Give Yourself Sound Career Advice Says Ellis of Bain & Co.
February 2008
STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS —As a young Business School graduate Stephen Ellis founded his own company, a career path sought after by many of his fellow graduates in the MBA class of 1990.
Slowly it dawned on him that his new entrepreneurial career wasn’t really inspiring him. Ellis, who today is worldwide managing director of Boston-based management consulting firm Bain & Co., realized he would be happier in a more traditional corporate setting.
Ellis, who joined Bain in 1993 and has been in his current post since 2005, often gets the question: “What are you going to do next?”
“My simple response to that is: I think I have one of the best jobs in the world and I couldn’t imagine doing anything other than this for as long as my partners will have me in this role,” said Ellis during a View from the Top speech January 31—part of a student-run lecture series that brings leaders from business, government, and the social sector to campus to share their views on leadership.
Ellis challenged students in the audience to change the way they think about their own career plans. “Where do you want to go? What do you want to accomplish? What’s in your future? I think those are all legitimate and important questions,” he said. “But I would argue they are the wrong place to start. I think it’s absolutely essential that you begin with a clear understanding of what your strengths are, what motivates you, what really ignites your passion as individuals.”
Ellis said when he entered the Business School in 1988, he outlined his game plan in his admission application. To plenty of laughter from the audience, he pulled a copy of that letter from his jacket pocket and read a few lines: “I know from my own experience that I have grown the most when working under people who know how to lead and inspire individual teams and large organizations. My aspiration is to earn a leadership position in the business world that allows me to do the same.”
He took a summer job at Salomon Brothers in New York after his first year. But Ellis said his next professional move was shaped by second year Business School electives in venture capital, entrepreneurship, and small business management. Another career influence was “a lot of hype that was going on around campus with respect to startups—and, frankly, a little bit of peer pressure.”
Instead of a corporate post he cofounded Focus, a consulting firm after graduation.
“As I was struggling as an entrepreneur, and frankly an only modestly successful one, one of the things I realized was I wasn’t really in my zone,” Ellis said. “I didn’t feel like what I was doing was really inspiring me and generating a sense of passion. In some respects, it actually felt like I was running in the sand. You know how that feels? You’re making progress, but you’re doing so with twice the effort and half the pace.”
Ellis learned a valuable lesson: Running a startup wasn’t for him. Despite valuable lessons that he says he carries with him today, Ellis said he realized “I really did want to go to work for a large organization where I could work for the best, where I could work alongside great leaders and hopefully someday earn the right to lead a high-performance team.”
While Bain has had numerous successes, the company also has learned from corporate missteps. Ellis said the company’s internet business incubator, bainlab(cq), and venture services firm eVolution Global Partners come to mind as “dismal failures.”
But both ventures evolved into several new business pilots that Bain is running today, Ellis said. “We’ve learned over the years that it’s the failures that teach more often times than our successes.”
—Michele Chandler