The Fishbowl MBA

There is something very powerful and lasting about initial impressions. The first impression you get of a person can often stay with you for a long time.

For that reason, it is perhaps not so strange that in the first few weeks of the MBA, a lot of us practised the art of impression management, trying to make a good impression on each other from the beginning. For most of us, this translated into an increased awareness of our appearance on others, and perhaps a tendency to be less spontaneous. This is probably as natural as it is unavoidable.

But in several instances, it degenerated into blatant self-promotion. We would be sitting in a small group of people, enjoying the sun and chatting about nothing, taking the first cautious steps towards getting to know each other. And then, it would come from somebody with all the subtlety of a pig on ice: “Yeah, I really like this city. I also got accepted at INSEAD and London Business School, but the weather here is much nicer, right?” Smooth, buddy, smooth; we almost didn’t notice your namedropping there. Others would consistently try to steer the conversation in the direction of the GMAT, desperately hoping for an opportunity to tell people about their 770 point score. In one extreme case, I even met a guy who mentioned his high GMAT score as part of his general self-introduction routine. Needless to say, this said a lot more about him than he may have wished for.

Impression management goes on whenever people meet each other for the first time. But it somehow seemed worse in the MBA. I think there is a bit of a vicious circle going on. You know that your fellow students are supposed to be really clever people; the schools, doing their own bit of impression management, do nothing but trumpet that only the best and the brightest are allowed access to the sacred grounds of their campus. You are concerned that people will think you are not as bright as them, so you start, well, bluffing a bit. This in turn makes your listeners feel insecure, so now they start bluffing a bit as well, and before you know it, everybody walks around in a constant state of anxiety, feeling like impostors about to be defrauded.

To make it worse, those illustrious stories you wrote about yourself in the MBA application essays can suddenly take on a life of their own. Perhaps you told the school that you founded a company, when in reality you only co-founded it together with four other people. Perhaps that flashy external consulting project you wrote about was really more of a six-week unpaid student internship. And perhaps that ’100 percent growth in sales’ you effected happened mostly when your mother convinced your father to buy something from you as well. But when your fellow students ask about your past endeavours, you don’t immediately share the down-to-earth version. Instead, you try to live up to your application essays, presenting yourself as that really amazing and mostly fictional person you managed to sell to the school. And so it happens that five minutes into your first meeting with your future friends, you start lying to them.

In our case, what broke this dismal spell of bluffing and counterbluffing was people like John Smithson. Formerly a captain in the British Army, John was a completely down-to-earth guy, a Scotsman with an easy laugh and a refreshingly self-deprecating manner. He didn’t give a damn about impression management. He would happily say to people that he was clueless about something. He joked about not being sure why they let him in, considering that his greatest accomplishment was the semi-illegal beer distribution network he set up while doing a tour of duty in Iraq. During the first weeks in the MBA, the relaxed openness of John and a few others like him was the welcome needle of relief that burst the balloon of ever-inflating impression management. It shone light on an essential truth: that ignorance was okay, that we were here because we didn’t know everything. After all, why go to business school if you know it all already?

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In essence: don’t bluff, and don’t be afraid to share some of your weaknesses as well as your success stories. Go get drunk in small groups, and suggest, after a few beers, that you swap stories about the worst blunders you have made. It all helps counter the effects of excessive impression management.

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