Grad's guide to graduate admissions essays - Colleen Reding 2015

Harvard business school
Business

How does pursuing an MBA support your choices above?

The time is now for me to pursue an MBA from HBS because the music industry urgently needs a change in its business model. I am seeking the fresh leadership perspectives and diverse management skills needed to provide creative and strategic direction to an industry that has relied upon gut instinct to sell music. By returning to a large record label and then perhaps starting my own, my goal is to use my leadership, artistic, and analytical abilities to improve the economics of the music business.

Tell us about something you did well.

When I first interned at Interscope Records, I quickly learned that its once foolproof methods of marketing music were no longer relevant in the rapidly digitizing landscape of music consumption. The company had access to exclusive and proprietary digital analytics such as Twitter mentions but it had no way of interpreting the data. Brooke Michael, Interscope’s SVP, learned that I graduated as a math major and one day asked me to explore patterns in some of our data dashboards. I immediately realized that this was an opportunity to shake things up at the label by using the digitization of music to our advantage rather than to our detriment.

That month, I spent many late nights working to establish a system that would allow us to study music consumption patterns on the Internet in a more sophisticated way. Since we spent the most money on creating and marketing music videos, I decided to track how music video releases impacted 10 different metrics for a set of 80 artists. Organizing the data this way revealed many findings, such as that the rate at which fans search for a video on YouTube is directly correlated to the rate at which fans stream the song on Spotify. My analysis showed us that digital data had the potential to unlock crucial information about our artists’ potential success rates in the market.

This exercise marked the first ever attempt to meaningfully navigate big data for the company. At the end of the summer, Brooke offered me a job to manage the data analysis process for product managers, brand partners, and even senior executives. The reporting system I created helped the Digital Department allocate a larger marketing budget to those artists whose videos were driving traffic to sales and also place a larger importance on Spotify since the data highlighted its value.

Over the past 2 years, I was promoted again to Senior Analyst and I now run the newly founded Analytics Group at the company. I have worked hard to train our team to use and expand upon the models I developed and as a result, we have been able to transform Interscope’s marketing spend, moving the label from a push strategy to a fan-centric pull strategy. I am proud to have significantly advanced the company’s efforts to sell music in a more relevant, effective, and cost-efficient way.

Tell us about something you wish you had done better.

In the spring of 2011, I created Washington, DC’s first all-women’s drumming festival called Rad Ladies That Drum. As a drummer, a gay woman, and a Women’s and Gender Studies minor, the event marked a coming of age for me. For the first time, I was able to use my music as a social enterprise by providing 110 women ages 9 to 67 with an exhilarating space to demonstrate their knowledge in jazz, gospel, batá, go-go, rock, and djembe drumming. My goals for the festival were to inspire more women to play, to dispel stereotypes about women’s drumming ability, and to empower women to seek out the toughest and most lucrative of gigs. Many people had tears in their eyes when we led the 600 audience members in a drum jam, concluding that soulful night in solidarity.

I originally thought that Rad Ladies That Drum would take place more regularly once I moved to LA. However, when attendees contacted me to ask if there were any future shows planned, I realized I had nowhere to point them. One of my deepest regrets is not giving direction to the momentum that had culminated with the festival. I was so passionate about the details of planning and curating the festival that I did not lay the groundwork for future leadership.

I have thought deeply about how starting something powerful without ensuring its continuity can make a movement seem inconsequential and even hopeless. I loved that festival so much but realized that one person’s vision alone is often not enough to sustain long-term change. Since my objective was to expand the presence of women in DC’s music community, I should have engaged fellow drummers in planning the festival with me so that Rad Ladies That Drum could continue to happen even in my absence. I realized that encouraging each individual to take a personal investment in the project would have allowed the complex planning process to belong to everyone and thus be more self-sustaining.

I am lucky to have learned this lesson so early in my career. As the first digital analyst hired at Interscope, I am working to build out an entire analytics department that will continue to advise digital strategy should I leave in the fall. Transitioning from an individual contributor to being an empowering teammate continues to be a cornerstone of my personal and professional endeavors today.