Crafting Your Life
Course Number 2077
Professor Leslie Perlow
Fall; Q1Q2; 3 credits
13 two hours sessions
Paper (Individual)
Enrollment limited to 40 students
Educational Objectives
Crafting Your Life is a new EC course offered by the Harvard Business School - for the first time in HBS history, this is a class created primarily by EC students, for EC students. In many of their own words, this is the course that they designed because they “wish it had been available to them” as EC students.In our “always-on” culture, in which personal and professional fulfillment grow ever-more elusive (as illuminated by an HBS alum in this recent New York Times piece), many students are inspired each year to ask themselves how they can approach their inevitably busy lives after HBS with more intention. Taught by Senior Associate Dean and Professor of Leadership in the Organizational Behavior Unit Leslie A. Perlow, this course is meant explore this question, as well as to build on the conversation first sparked by cases such as “Profiles of the Class of 1976” in the RC LEAD curriculum.
Fundamentally, Crafting Your Life is a tactical course about You. It is about discovering what really matters to you. It is about how you can stay true to yourself as you navigate not only your career, but also the breadth of your lives, from your connections with others to your impact on the world. It is about preparing and equipping you to better handle the choices, surprises, and tradeoffs you will inevitably face in your early years post-MBA.
Crafting Your Life focuses on new, innovative forms of teaching - using few cases and many exercises, workshops, tools, and a simulation and app being developed specifically for the course. The course relies heavily on leveraging HBS alumni to learn from their real-world experiences in the decades following their own HBS graduation. There will be multiple forums in which you can interact with alumni directly: at alumni reunions in small groups, through HBS Online case discussions, in panels, as well as in 1:1 conversations.
The course strives to help you to think deeply and intentionally about the following tactical questions:
- What are your values, interests, expectations, and strengths?
- What does living a fulfilling life mean to you? What role will happiness, meaningfulness, and impact contribute to your life? How will you prioritize and cultivate each of these in your post-MBA life?
- How do you use time in your day-to-day life? How would you ideally like to use your time, and how can you get there?
- How do you manage work-life tensions and tradeoffs? How do you think about competing demands between family and career?
- How do you develop relationships to help sustain you - both at work and in life?
- How do you take care of yourself? How might you improve your self-care?
- How do you build resilience?
- How do you create and change habits to keep you learning, growing, and staying true to your values and priorities?
This course is not about creating a rigid 10-year plan. It is instead about getting to know yourself so that you can be better prepared to more thoughtfully and confidently navigate the choices, tradeoffs, and surprises that will inevitably present themselves in your first decade post-MBA.