Glittering the Halls of Wharton

So alternate headlines for this piece include: “Adventures on the Death Star” or “Stripping Your Way through Wharton.” Let me explain. 

Inside the University of Pennsylvania sits a bastion of high achievement and cutting edge privilege thought, Huntsman Hall, which houses the Wharton Business School. It is affectionately nicknamed the Death Star, and exists as an architecturally modern contrast to the ivy-covered limestone and brick walls of the majority of Penn’s buildings. Inside, the atmosphere ranges from academically nondescript — think LED lighting, white boards, beige walls — to the grandiosity of the megachurch-like central lounge area with a two-story promenade staircase dividing the brick- and wood-clad walls. The ceilings are as lofty as the career prospects of the MBA students within. I’ve been in subway stations that were more compelling.

For some reason, the world’s best program dedicated to positive psychology holds their classes there. Every weekend during on-sites, we wellbeing students shared space with Wharton weekend warriors, which is to say, all of them. At once blasé and anxious, they gave off the exact vibe of teenage smokers of old, huddled behind the high school — desperately interested in looking completely badass while simultaneously radiating insecurity. For those of us who coach or were interested in furthering wellbeing in the working world, it was hard to not consider that this was the population we would be working with shortly. We were learning how self-harm in teens, women and girls had increased sharply since the advent of social media in 2009; they were developing investment and marketing scenarios for shiny new tech. The contrast was palpable. I had a certain feeling of dread within those walls, and I wondered how many Wharton students felt the same way. 

So I decided to send up a flare of wellbeing, and insert a bit of incongruous and dissonant joy into those hallowed halls, a hail Mary of absurdity: I sprinkled glitter into the carpet. Not enough to cause any undue stress on the janitorial staff, but enough to be noticed. A tiny, Shawshank Redemption-type amount. 

Now, those of you with a taste for the crafty or with young children know that glitter is the most insidious substance on the face of the earth. It is impossible to clean up. Once in a textile it will remain noticeable through repeated vacuuming and washing. I chose glitter for precisely this reason! There are now classrooms and study pods at Wharton that will never not be subtly glittery, and hopefully this will give the denizens within pause to stop, reflect, and possibly freak out: Why is this here? Who could possibly be using glitter in a project? Aren’t we all using Powerpoint? Did someone get extra credit for something? This is Wharton for fuck’s sake! Did the rest of my cohort go to a strip club? Is this why I am always doing the lion’s share of the project work? Is this how Bennett is paying for his tuition???

What I was trying to do with the glitter is to spark joy, yes, but also to offer an off-ramp from typical thinking. We can get very busy in our definitions of ourselves, our narratives for different situations, and these thoughts can be easily misconstrued for facts. Said with enough authority, and with the right education or experience backing it up, these narratives become facts that fossilize into culture. 

I was recently coaching a young executive who was describing all of the things that she urgently needed to learn, expertise she needed to exhibit to her staff. I stopped for a moment and told her I was taking off my coaching hat, which is code for: I am about to drop bombs of expertise, client, that I think you need more than you may actually need. (Inside baseball for non-coaches: It is a fine line between going with your gut and sharing your expertise, and subsequently running the risk of imposing your agenda on the client. It is generally frowned upon in this establishment but I did it anyway. Please don’t call the ICF.) Anyway, I stopped and told her that in my experience, the questions you ask of others are much more important than the expertise you have to offer — meaning, make an effort to share what you don’t know, rather than what you do. Otherwise, you are much busier imposing your narrative on any given situation than collecting information from others, increasing their value and agency.

I have friends who coach the executives who run companies in the world’s biggest cities. These executives have their names embedded into their logos, lit for all to see some 20 stories in the air. Do you want to know what my friends say the throughline issue is for all of them? They’re afraid that someone will find out they have no idea what they’re doing. What if early on, they were concerned with asking questions instead of posing as omniscient? What if they actually asked their cohort to go to the strip club, instead of acting haughty about who did what, when? Who will someday be the better leader? How sad to think the seeds for this kind of lack of vulnerability and fear were planted already in grad school.

Which brings us back to the Death Star. Outside of my sanctimonious glitter distribution, I had my own posturing to contend with. I wish I had spent less time in a Hermione Granger-esque trance and spent more time with the humans in the program, instead of the research. I wish I had asked more questions of my classmates instead of …posing as, if not omniscient, then at least belonging in those ivy-covered walls. 

The wellbeing lesson is: human connection beats human knowledge every time. It wins out in our job searches, in our promotions, in our monetary transactions, in our personal partnerships. I have never regretted going with a colleague or a vendor I connected with versus one who knew more, but I have endured plenty of smarter-than-thou assholes. I have never felt great about admitting I am struggling, but I have known the pain of struggling in silence while being in way over my head and maintaining “face.” 

I recently attended a funeral for a beloved gentleman who took his own life. His struggles were made public at the funeral, an act of generosity and compassion by his family to not hide, to not cover up his struggle. With their disclosure, you could feel the atmosphere in the packed church tensing, and then releasing, armor dissipating into the air like frankincense. We left closer to one another, protected for a minute from the brutality of the world. Raw, but also somehow healed. 

In this season of relentless messaging about renewing yourself, dare to do something truly new: expose that place in your life that you don’t want anyone to see. Connect through questions.Talk about what you don’t know. Ask for help! Be known for your curiosity and your compassion, a very powerful combination. As Brené Brown says: "We think we are cognitive beings who occasionally feel. We are not. We are feeling beings who on occasion think."