How They Did It
Robert D. Hales (Member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles)
Elder Robert D. Hales, applied [the principle of a job designed for learning] in his first job after graduating from the Harvard Business School in 1960. He did well in school and had many good job offers at graduation. Several of the companies who offered to hire him were among the largest and most prestigious in the world. They had hired many Harvard MBA graduates, but they especially wanted young Robert for his outstanding product marketing and advertising skills.
Young Robert also had an offer from a much smaller company called Gillette, which made shaving razors. Gillette wasn’t used to hiring top-flight MBAs. Their senior executives had all started at the bottom of the company and worked their way up. They were the number-one maker of razors in the U.S. But they were less prestigious than the other companies recruiting Robert, and they weren’t willing to pay as much.
Robert, though, saw a potential opportunity in working for Gillette. Rather than immediately making him a marketing and advertising executive, as the other companies planned to do, Gillette wanted Robert to learn all aspects of their business. He recognized in this offer the opportunity to acquire what his business school mentor George Doriot called the “sense of operation,” or an understanding of how all the parts of an organization work together. Even though it meant a lower salary and less prestige, Robert went to work at Gillette, with the goal of learning everything he could. He took assignments to work in the company’s factories. He did a stint in the finance department. He even made sales calls to supermarkets and drug stores.
He received one promotion after another. Within just a few years, he was president of one of Gillette’s largest divisions. By then he was better compensated than many of his former business school colleagues who went to work for the larger, more prestigious companies. He rose quickly because he focused more on learning than on climbing the organizational ladder.
Kim B. Clark (President of BYU-Idaho)
President Clark was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and raised in Spokane, Washington. After serving as a missionary for the Church in Germany, he married his wife Sue in 1971. President Clark earned bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees in economics from Harvard University.
In 1978 President Clark became a member of the faculty at the Harvard Business School and was named the dean of the school in 1995. He served in that capacity until he became president of BYU-Idaho in 2005.
http://www.byui.edu/president/clarkbio.htm
Julie Bangerter Beck (Relief Society General President)
She started college but married young and left school for a time. Several years later, one of her older sisters offered to babysit President Beck’s children so that she could return and finish her degree. It took a total of eight years, and she ended up attending college with a total of five of her siblings. When President Beck finished, she and her siblings passed their love of learning and education on to their children.
Cecil O. Samuelson (President of BYU)
President Samuelson is a Salt Lake City native who has served at the University of Utah as professor of medicine, dean of the School of Medicine and vice president of health sciences. Prior to his call as a full-time General Authority of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he was senior vice president of Intermountain Health Care. He holds a bachelor of science degree, a master’s degree in educational psychology and a medical degree from the University of Utah.
Dr. Samuelson fulfilled his residency and held a fellowship in rheumatic and genetic diseases at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. He has received numerous scholastic honors and is the author or co-author of 48 original publications, eight books or chapters of books and 13 abstracts. He also has served as a director, officer or member of several national medical and hospital organizations.
http://unicomm.byu.edu/president/samuelson.aspx
Michael K. Young (President of the University of Utah)
President Young is a graduate of Brigham Young University (B.A., 1973) and Harvard Law School (J.D., 1976), where he served as a note Editor of the Harvard Law Review.
From 1978 to 1998, he was the Fuyo Professor of Japanese Law and Legal Institutions and Director of the Center for Japanese Legal Studies, the Center for Korean Legal Studies, and the Project on Religion, Human Rights and Religious Freedom at Columbia University. Prior to joining the Columbia University faculty, President Young served as a Law Clerk to the late Chief (then Associate) Justice William H. Rehnquist of the U.S. Supreme Court.
During the administration of President George Bush, President Young served as Ambassador for Trade and Environmental Affairs (1992-93), Deputy Under Secretary for Economic and Agricultural Affairs (1991-93) and Deputy Legal Adviser to the U.S. Department of State (1989-91).
Caroline Romney Eyring (Henry J. Eyrings’ great-grandmother)
Taught at the Juarez Academy, and she made sure that all of her children attended. The educational head start they got propelled them to later success. Of Caroline’s eight children, six earned bachelor’s degrees, four went on for master’s degrees, and three earned Ph.D.s. That was in a day when only one in twenty five people in the United States had a college degree.
Elder William Grant Bangerter (a pioneering missionary to Brazil)
He and his wife were the first people in their families to earn college degrees. When they married, they set a goal to ensure the blessing of higher education for each of their children. As it turned out, they had ten children, making the goal unusually difficult to achieve. But all ten earned a college degree. It took a long time; the Bangerters had one or more children in college for a period of twenty-five years.
Henry J. Eyring
By the time I was eight, I was determined to attend the Harvard Business School. My father, then a professor at Stanford, had earned both an MBA and a doctorate in business administration from Harvard. I admired both schools but knew that Harvard was number one. So of course I wanted to go there.
[Grandpa] counseled me to major in physics and Dad told me that the Harvard Business School would like a science major. So, based on their counsel, I was all set with both an undergraduate and a graduate education plan: I would get a bachelor’s degree in physics and a Harvard MBA.
Brigham Young University accepted me, and I thrived in its student-friendly geology department. My grades were solid, and I got a good score on the GMAT, the standardized exam required by the top graduate business schools; in fact, on both of these dimensions, I looked better than the average student admitted by Harvard the year before. Everything seemed to be going according to plan.
But Harvard denied me.
That presented a huge problem. I wasn’t qualified to work as anything but a geologist. And, unfortunately, oil was selling for $8 a barrel, one-third of the price it had been at the time I started my geology degree program. No one was exploring for oil or gas, and even experienced geologists were being laid off. In that down market, a brand-new bachelor’s graduate in geology had little chance of getting the kind of job necessary to win admission to either Harvard or Stanford. My lifetime’s dream was dead. Worse, I felt unemployable.
More than twenty years later, I am happy to report that things worked out well. In fact, looking back, I see evidence of a kind providence leading me down an even better path than the one I had dreamed of from boyhood. Outstanding professors in both college and graduate school helped me gain valuable education and insight into the things that matter most. I’ve enjoyed a rewarding career that has included not only the intellectual challenges and financial rewards I had hoped for, but also deeper professional friendships and more time for family than I had imagined.