Take A Tip From George Soros In Your B-School ‘Setback’ Essay

The setback-failure-weakness essay is commonly asked for in MBA Admissions because it is a test of an applicant’s maturity, self-knowledge, honesty, and ability to learn from mistakes.

It is, in other words, the biggest indicator of real leadership ability and potential.

Sample questions that approach this topic are:

Tuck-Dartmouth (Essay 3): Describe a circumstance in your life in which you faced adversity, failure, or setback. What actions did you take as a result and what did you learn from this experience?

Harvard Business School (Essay 2): Tell us three setbacks you have faced?

INSEAD (Essay 3): Describe a situation taken from your personal or professional life where you failed. Discuss what you learned.

Judge Cambridge (essay 2): What did you learn from your most spectacular failure?

MBA applicants often struggle with these essays because they feel that admitting a weaknesses or sharing a time when they failed erodes their candidacy. In fact, it does just the opposite. Leaders know their weaknesses, and can admit them to themselves and others — in order to work on them, or work around them. It shows self-insight and points to seniority.

No one is comfortable talking about their weak spots and failure. But nobody is perfect or has not failed. Not Bill Gates, not Richard Branson, not me, nor you, nor the admissions officer.

So it is not admitting a weakness is what will get you dinged, because it’s like waving red beacon that betrays inexperience and a junior mindset. If you “have no weaknesses” that just tells Adcom that you don’t know what they are yet or that you’re too immature to face them. It says you don’t know yourself, therefore you don’t yet know where you will mess up. You are a liability to yourself and your company.

Take a tip from George Soros, self-made billionaire, philosopher, philanthropist, social reformer, and fund manager extraordinaire – famous for “breaking the Bank (of England)” by shorting the pound sterling in 1992 – who shares this candid account of his weaknesses:

“I’m a very bad judge of character. I’m a good judge of stocks, and I have a reasonably good perspective on history. But I am, really, quite awful in judging character, and so I’ve made many mistakes. It took me five years and a lot of painful experiences to find the right management team. I am please that finally I found it, but I cannot claim to be as successful in picking a team as I have been in actually managing money. I think that I’m very good as a senior partner, or boss, because I have a lot of sympathy for the difficulties that fund managers face. When they are in trouble I can give them a lot of support, and that, I think, has contributed toward creating a good atmosphere in the firm. But I’m not so good at choosing them.” – ‘Soros on Soros: Staying Ahead of the Curve,’ Wiley & Sons, NY, 1995, p.18

See, the greatest business leaders all have weaknesses and all have made significant mistakes in their careers and their lives. The point is not to prove that you don’t fail, or won’t fail. It is to prove that you have the insight into yourself to be able to recognize and compensate for your weaknesses.

What Adcom wants to know is not how you avoided failure, but how you managed it, what you learned, what insights into yourself you gained, and how you grew from there. They want to see that you have the will and the insight to locate and understand the source of your mess up – the underlying weaknesses that caused it – and that you have the maturity to face and work on the issue.

To summarize: the setback essay is not testing to see if you have weaknesses. We all do. It is a test of your self-knowledge and maturity. The committee wants to see if you can candidly face, discuss, and work on your flaws, or if you will you try to hide them or blame circumstances or other people. This is a significant test of your readiness for senior leadership.

A note on tone:

Soros is candid, straightforward, and objective in his self-analysis. He shares measured self-insight with the reader. He doesn’t try to slip in softening or deflecting phrases, or hide behind humor; nor is he self-excusing or whining and looking to blame others – the hallmarks of a too-junior applicant.

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George Lucas Infuriates Fans By Making Even More Changes To Star Wars On Blu-Ray

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With breaking news that an updated version of the original Star Wars trilogy will be released on Blu-ray for the first time September 16th, fans of the series can expect more of the same -- which is to say -- something different.

Once again, Star Wars creator George Lucas is taking advantage of the change in medium to alter the content of his films. This time, the adjustments to the movie include giving puppet Yoda a CGI makeover, CGI Ewok eyes, and the climactic scene in the series' finale -- which now features a few added "No!" exclamations by Darth Vadar, to mirror his outbursts in the more recent prequel, Revenge of the Sith.

Though profits from the release should be huge, hardcore fans are boycotting the new version, citing Lucas' ability to "squeeze more cash out of a film franchise... and he’s at it again." Also, they really hate that he changes the movies they like.

The scene with Darth Vader that rang the fan boy alarm can be seen below [Spoiler alert, we suppose].

Again, this isn't the first time Lucas added and subtracted from his own beloved work, in an attempt to either complete his vision or to put out something else the public will undoubtedly buy. All this is put into even more startling relief by this excerpt, now used by upset fans as an example of great hypocrisy, from a 1988 Congressional testimony by Lucas, where he stated his views on artistic alteration of his favorite films -- which admittedly sounds an awful lot like an indictment of his 2011 self:

“These current defacements are just the beginning. Today, engineers with their computers can add color to black-and-white movies, change the soundtrack, speed up the pace, and add or subtract material to the philosophical tastes of the copyright holder. Tomorrow, more advanced technology will be able to replace actors with ‘fresher faces,’ or alter dialogue and change the movement of the actor’s lips to match. It will soon be possible to create a new ‘original’ negative with whatever changes or alterations the copyright holder of the moment desires….

In the future it will become even easier for old negatives to become lost and be ‘replaced’ by new altered negatives. This would be a great loss to our society. Our cultural history must not be allowed to be rewritten…. Attention should be paid to the interest of those who are yet unborn, who should be able to see this generation as it saw itself, and the past generation as it saw itself.” (via Save Star Wars)

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UBS's George Magnus: Here Are 5 Ways To Fix Near Record High Income Inequality

George Magnus, a senior economic adviser at UBS Investment Bank, says we're facing a crisis in capitalism and policymakers should read up on Karl Marx for dealing with it, he wrote in an Op-Ed for Bloomberg.

Magnus writes that as companies pursue greater profits and productivity, they are trimming their workforces. (Notice how his own firm, UBS, announced last week it was cutting 3,500 jobs as part of cost-cutting efforts.)

This has created a crisis -- U.S. income inequality is now close to its highest level since the 1920s.

To address the crisis, "policy makers have to place jobs at the top of the economic agenda, and consider other unorthodox measures." 

Here's five things he says policymakers should do:

1. Cut employer payroll taxes and create fiscal incentives to encourage companies to hire people.

2.  Allow for eligible households to restructure mortgage debt, or swap some debt forgiveness with future payments to lenders.

3. Well-capitalized and well-structured banks should be allowed some temporary capital adequacy relief to try to get new credit flowing, especially to smaller companies.

4. In dealing with the euro zone debt crisis, European creditors should extend the lower interest rates and longer payment terms recently proposed for Greece.

5.  Instead of using just bond-buying programs to defend against deflation and stagnation, central banks should target a growth rate of nominal economic output.

Read the full Op-Ed here >>

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