The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change (11 page)

*  *  *

The following day I flew back to New York City. We had a week to go before our masquerade fundraiser, and Mimi and the crew were finalizing logistics. We had chosen to do a party that gave everyone a chance to wear formal attire because at the time young professionals were rarely able to attend formal nonprofit events since the ticket prices were usually set too high for them to afford.

As one of the first nonprofits to exclusively advertise through Facebook and promote our event through a YouTube video, we were able to sell tickets for much less than the norm. Mimi secured liquor sponsors too, drastically reducing our costs. It worked: we sold over six hundred tickets to the event. Since our entire staff was made up of volunteers, after covering minimal costs we netted more than $20,000 that night.

By the end of the year, we had secured even more donations from people who’d learned about our approach and wanted to support us. In just three months since opening the bank account with $25, we had raised about $35,000 from more than a thousand donors. PoP didn’t feel like a personal project anymore, it felt like a movement.

The difference between a lunatic and a leader is that only one of them has others who join in his or her pursuit. As much as I held the original vision of Pencils of Promise, my friends’ support at that first Halloween party gave it legs. It was Mimi’s pouring her heart into the masquerade, Dori and TC’s introducing me to the Luang Prabang education ministry, and Richard’s hopping on that flight to Laos that enabled the organization to move forward when others said it couldn’t be done. Our culture glorifies founders and CEOs far too often, when in fact the early adopters and evangelists are actually the ones who make a company’s success possible.

In the early days, we were a ragtag group with one common thread: belief in the impossible. We wanted to break the rules that others put in front of us and bring about a better world than the one we’d inherited. Through teamwork and dedication to a shared vision that we all collectively molded into reality, PoP was just a few months away from creating its very first school.

But just when I felt most confident, I’d failed to register that I was on the verge of getting fired from my job, and everything we’d worked so hard to create could all fall apart.

I
rang in the New Year basking in the glow of the uplifting experience in Laos and our fundraising successes, but it soon became clear that everything in New York was crashing around me. Companies were laying off employees in droves, the unemployed were futilely looking for jobs, and businesses were folding at an alarming rate. In this tumultuous climate, Bain called all of the third-year consultants in for a big meeting. Despite a lot of buzz about what was happening, none of us knew what to expect.

The partners sat us down in a large conference room on the twenty-fifth floor and told us they wanted to talk about potential changes in the externship. I had been counting down the days until I could get back to Laos, and I had been planning and strategizing my company-sanctioned trip with military precision. Now I worried it was all in peril.

We circled around a table with our staff manager, Rebecca. I sat biting my nails. Rebecca stared at us seriously.

“While the externship is usually six months, we are now allowing you to leave for nine months, if you’d like,” she announced.

I felt flushed with relief. The policy change, Rebecca explained, helped Bain to reduce the number of people it had on the payroll without laying anyone off. Employees on externship would not receive a salary from Bain, but they would get health care and would have a job to come back to.

Maybe this wasn’t fantastic news for the company, but this was fantastic news for me. I was used to living as a backpacker and subsisting on a tight budget. That skill, plus the savings I had accumulated from previous jobs, would allow me to forgo a salary while on leave. I followed Rebecca back to her office. “Where do I sign? I’m happy to go for nine months,” I said.

I was in my second year at Bain and knew that if someone wasn’t on an active case, they only had to come to work if they were called in. We referred to this as being “on the beach.” I also knew that client work basically shut down for two weeks during Christmas and New Year’s, so if you were on the beach going into that period, you basically received an extra few weeks of paid vacation. This meant that if my return date was in mid-December, I would most likely remain unstaffed until early January. I counted back nine months from that date, which landed me in mid-March. To make this work I would have to leave for my externship on March 17.

I had just a few months to prepare. It would be an absolute sprint.

*  *  *

To be eligible for an externship you had to be promoted to senior associate consultant (SAC), which most of my class expected to achieve. When I pitched the Bain management team my externship
idea, they told me they didn’t typically sanction entrepreneurial ventures. I knew that the only one who had the authority to change this was James, the New York office head. Although most of my peers were intimidated by James, I had connected with him over music. During our annual charity auction I had offered to make a monthly music mix for the highest bidder, and James bought the item. Each month I met with him to discuss his music tastes, and I’d make him a mix that both catered to his likes and introduced him to the latest tracks I had pumping through my own headphones. Our musical bond greased the wheels, and when I asked him to break precedent and let me pursue PoP during my leave, he said yes.

While the Bain leadership team agreed to let me work on PoP during my leave, the externship program still required employees to work at an existing organization. I couldn’t work for PoP if it wasn’t yet off the ground. Since I was committed to leaving by mid-March, I only had about five months from the moment that first bank deposit was made to get it up and running. Entrepreneurs often give up fifty-hour-per-week jobs to take on one-hundred-hour-per-week jobs, and I was trying to balance both. Although I thought I could take on absolutely anything, in time one of my two jobs started to suffer.

*  *  *

I decided to throw one last party before I went back to Laos in an effort to gather friends, raise more funds for the organization, and get rid of the insane amount of booze left over from the masquerade party. We’d overestimated how much we’d needed by a landslide, and I had 144 bottles of vodka sitting on the balcony of my apartment. After a friend came over and saw the sixty cases of leftover Coors Light stacked in my bedroom, he jokingly asked, “Is there something you need to tell me?”

I figured an open-bar Valentine’s Day party would be a productive way to unload my stockpile. This could raise money for PoP, introduce more people to the organization, and let me reclaim some square footage in my bedroom. I found a loft for the event and set the ticket price at $40 for an all-night open bar.

At the same time, work was heating up. I was staffed on an important pitch for a postmerger integration (PMI) between two well-known banks. The project assigned me to a new manager, Prescott, who had been at Bain since he’d graduated college. He wore salmon-colored pants and was the only person I’d ever seen at the company who wrote notes on fancy, monogrammed stationery.

The project was a high-level finance pitch, and Prescott would be considered for partner if Bain could win it. As a result I was often working late, never knowing what was to come next. On the day of the Valentine’s party, I was hoping to leave work at a normal hour so I could set up for the party downtown. Toward the end of the day, Prescott requested that I create a new slide, one that he referred to as our “million-dollar slide.” In Bain speak, this meant it was the most important one in the presentation, the one that would win the client over. It was one slide but an enormous undertaking; the data required to make it was hidden within thousands of pages of annual reports and filings. Even if I could find the right numbers, I was worried that I didn’t have the financial knowledge to create the ratios required to produce the graph needed for the slide.

I was scrambling to get the assignment done quickly, but by 8:00 p.m. I hadn’t finished. All of the drinks, speakers, and party decorations were at my apartment. So were my friends Tich, Gabe, and Dan, who were helping organize everything for the 9:00 p.m. start.

My phone was blowing up.

“Where are you?” asked Tich.

150 people are coming and everything is locked at your place,
texted Gabe.

I finished up feverishly, grabbing the best numbers I could find from the company reports. Just as I thought I could get out the door, Prescott called me to meet him in his office. “I need a lot more on this,” he said. “You’ll have to stay until midnight.”

“I can’t do that,” I said.

“You need to finish this slide with numbers on a few more companies, and I need to see an Excel model to back up all the data used with sources cited.”

I spent the next forty-five minutes riffling through reports while entering data as fast as I could. I didn’t do a thorough job, but I sent it in, explained that I had an event to get to, and ran into the crowded Times Square subway station to head downtown.

I was a sweaty mess by the time I got to my apartment, but arrived in time to help Tich and Dan load the drinks into big rolling garbage cans. We packed up the speakers and supplies into a rented van and sped to the loft.

We didn’t arrive until 10:00 p.m., but we still beat most of the crowd. I got a lot of
Where the hell have you been?
glances from the others who helped organize the event, but otherwise everything went off without a hitch. We sold out and raised over $10,000. It was a success. Crisis averted. Almost.

*  *  *

Back at work on Monday morning, I met a different fate. At 9:00 a.m. I got an email from Prescott calling me into his office.

“The data you sent me was wrong. We would have lost the case if I put this through. I stayed in the office past midnight doing the research myself to cover for your mistakes.”

It was bad, but it soon got worse.

“This is some of the worst work I have ever seen. This shows me you are not capable of promotion. I can’t recommend you as an SAC. I’ll be recommending that you do not get promoted based on my experience with you.”

I had only been working with this manager for three weeks, and he was about to ruin my career. I was furious. Whereas other managers had seen me do mistake-free work for months, this guy had only seen me at my worst. Now, everything I wanted, everything I was working so hard for, was in jeopardy.

Later that day, my staff manager, Rebecca, called me into her office. “Prescott told me that he can’t recommend you get promoted to SAC, which would mean you can’t go on externship. He also doesn’t want you on his case anymore, so you’re getting a new assignment with a new manager. You’ll have five weeks to prove yourself, otherwise you won’t just be out of an externship, you’ll be out of a job.”

She assigned me to a new internal project, an evaluation of the candidates Bain interviews and hires. They asked me to review all of the data, looking at employees’ SAT scores, college grades, and how they performed once they were hired, tasking me to make correlations to find what type of person is most successful at the company. I was given a new manager, Katie, and was told, “Hopefully this thing that happened with Prescott was just a misstep. Prove to me that it was just a onetime occurrence.” I had a second chance.

Fortunately, Katie and I got along great, and after slicing the data we discovered that the best consultants aren’t those with a 4.0 GPA. The workplace is never perfect, so it made sense that those who were high achievers but not perfectionists could best cope with a constantly changing environment. In a matter of weeks we produced hundreds of slides for the recruiting teams. I was as
stressed as I’d ever been, but when I met with Rebecca for my final review, she told me I’d been cleared for promotion and could leave on my externship.

I exhaled a huge sigh of relief. I’d learned a valuable lesson. It’s in the moments when you feel most confident that you are most likely to fall flat on your face. I had taken my job at Bain for granted, assuming that I could coast into the next phase based solely on my previous accomplishments. In truth we re-create our reputation every day. Journalists with thirty years of credibility have washed their careers down the drain with one plagiarized paragraph. I had soiled months of good work with one lazy night. We each bear responsibility to prove ourselves day in and day out and have no one to blame but ourselves for the outcome. As much as I resented Prescott at the time, I later realized my three weeks with him were some of the most beneficial of my entire career. He put me in my place when it was necessary. We learn far more from our mistakes than we do from our successes, and although it nearly cost me my job and my best opportunity to start PoP, he was right to demand nothing short of excellence. I would never make the same mistakes again.