Lesson 38: Hope

Remember The Titans is a movie based on the 1971 T.C. Williams High School football team. This school was recently integrated, but the players on the team literally fought each other because of the racial tension. Coach Herman Boone instills hope in his team during their training camp by uniting them around a common goal. They become a great team because of their shared ambition, and their refusal to let history divide them. This movie reminds me that building a great team is the first step to finding hope in the middle of a storm.

I have never made it out of a storm by working alone. However, ETA has a reputation for being a lonely journey. Through this journey, I have found teammates willing to join me, such as my classmates Courtney, Pieter, and Serge. Together, we formed a team for Chicago Booth’s Water Street Private Equity Case Challenge. The competition required participants to pick a publicly traded company for acquisition. 

Since one of the leaders in professional education is Adtalem Global Education, I proposed our team should acquire them. They are a publicly traded company and the leading provider of professional education training for the healthcare industry. For the last 38 weeks, I have been writing about buying education companies, so I hoped my teammates would get as excited about Adtalem as I was. Thankfully, we voted and picked Adtalem.

To learn more about the company, we read their 10-K’s and investor presentations. Our problem was trying to find someone at the company willing to speak with 4 students. Thankfully, Pieter found out the CFO, Robert Phelan, and the Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer, Evan Trent, were both Booth graduates. They accepted our request for a call. 

Having a team join my excitement for Adtalem and seeing these executives offer their time reminded me how you can unite people around a common goal. Although this group did not face high tensions like in the movie Remember The Titans, we found a common goal that crystalized our hope in the work we were doing. Without a shared goal, Coach Boone’s team would have destroyed their hopes of winning. Likewise, building buy-in across the team was essential to executing on our plan for the case competition.

My mission is to increase representation for Black leaders at the executive, investor, and board level. Building a great team will not only instill hope but also drive success as a CEO, investor, and board member.

Hope is Lesson 37. Next week, I will share Lesson 38: Potential.