Security, Business School and ApplyYourself!

When I first heard about it (You have, haven’t you?), the rejection of all Harvard MBA Candidates who attempted (with success) to see their admission results early, seemed kind of boring and obvious. Then I began to think about it. Didn’t really seem to make sense at all. I admit to having forgotten about it over the last month or so. Today it came out that several other schools including Stanford had done the same and rejected to group who broke in.

That is a lot of powerful, up and comers to arbitrarily reject. In fact, unlike at Harvard, these applicants were asked to write letters justifying their actions. Having worked with, hired and yes fired, many MBA’s over the last 10 years, I have to say that this might be the best thing that could have possibly happened to them. I haven’t found that any of them have an edge at anything except being overly ambitious and ready to take advantage of their peers.

They tend to be highly intelligent. Incredibly ambitious. Not afraid of hard work. In addition, they tend to lack much in the way of common sense. Life has yet to catch them. Given 5 or 6 years on the street, these people become leaders. Some of them anyway. And they have a hard time discerning right from profit on a regular basis.

But in this case? As something of a web security expert (I once was in charge of systems that contained more than 700,000 credit card numbers.) I would have been intrigued by the possibility to find out about my results. More importantly though, I would have been curious about a system with huge holes. I would have been curious about the world. And I would have “manipulated” the url to gain access to my own account.

An obvious case of rejection could be made if the manipulation of results had occurred, but in this case the simple act of exploration has caused major upheaval to fragile lives. These people aren’t used to rejection. 20 seconds has changed their lives forever. I’m going to ignore that however.

What I haven’t seen in the news is the repercussions to ApplyYourself and individuals that chose them. The real culprit is the people at the Universities who chose ApplyYourself without properly auditing their systems. A case can be made that it is a fine line about rejecting or accepting these candidates, but if you land on the side of rejection, then out with the current admissions teams as well.

If we are going to get rid of the grey areas and flat out reject those individuals who let their natural curiosity get the best of them, then we have to translate EVERYTHING into black and white. Time to fire a LOT of people. Yes, lives will be ruined. Families will even lose their homes. BUT, fair is fair. No questions asked. The people who chose ApplyYourself must go. NOW!

I do so hate arbitrary!