Sight Sphere: Targeted Career Consulting with Pian Shu, PhD
I offer consultations and coaching programs designed to help you navigate career challenges and pursue a path that’s both professionally rewarding and personally fulfilling. With over a decade of experience teaching and researching at top business schools, I have developed effective methods to help build clarity around your goals and priorities. We will focus on uncovering what motivates and excites you, so that you can turn the projects, tasks, and demands you’re facing into a creative process that sparks gratification and meaning. By channeling this creative energy into clear, actionable steps, you will be able to move forward with purpose and build a career aligned with your aspirations.
Sight /sīt/. noun. The power or faculty of seeing.
Sphere /sfir/. noun. An aspect of life distinguished and unified by a particular characteristic.
Where Clarity Meets Purposeful Action
From a clear understanding of where we are, we forge a path that progresses toward our visions and purposes. Our mind has a focus, and our actions become cohesive rather than scattered. As a result, we build a circle of momentum and commitment to create positive change.
🎄 Hi, I’m Pian
My passion for career coaching grew from my experiences teaching MBA and undergraduate students at Harvard Business School and the Georgia Institute of Technology. As a professor, I taught a range of topics, including operations management, design thinking, and business strategy. I immensely enjoyed leading large class discussions and guiding students on how to think through complex business cases.
One of the most fascinating aspects of teaching was observing diverse perspectives. Each student brought a distinct way of thinking, reflecting their background, experiences, and learning style. Differing perspectives challenged assumptions and broadened understanding, and as a result, each classroom discussion was uniquely engaging. Even after teaching the same case several times, I was continually surprised by the new and original insights each group of students uncovered.
My experiences teaching in dynamic, discussion-driven classrooms have shaped how I approach coaching and consultation sessions. My methods aim to guide you through a discovery process tailored to your unique perspective, helping you generate new ideas and insights to solve your problems or achieve goals.
My educational background includes a B.A. in Mathematics and Mathematical Economics from Colgate University and a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT. As part of my doctoral thesis, I studied the career choices of talented individuals and what led some of them to become innovators. This study helped me develop a broad understanding of how people make career decisions and provided me with a foundation on which to develop more personalized and specific approaches in my coaching and consultations.
In addition to being a tenure-track faculty member at HBS and Georgia Tech, I have been a visiting scholar at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a visiting professor at Boston University. My academic research, including work on the uncertainty of entrepreneurial outcomes and the impact of international trade on firm innovation, has been published in leading economics and management journals.
I live in Boston with my husband. When I’m not coaching or providing consultations, I do creative writing. I love exploring nature and traveling internationally, and a few of my favorite destinations include Japan, Taiwan, and the Dolomites. Films and music also inspire me.
If you would like to learn more about my professional background, including my teaching experiences and academic publications, you can find more details on my LinkedIn. And if you would like to read some fun snippets that I have written about my favorite movies, visit this page.
My methods draw on years of academic teaching and advising, together with training in mindfulness mentoring and two decades of personal meditation practice. This unique combination enables me to guide you with empathy and precision.
“During a recent career and life transition, Pian offered me insightful perspectives that helped me embrace new changes and challenges. Her sessions were not only practically useful, but more importantly, in a seemingly magical way, allowed us to create a poetic approach to assessing and ultimately overcoming the problems I was facing at the time.”
Emily H., Social Science Researcher