MBA

Profiles

Rye Barcott, MBA/MPA 2009

If there is a theme to Rye Barcott's career to date, it has been his willingness to confront painful situations many of us would prefer to ignore. "I've always been interested in understanding ethnic violence and intervention," Rye says. With the blessings of the U.S. Marine Corps, who provided the scholarship for his education, Rye studied Swahili and, in his junior year at the University of North Carolina, took his new language skills to Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya, one of the largest slums in the world.

"I lived in a shack and formed friendships with the people around me," says Rye. "When you show a genuine interest in their lives, they open up and share their innovative ideas." One was simple yet brilliant: a community soccer league that could bring different ethnic groups together and promote leadership. "My fundamental premise is that the poor themselves have the solutions to the problems they face," Rye says. He returned to North Carolina to raise money, then came back to Kibera to launch the program, Carolina for Kibera. Today, the organization is thriving "under community leadership and the support of volunteers at UNC."

Building cross-sector partnerships

After a tour of duty in Iraq, Rye decided to pursue the joint MBA/MPA; the Harvard Kennedy School portion of tuition is covered by Rye's Reynolds Social Entrepreneurship Fellowship. "I've seen tremendous inefficiencies in large organizations," Rye says. "I came to Harvard to find news of thinking about leading complex organizations. How can business principles be applied to improve government agencies and nonprofits? Where are the productive intersections? How can they be leveraged for the most good?"

"The power of the case method," says Rye, "is that it builds a growing intuition about solving business problems that we can later draw upon to make more informed decisions. Every week I get new nuggets of insight. I'm most impressed by cases that address the issue of businesses creating more value for society – and doing so in a sustainable way."

Innovation for solving problems

Sustainability is at the core of Rye's upcoming summer internship with Amyris, a "green tech" alternative energy company in California. "They started as a nonprofit to create a more effective anti-malarial medication," Rye says. "But they discovered that their synthetic biology processes could be used to create fuels. Now they are a for-profit energy company with a nonprofit subsidiary that makes anti-malarial drugs. It's the perfect intersection of government, nonprofit and for-profit collaboration." With the experience Rye gains at Amyris and through his joint degree, he hopes to pursue a post-MBA career "in alternative energy or in a clean technology industry."