Growing up on a dairy farm in Iowa as one of 14 children, Brian Gross, MBA 08, had never heard of Boston Consulting Group. But he did learn a lot about problem solving, which may have led him to launch a 16-year BCG career.
“I spent my whole childhood watching my dad fix things all day,” he said at a recent Dean’s Speaker Series talk, co-sponsored by Q@Haas. “That’s all you do in farming. It’s in a very complex environment with tons of variables coming your way, most of which are out of your control, and you fix stuff and you make it work better. So that part I got.”
Gross, after interning at BCG while at Haas, went on to become chief operating officer of BCG’s North America region, leading operations, human resources, and business services teams for 1,800 employees.
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First in his family to go to college, Gross said his parents didn’t support his plans to attend university. After earning an undergraduate business degree, he said he never saw himself as “a kid who belonged at a top graduate school.” But after attending a Q@Haas outreach event he said he was drawn to the program’s inclusivity.
“When I got to Haas, I was largely a closeted professional,” he said. “It was such a jarring experience, frankly, to come to an admissions event because I was out and gay and was willing to show up. But I had never had an experience like that before. I always revealed drips of myself before. I tested the waters. I played it safe. I checked where I could be comfortable, but this was really the first place.”
Gross went on to work in talent acquisition and account management at BCG, eventually moving into logistics and supply chain management. Working in the firm’s San Francisco office, he found a passion for human resources and combining operations, people, and HR.
“Each of our interactions, internally and externally, is an extension of our brand and our culture of who we want to be as an organization,” he said. “So there is power in any functional path you choose—you don’t need to pick one. And there’s not one that I would say has more value than the other.”
Gross said that he has learned the most in his role by listening, learning, and adapting.
“One of the ways that I try to not pretend I know everything about the LGBTQ community is in our benefits administration, our plan design, and how I think about what people need,” he said. “I have a panel of people that represent different parts of the LGBTQ experience and they advise my team, who every year we sit down and think about our benefits and our strategy for benefits and how we support people.”
He said he’s also learned a great deal by sitting on BCG’s Racial Equity Taskforce and as a member of the company’s Pride Network.
“I sit in rooms where there’s underrepresentation,” he said. “I think I carry that with me, and I really think about who’s not here today and what would they be saying, what would they want in this conversation and I try to help us make the right decisions wearing those hats and using that input.”
Read more about Q@Haas, the organization for LGBTQ MBA students, partners, and allies at Berkeley Haas.
Read more about the Dean’s Speaker Series.