He says watching her fight while still devoting her energy to her high-end textile company inspired and challenged him. He too wanted to be so passionate about his work.
"I felt like I was leaving a legacy I couldn't believe in," Albion says.
In surveying his students at HBS, he says he found that an overwhelming majority of them wanted to learn how to make money more than anything else.
He had no trouble understanding their sentiments--his own life's question then, he says, was, "'How can I be a Marxist and still own a Jacuzzi?'"
Yet he was a dissatisfied with teaching graduate students, and he thirsted for the kind of passion in his own life that his mother had.
As he talked to his colleagues about his grief over his mother's illness and his dissatisfaction with his work, he says he found that many of them shared his doubts about the meaningfulness of their work at HBS.
In 1988, Albion made the decision to leave Harvard, his eyes opened by his mother's illness and those doubts that his colleagues had confirmed.
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