Finley Harckham, EWMBA ‘22 - Shaping Policy Through Business and Leveraging the Haas Community

Episode #35: In the 35th episode of OneHaas, co-hosts Sean and Ray talk to current EWMBA student Finley Harckham (‘22). They discuss his background & interest in policymaking, commuting to Berkeley from LA, and making the most of the Haas community’s knowledge and expertise.

Episode Highlights:

• Finley grew up in Greenwich, CT, and had initial interest in public policy, working on a Congressional campaign immediately out of college.
• Later, Finley interned for Ecologic Solutions, a startup making ecologically-friendly cleaning products. He started in Sales and Service, became an account manager, and eventually moved into business development.
• Now Finley is a manager at Compass, a startup real estate technology company. He has been able to apply several learnings from classes at Haas in his current role. 
• Finley makes the most out of his commute by working half-day Fridays and turning LAX into his remote office for a few hours instead of rushing in LA traffic.
• Finley believes policy challenges the status quo by tackling larger problems and continuing to make things better around us
• Instead of trying to solve the problem of the influence that money and business have on politics, Finley thought he would try to influence businesses for the greater good so they influence politics in a better way.
• Finley attended the BERC Energy Summit recently to learn more about renewable energy and the sectors it affects.
• Finley is looking forward to getting to learning more about renewable energy. He would also like to get to know his classmates at a deeper level because the real value beyond education is in the community.

3 Key Points:

1. Don’t discount what you can teach others and what you can learn from others.
2. Having a business school at Berkeley embodies the Haas principle of challenging the status quo.
3. Your cohort is as much a resource as your education.

Tweetable Quotes 

• “I think the most exciting thing that I’ve realized is that there really is a place at the school for all the students to maximize their own strengths and to help teach others and learn from others based on their other strengths.”
• “Policy gives you a space to keep changing things and always to make the place, this earth, more efficient.”
• “If you leverage the Haas community, naturally all of the other goals in terms of career, understanding the material, are all going to fall in place.”