How I Got Into Business School, Part 1

I told this story last week to my old GMAT student in Warsaw, and I figure it makes a nice segue from the Valentine's Day story, to the next BMFRTE post. It's a nice segue because it includes the story of one of the near-death experiences (with Laszlo) mentioned in the V-Day post, which happened in a location (Arches National Park) that figures in the next BMFRTE post. So without further ado,

How I Got Into Business School

I applied to business school during the fall of '97. I had been working for Katz Communications in LA for 3 years, and had been having a very good career there. I had only recently come to consider the idea of getting an MBA, and decided that it was only worth it if I got into a really good business school. So I applied to just 4 schools: Stanford, UCLA, Berkeley, and Yale.

As I evaluated my own candidacy, I realized that I was a terrible long shot. On paper, I really had no business being in a top business school. My grades were mediocre (3.06), and I had minimal work experience in an industry which sent very few people to business school. Thankfully, I did have a very good GMAT score (770), but that was the lone bright spot in an otherwise thoroughly mediocre candidacy. I realized I desperately needed to get an interview with these places. I've always done better in person.

Unfortunately, neither Stanford nor UCLA interviewed people unless there was some really compelling reason for it. But I went and visited Berkeley, and managed to get an interview with a current student there. So my girlfriend Sarah and I drove up to SF from LA, and crashed with JOC, who was at Hastings Law School at the time. Since I had to park my car in the Tenderloin, I decided to bring everything inside, including my interview suit.

If you have been reading these posts for a while, you might be able to guess where this is heading- after staying up all night with JOC (I remember falling asleep during South Park at like 3 a.m.), we were dragging a bit in the morning and raced out of the building sans suit. Halfway to Berkeley, it finally dawned on me that we'd left it behind, and so I had to drive 90 mph back to get it, causing me to trip one of those photo-enforced intersections in San Francisco. Though, I never did receive a ticket; it's possible I was going so fast the camera didn't get a good look. I've read that's possible.

Anyway, despite my best efforts, I didn't really click with my interviewer, and I had a lot of doubts about whether the student was going to talk me up enough to make a real difference. But then I found out that Yale was sending its admissions people out to LA for interviewing, and that by luck of the draw I had landed on the slate of Richard, the Dean of Admissions. I was totally pumped.

The interview was set for a Friday at 4pm, at one of the hotels down by LAX. That put it 20 minutes away from work assuming no traffic on the 405 (ha!), but I had a surefire surface-street route that could get me there in 30 even during rush hour. Nevertheless, I resolved to leave work by 2pm so that there was no conceivable way I would be late. Friday afternoons were normally very slow at work, since working on Friday afternoons would get in the way of the primary activity of people in the advertising business in LA, which is drinking in westside bars.

Our team at work was composed of a manager, 5 account executives (AE's), and 5 assistants. We represented several television stations scattered around the country, but 80% of our business came from just 2 stations: KUSI in San Diego and KNXV in Phoenix. The National Sales Manager (NSM) from KNXV was in town that day, and so our manager and all the AE's took him out to lunch. A long lunch. A long lunch that, by 2pm, I was beginning to suspect was going to end up lasting the rest of the day. Clearly, none of them were coming back. No worries though, I figured, I'll just wrap up and get out of here.

And that's when the NSM from KUSI called.

Her name was Judy, and she was, while being personally a wonderful human being that I genuinely liked, often a pain in the butt to work with, especially when she was in a mood, which, to be honest, was frequently. And today she was in the mother of all moods.

As it happened, the very first person at Katz that I ever assisted was Judy's daughter, Summer. Summer was her mother's daughter in that on a personal level she was awesome, but she went through a lot of assistants because assisting her was like assisting General Patton. But once I figured that out, and decided not to take it personally, we bonded and worked extremely well together. And so, her mother treated me far better than she generally treated the other assistants on the team.

Also, by this time, 3 years into working at Katz, I carried a much bigger and more advanced set of responsibilities than the other assistants on the team. So when Judy called needing a deal to be negotiated with J. Walter Thompson, who happened to be in our building up on the 21st floor, and it couldn't wait because it was for spots to air that weekend, and there were no AE's present, and it was 1997 and no one had a cell phone, I did what I thought was best and volunteered to go upstairs and try to negotiate the deal. Technically, that was work that only an AE should have done, but I knew the buyer up there and she liked me too, so I negotiated the deal. That part all worked out- the buyer got a good deal, Judy got the money she needed, and Katz Communications looked great.

The problem was, by the time it was done and I could run out of the office, it was 340. I was panicked. I had no number to get a hold of Richard, and I needed LA traffic not to present a single problem in order to make the interview on time. You're in pretty bad shape if you need LA traffic not to present a single problem. In fact, the 405 was a parking lot, and then there was construction on my backup route, and so by the time I got to the hotel, parked, found out which conference room Richard was in, and found the room, it was 420.

420. 20 minutes late for a half hour interview. I literally ran into the room, foaming at the mouth in apologies.

Me: "OhmygodI'msosorryIhadnowaytocontactyoupleaseacceptmyapology..."
Richard: "Relax, it's OK. Did they send you to the wrong room also?"
Me: "What?"
Richard: "Yeah, they've been sending people to the wrong floor all day. No one has been on time. Where did they send you?"
Me: "They sent me here. They got it right." And I proceeded to explain about Judy, etc.

So after hearing my little story, Richard says that he appreciates that I 'fessed up about why I was late, when I had the opportunity to pin it on someone else, and then offers that he only has one more interview, at 430, so if I am willing to wait outside the room until 5, he'll see me then.

So I waited until 5, and Richard called me in. In the end, the interview consisted of just 3 questions. After looking over my resume for a minute, he asked the first one...

Richard: "So, I see here that you were a physics and math major, and now you work in advertising. It's not real intuitive to me how that happens, so why don't you tell me how you ended up at Katz."

And this is the story I told him:

I was raised from birth to be in the sciences. My dad wanted me to be a doctor, but I knew early that I hated hospitals and medicine. However, in a show of flexibility, my dad was willing to accept a Ph.D. in a hard science as a substitute for an M.D. In my dad's very black-and-white mind, there were 2 types of people: people who did science or medicine, and Other People.

And so, raised in a household with a heavy Indian influence, it didn't really occur to me to further question whether that was the right track for me. I majored in physics because it was the only science I enjoyed, and majored in math because I took so much of it I only needed 1 more class. And so, needing a Ph.D. to fulfill my father's wish, I applied to Ph.D. programs in planetary physics, and finally got accepted to the program at UC Davis.

It wasn't until I got that acceptance, just before graduation, that I finally sat down and grappled with the thought of doing physics pretty much exclusively for the next 6 years, after that entering a job market with maybe a dozen jobs out there for theoretical astrophysicists, which is what I would have been. A dozen jobs, currently held by people all perfectly capable in principle of winning a Nobel Prize. We're talking people like Stephen Hawking. If you took a teaspoon and scooped out a chunk of Stephen Hawking's brain and dumped it on your kitchen table, that disembodied chunk would be about 1000 times smarter than I am.

Between being not smart enough to effectively compete for a handful of jobs in the area I would have pursued, and a broader feeling that I liked physics, and liked understanding it, but didn't love physics in the way that you have to in order to pursue that kind of life, I chose to defer for a year. I figured I'd try and spend the next year doing something as totally unlike physics as possible, and then a year later, if I found I was really missing physics, I would know that it was the right path for me, and I would go to UC Davis.

Then I graduated, went home to StL, packed my stuff in my car, and moved to LA permanently. And discovered that I had no savings, no income, and absolutely no relevant job market experience whatsoever. I had only worked in places like ice cream stores, or been a TA, or done random odd jobs. I had no resume. I had no prospects. And I needed income fast.

I put together a resume and submitted it for several positions I saw in the LA Times. One of them was for a job as the assistant to the VP of Marketing at Petersen Publishing, which publishes Motor Trend, Guns & Ammo, and many other magazines. They received 100 resumes, and picked 20 people to come in for a first round screening interview. Judy, the woman I would be interviewing with, told me to come down Wilshire Blvd, see the Petersen Publishing sign on the right, turn into the driveway, and then park underneath the building, come up to the 2nd floor, and tell the receptionist that I was there for an interview, and she'd direct me from there.

So I got in my car and started driving. It was my first interview for a real job, and I was nervous as hell. Laszlo had given me a page of commonly asked interview questions, and I was more reading that than I was driving. Eventually I did come down Wilshire, saw the Petersen Publishing sign, and then turned into the driveway, whereupon I went back to reading my interview questions. On autopilot, I parked underneath the building, went up to the 2nd floor, marched up to the receptionist (Alice).

Me: "Hi. I'm here for an interview."
Alice: "Great, we really need people."
(That's encouraging, I thought)
Alice: "Who are you here to interview with?"
Me: "Judy."
Alice: "Um, we don't have a Judy here." She picks up what must be the company directory and starts scanning it.

That's odd, I thought, I just spoke to Judy half an hour ago. Just then, I look up at the wall behind Alice, and in enormous letters it says, KATZ COMMUNICATIONS.

Me: "Uh, this isn't Petersen Publishing, is it?"
Alice: "No-o-o, that would be the building next door."

The Petersen building and 6500 Wilshire are right next to each other, separated only by their 2 driveways, and a short concrete wall between the 2 driveways, atop which sits the little Petersen Publishing sign that I had seen shortly before turning into the wrong driveway.

Just then, Nancy, the office manager, walked into the reception area and saw me there in my suit.

Nancy: "Oh hi. Are you here to interview?"
Me: "Uh, actually, I'm supposed to be next door interviewing in like 5 minutes."
Nancy: "Well, here's my card. We work in television, it's a great entry level job, a good place to learn and get started. If it doesn't work out over there, call me."

So I pocketed the card and went next door.

I ended up passing the screening interview. They picked 3 people to come back and interview with the VP. I was the 1st one he saw. We had an awesome interview; it went over an hour, we really connected, and at the very end I thought "I so have this job locked _up_"

And that's when he said: "I just want to let you know, although I haven't seen the other 2 yet, I'm definitely going to offer the position to one of them." At what must have been my look of shock he continued, "I think you're really smart, and will be bored in this position and want to leave within a year. I want someone who will be a little bit more challenged than you will, and who will therefore stick around longer. Thanks."

So I left. I was depressed. No one else had responded to any of my resumes. And I was staring starvation in the face. The only reason I had a place to stay was that I'd moved in with my girlfriend Tasha, who rented the 2nd bedroom in a West Hollywood apartment from a gay male hairdresser named Stan whose salon had been leveled in the Northridge quake back in January. So, he cut all his hair in the apartment. And smoked copious amounts of weed. And brought home a lot of strange men that, as a fully hetero guy, I could tell were scrapings from the bottom of the barrel. I desperately wanted out, but we were stuck there until I had income.

So I went home and called Nancy. She was thrilled to hear from me, and asked if I could come in to interview tomorrow. I said sure. Now, it was 1994, and so across the country at MIT, Tim Berners-Lee was busy founding the World Wide Web Consortium, which would eventually lead to mass exposure to the Web. But as of that day, there was no meaningful WWW, no Google to look up anything with, and so the next day when I went in for my interview, I knew the following things about the position I was interviewing for:

1) It was for a company called 'Katz Communications', and
2) It had something to do with 'television'.

As it happened, when I arrived neither Summer nor Mike, who were the two people immediately in need of an assistant, was present, so rather than send me home, they sent me in to interview with Mickey, the Vice President of the whole damn company.

Mickey, you may be interested to know, was the nephew of Mickey Cohen. That's Mickey Cohen the gangster, who was partners with Bugsy Siegel in setting up the Flamingo Hotel and more or less building Vegas, and who worked with Al Capone, Frank Gagna, and over the course of his life survived several attempts on his life. I didn't know that at the time I walked into Mickey's office, but I did immediately recognize that this man was _terrifying_. Although Mickey spent his whole life trying to maintain a distance between himself and his gangster pedigree, he definitely had absorbed the special gangster ability to project a unique combination of absolute authority and dispassionate lethality that I promise you is different from anything else you've ever experienced.

Mickey had a huge corner office, with an enormous, pristine oaken desk, and a huge leather chair. He'd sit way back in that leather chair, angled somewhat away from you, mostly looking down at his hands folded in his lap. He always spoke quietly; in all the years I worked for him I only saw him lose his temper and yell once, and it was the single most terrifying moment I had there. And I was just a distant bystander. We had several clients who had national reputations for being abusive to salespeople, but every last one of them was extremely deferential to Mickey. He just had that kind of ability to project.

And so, when he asked me why I was interested in the job, I almost pissed myself because I had no idea about the job really, and instead just told him how I'd ended up there. I can only hope I didn't sound even a tenth of how terrified I was. When I finished, there was a long silence, while Mickey just looked down at his hands and I tried hard not to squirm in my seat. I fully expected him to say, "Why are you wasting my valuable time? Hey Vinny, whack this piece of shit!"

Finally he said: "Well, this is a sales job. There's a lot of talking on the phone. If you're the sort of person that argues with your girlfriend over who has to call and order the pizza, this isn't the job for you."

Wow. The thing is, and I am not making this up, the previous night Tasha and I had gotten into an argument over who would have to order the pizza. But I was so desperate for this job, whatever it was, and so I said:

"Oh no, I love talking on the phone. I talk on the phone all the time."

Yes, I said something that retarded. And yes, it was a bald-faced lie. It remains the one lie I have ever told in an interview. I told it because I was even more desperate for a job than I was afraid of Mickey, who gave every impression that if he found out I'd lied to him, would casually reach into his desk, pull out a gun, put a bullet in my head, and then go back to reading Advertising Age and eating Triscuits.

He said they'd let me know, and swiveled his chair to go back to facing the window, which was always his way of dismissing you. I got up and left, went home, and about 15 minutes after I got home, Nancy called me and asked me if I wanted the job, and upon hearing my answer, asked if I could start tomorrow, to which I joyfully answered "yes". I still really had no idea what they did there- I'd been too nervous to ask Mickey any meaningful questions.

I soon found out that the team normally had 5 assistants, was down 2 already at the time I blundered into the Katz office, and a third had just given notice. So they were desperate for a warm body, which I was able to provide. Later, as people came and went, I would look at the people we would turn away, who had actual experience in the industry, and marvel that it's all about timing. But I got my wish- selling television airtime was as unlike physics and math as possible, and it turned out I had some facility for it. Just before he died of AIDS, Mickey said I was the best hire he ever made.

And that's how I ended up in advertising.

When I finished telling Richard the story, he looked a little, well, stunned.

Richard: "Wow, that's a hell of a story. You should embellish it a little- you know, say you'd been working there a couple weeks before you even noticed you were in the wrong place."
Me: "Ye-e-a-a-h-h, I could do that, but I kind of feel like the story is crazy enough as it is, without embellishment."
Richard: "Yeah, okay, you're right about that."

And then he asked me his second question.