prize winner, though he died before the award was given to his research colleagues. Here was a man who in my eyes had all the right values, turning down White House appearances if it meant canceling a class. I knew that if I did well, I could someday become a resident of that office.
I thought of my “contribution,” my tombstone. I visualized my birth date, a spot for date of death, and that dash in between. How was I going to spend that dash? I wasn’t sure, but I knew at that moment that occupying his office wasn’t it! I would feel that I had spent my life in the wrong place. Why? I didn’t exactly know. Where was the right place? I absolutely did not know.
In 1988, the second half of my life began, the Net Impact years of helping service-minded MBAs find their destiny path and in so doing helping Mark Albion find his own. These twenty years are captured in this book. Whereas I helped found small, socially responsible businesses, following in my mother’s footsteps, I learned that I still loved teaching and research; I just needed to change subjects! The lessons learned from that transition are the foundation of More Than Money.