(Boston) Researchers at Kutztown State’s Institute for MBA Reunions released a shocking new study on Saturday indicating that, contrary to what is taught in the “Profiles of the Class of 1976″ LEAD case at Harvard Business School, only people who’ve been unsuccessful in their business careers will actually talk about their families at an HBS reunion.”
According to Institute Vice Chairman Niall Rosen, “We have found that at an HBS reunion, if you are CEO of a Fortune 500 company, you are going to talk about the fact that you are a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, not about how proud you are of your daughter’s third-place finish in the Robert Mapplethorpe Elementary School spelling bee.”
“The reality is, if you’re a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, you probably didn’t know your daughter was in the spelling bee in the first place. In the second place, there’s a good chance that you forgot you even had a daughter.”
Rosen first got the idea for the study when he attended his tenth HBS reunion in 2000. “Given that I was a researcher at Kutztown State, and not some dot com CEO, I found myself talking to people in my old study group about my dog and my wife and my son’s first words. Their response was ‘You’re married? You have a kid? I didn’t know that. You never mentioned it in your email to our section listserv about the B2C Venture Fund you started in 1999. How’s that going?'”
Dean Clark’s office responded favorably to the study. “We will now pay a lot of attention to what people are talking about at their reunions. It will help us focus our shakedown, I mean, fundraising efforts.”
