About Pian Shu, PhD
My coaching grew out of a decade of teaching and advising students at leading business schools.
For ten years, I was a faculty member at business schools, first at Harvard Business School, and then at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Scheller College of Business. I taught operations management, strategy, and design thinking to MBA and undergraduate students. I immensely enjoyed interacting with students and facilitating class discussions.
During this decade, I developed a distinct teaching style that proved highly effective in discussion-based classrooms. I focused on making complex concepts intuitive and accessible, while using discussion and debate to push students to think critically, articulate their ideas, question assumptions, and engage seriously with different perspectives. One of my students at Harvard described my teaching approach as:
“You really engaged the classroom and challenged us. You encouraged us to become our own professors more than any other professor did. You were very supportive of our learning efforts and pushed us to perform our best.”
I consistently received near-perfect ratings on my teaching. But more importantly, I have been surprised and inspired, time and again, by the depth and breadth of insights that my students generated when they “became their own professors.” When students were given the freedom to explore the material rather than simply being taught it, they often came up with original insights that shed new light even for me on subjects I had been teaching for many years. Empowering students to develop their own views as they grapple with unfamiliar material fostered both intellectual independence and confidence.
Outside of the classroom, I also regularly advised students. During my office hours, a student and I would have a focused conversation on a topic or challenge of immediate concern to them. Unlike classroom discussions, which tended to be more theoretical, these conversations were much more grounded in the students’ own circumstances. Interestingly, these conversations often began with a specific question but evolved into much broader discussions about who they were, what motivated them, and how they saw themselves and the world. A decision about a job offer would turn into a deeper conversation about what the student actually wanted from their career. A concern about classroom participation could lead to a broader discussion about confidence and self-expression.
These conversations almost always left me with a deep sense of gratification. Their individualized nature meant that we could work toward a resolution specific to the student and their situation, often ending with greater clarity and concrete next steps. Over the years, students have shared with me that the value they gained from my office hours paralleled what they gained in the classroom. Receiving this feedback initially surprised me, but it made me realize the value of a focused and nurturing space for one’s professional and personal development. The benefits of this kind of support extend well beyond the school setting.
The techniques I developed and refined as a teacher and advisor form an important part of my coaching. A coaching session with me is a dynamic conversation where we actively engage with an issue, examine it from different angles, question assumptions, and develop new ways of understanding and approaching it. We work through problems together and come up with solutions that you are genuinely excited about and can take ownership of. In the classroom, I learned that being an effective teacher meant knowing when to provide targeted guidance, such as stepping in to redirect a discussion or clarify a concept, and when to create space for exploration, such as stepping back to let students share and learn from one another. I bring this same balance to my coaching. Sometimes you may benefit from a targeted observation, a new perspective, or a concrete suggestion. At other times, the most productive thing I can do is let the conversation unfold spontaneously, allowing insights to emerge through open-ended questions. Both have led to meaningful moments of discovery and clarity.
My coaching builds on methods I developed through years of teaching and advising while also drawing on nontraditional practices that deepen self-understanding, strengthen self-trust, and cultivate intuition.
During my years in academia, I became intimately familiar with both the power and the limits of analytical thinking. Rigorous analysis was central to my work as a scholar, and I naturally brought the same habit of mind into my personal life. Over time, however, I began to experience the downsides of incessant doubt, questioning, and analysis. I often struggled to make even simple decisions because almost everything seemed to invite another round of scrutiny and back-and-forth. Thoughts and analysis flooded my mind.
Around the time that I started questioning the academic path, I had a powerful experience that changed how I perceived the thinking mind. I had just finished a week-long meditation retreat, during which my mind had become calmer than usual. I was flying home and sitting on the plane, waiting for it to take off. Watching people putting their luggage onto the overhead bin, my mind started wandering, and thoughts and analysis began to flood my mind. Suddenly, a visual appeared: ocean water was flowing over the frame of a hollow metal cube. A hand kept trying to scoop up the water with the cube frame, but each attempt failed, because the cube was hollow.
The visual showed me the futility of trying to live through the thinking mind. Putting everything into structures and frameworks, as thinking tends to do, can be helpful at times, but much of reality’s richness and complexity, like the ocean, lies beyond what can be conceptualized. The visual had a powerful effect on me, and I thought back to it often for a long time after.
My journey towards becoming an academic began at MIT, where I earned a PhD in Economics and wrote my thesis on MIT alumni’s career choices and inventive output. (How people choose and succeed in their careers has always been an interesting question to me.) More broadly, during my ten years as a tenure-track faculty member, I developed several research streams in innovation, entrepreneurship, and international trade. I published in top journals and had good prospects for getting tenure. Nonetheless, I felt that something crucial was missing. Publishing papers and researching/teaching abstract concepts did not energize me at a deeper level. I wanted to do work that has a more concrete and tangible impact.
When I left academia, I knew more clearly what I didn’t want to do than what I wanted to do. I left without lining up another job, because I did not want to commit to another path before giving myself the space to consider what would make me genuinely happy. It was an unconventional decision, but I had a strong intuition that it was what I needed at the time. In my mind, I saw an image of a room filled with dated furniture. Sometimes, simply bringing in new furniture to replace the old does not improve the room. Sometimes, the room needs to be empty for a while before new possibilities can emerge. I wanted to explore what might be possible with a fresh and open mind.
5. Why “Sight Sphere”?
I have always been fascinated by the moment when something comes into view and changes how we understand a situation. In the classroom and in advising, I saw the magic of this when students arrived at insights that changed how they approached a problem or understood themselves. In my personal life, I experienced how a single image or realization could suddenly quiet years of habitual thinking. And in coaching sessions, I continue to witness moments when a new perspective, pattern, or connection comes into focus and changes what seems possible.
I named my coaching practice Sight Sphere because this is the kind of experience I hope to create. To me, “Sight” is not only about seeing what is in front of us, but also about seeing differently: noticing a pattern, recognizing something that had been just outside awareness, or suddenly viewing a familiar situation from another angle. “Sphere” is what can emerge from that shift in perception: a changed atmosphere, a different field of possibilities, something tangible that we can move and act within. That movement from seeing differently to inhabiting a different space is at the heart of what I create in my coaching.