Customer Reviews

Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School

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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

First, some disclosure: Philip and I were classmates at HBS, did a project together (which he doesn't directly mention in the book), I've had dinner at his house, and I consider him a friend. If you choose to ignore my perspective because of the above bias, I wouldn't blame you, but I want to make sure that myths (generated by some press coverage) of what this book is about are dispelled: by no means is Ahead of the Curve a tell-all insider-guide bashing of the HBS experience. In fact, I suspect that some of the negative reviews are written by folks who either didn't read the book or didn't read it all the way through.

What the book is instead is a rather touching introspective memoir on Philip's personal experience at HBS as an outsider - someone who, because of his age, career background, nationality, but most of all personality did not fit into the traditional HBS mold. Despite that, the reader comes away clear on the fact that Philip learned a great deal from HBS, respects its educational method tremendously, made some very good friends, and overall came away a bigger person after it. I want to elaborate on that last point - Philip was already a fully formed individual before coming to HBS: a father, a husband, a successful journalist, a well-traveled man. To feel growth after HBS, where the average age is ~5 years younger and the average experience is much more junior is a BIG DEAL.

The book really has two elements to it. One is a witty description of the HBS stereotypes, fun stories about interactions, and, ultimately, a fascinating tale of what it's like to be immersed into the HBS experience. The second (one that I didn't find as exciting having gone there) is a reasonably in-depth description of the cases and educational method. The first element is a joy to read and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. Moreover, it's quite an experience to observe Philip's thought process and see how life touches him. Highlights include getting stuck in a white wedding limo in the parking lot at the Google headquarters and frantically taking notes on a loose-leaf sheet of paper during a McKinsey interview. The second element is geared to the book's main target audience: potential b-school applicants. To be honest, I was shocked by how well Philip recollects the cases and formulae from HBS. I certainly got quite a refresher!

In the end, Philip chooses to opt out of the post-HBS grind, having fully opted into the experience while there. Funnily enough, too many people do the opposite. They float through HBS, barely read cases, sign up for courses on Tue-Thu so they can travel all second year, and then opt into a grueling i-banking or hedge fund job. Personally, I think Philip has come out a better person having learned much from what HBS has to offer and still chosen to pursue life in his own manner. He's the type of graduate HBS should be proud of - I certainly am proud to have gotten to know him while there!

Despite everything I wrote above, I must point out that PDB is a writer and as such, he left plenty out that didn't fit his theses. For example, I was a part of a team of three with him on a first-semester project in our second year. Of the three of us, exactly zero has jobs we accepted after graduation. Of course, all of us has unusual ambitions, but comparisons are driven by one's choice of peer groups. Philip stands out dramatically when compared to i-banker types, but he may not be so unusual amongst others, albeit smaller, HBS groups. One of his section-mates, for example, joined a record label in a creative role after school for a salary of at most 1/4 of what he would have gotten had he gone back to his investment banking career.

Overall, Philip gives a balanced perspective on HBS. He gives an even more balanced perspective on himself and it was a joy to follow his personal travails. Yes, he does omit descriptions of some of the more "out there" folks from HBS, but no, he doesn't break any sacred bonds of the HBS classrooms. If you went to HBS and are fuming based on the press coverage of this book, please read it first before forming an opinion. And if you think about going there, PLEASE READ IT!

Philip Delves Broughton was on top of the journalism world as the Paris bureau chief for The Daily Telegraph of London when he got itchy feet and decided he wanted to go to business school. Setting his sights on Harvard, he was pleased to get in. The book's title refers to the grading system at Harvard and alludes to the competition to get a leg up on other MBA students in gaining a lucrative job.

I attended Harvard Business School while in law school many years ago. I was surprised to find out how many things are similar to when I attended. The student complaints were similar, too.

I thought that Mr. Broughton did an excellent job of explaining what the case system is all about and what occurs in preparing for and during a class. If you've always wanted to go to HBS, here's a chance to take a peek.

The book's strength is in exposing the values behind HBS, people seeking the highest-paying jobs despite the personal cost to family life and one's own soul. Mr. Broughton made some half-hearted attempts to seek out such opportunities, but ended his two years at Harvard with a large loan to show for the experience . . . and no job.

The book's weakness comes in Mr. Broughton's desire to teach you some of the basic concepts about business management. I doubt if you are interested. He doesn't always get it right, either.

I found myself comparing Ahead of the Curve to One L, Scott Turow's brilliant description of the bad old days of being a first-year law student at Harvard. One L is a better book. But both are powerful in explaining what it feels like to be a student in the middle of the gigantic forces moving to shape you like a vise into a new form that will be attractive to employers.

As the father of a recent HBS graduate, I was drawn into the book to understand more about the inside workings of Harvard. As a graduate of a community college in New York, and the father of eight children, and owner of a 30 year successful technology business, I quickly realized that this book was about true success. The balance of family, love of work, and of course, making a living. The chapters replayed much of what my daughter talked about, but I could now truly understand the life and pressure of those embarking on this trip. It was amazing to hear from somebody almost half my age that he truly understood what most people didn't.He heard of the loss by those that did not follow their hearts, but allowed the brand they wore to set their direction in life. The guilt I sometimes feel for being a parent that pushed their child to fufill their own dreams is now diminished, since I know, just like Philip chose to stay true to his heart, my child may elect to do the same. This book is not about Harvard, it is about life. I want to thank him. Although many books have talked about life-work balance, "ahead of the curve" shows us what we need to consider when raising our children, and helping them in their life choices.

I was interested right away in this book because I taught at Columbia Business School several years ago, and wondered if the same crazing, hard-driving lifestyle existed at other ivy-league schools. Delves Broughton is brutally honest in this insider's look at Harvard's B school, including his admission that he never got a job offer after his 2 year stint (which may explain his cynicism).

He wrote his book when the school was headed up by devote Mormon economist Kim Clark, who has since left for another challenge -- making Ricks College (now called BYU-Idaho) into a top rated 4-year college.

His main conclusion is that MBA students at Harvard are insecure overachievers and "a factory of unhappy people" who, when they graduate, work too much at their jobs and don't spend enough time with their families and outside interests (p. 268) He said most of the famous CEOs who came to speak at Harvard were successful in business but failures in their home live (multi-divorces). On p. 270, he tells the story of a Goldman Sachs exec who came to Harvard to talk about leadership and values, and then confessed he had four ex-wives. However, he fails to mention that dean Clark has managed to have a successful career and a good family life with seven kids and a loving wife.

I'm citing the page numbers because shockingly this book, published by Penguin, doesn't have an index. Talk about behind the curve!

If you want to know what the author thinks of dean Kim Clark, go to pp. 5-6, 19-20, 28, 85-86, 111, 164, and 208. "Clark has whittled his life down to just four things: work, family, faith, and golf." (p. 85)

As far for his suggestions for improvement at HBS (at the end of the book), I thought he had some good ideas. One was that professors who teach entrepreneurship should not be pure academics but practitioners who have had lots of real world experience. Amen. I found that at Columbia B school, over half the professors had no experience running companies, and the micro they used for microeconomics was a standard micro text, not a managerial econ textbook.

The reason for this strange situation is that years ago top B schools decided they should compete with top academic departments by hiring PhDs who write abstract papers in top journals rather than running successful businesses.

The other major drawback to today's top B schools is that they don't teach hardly any history of finance or business, other than case studies (and those are usually from the recent past). Robert Heinlein wisely said, "He who refuses to study history has no past and no future."

What a sad commentary on today's ivy-league B schools. Fortunately, other B schools, such as Acton and Market-Based Management at Wichita State do teach applied courses by practionioners, not just academics.

The author cites a delightful statement by Jack Welch when he visited HBS: "Government generates no revenues. Government lives off taxes generated by business and people that work in business. Don't ever forget that." (See p. 233)

I could find only one sin of omission: Broughton never discussed the "Biggie" course at HBS, the macroeconomic course on "Business, Government and International Economics."

And one sin of commission: I liked his writing style, but he overdid the use of 4-letter words and vulgarities. Isn't it a sad commentary on the business, finance and academic world that top graduates can't control their tongue?

The book is well written, as befits someone who had a career as a journalist prior to business school. The scenes are captured wonderfully, dialogue skillfully rendered, the portraits of places make them seem almost palpable.

And yet... whenever he writes about something I know about, he is DEAD wrong. Since I was never a Harvard MBA student I wonder whether his depictions of places and events of which he is supposed to be more familiar are any more accurate.

Let me give 3 examples. In his dismissive account of a visit to Silicon Valley (pp 120-21) he writes "Up in the hills were town such as Palo Alto, Woodside, and Atherton..." The housing in Palo Alto & Atherton is not up in hills. It's on the flatlands skirting the San Francisco Bay, at most 100 feet above the water. In fact the city data at http://www.idcide.com/citydata/ca/palo-alto.htm has it located 23 feet above sea level, hardly "up in the hills".

Of his visit to Google he writes "Google's headquarters was a sprawling glass and metal complex originally built for Netscape" (pp 219). No, it wasn't. It's previous tenant was Silicon Graphics (SGI). Netscape was never in the building. There is a *tenuous* connection -- Jim Clarke, a founder of SGI, left and later founded Netscape among other companies. But Clarke left SGI long before SGI even erected the complex (and then immediately cratered as a going business). But if this sentence exemplifies the depth of his research and the accuracy of his reporting, what in the book can you trust?

In recounting a talk by Dan Gilbert, founder of Quicken Loans, he writes that Dan recommended they ditch their copies of books about entrepreneurs recommended by the faculty and "read 'One Smart Cookie', the biography of Debbi Fields, the founder of Mrs. Fields cookies (pp 238). She was a single mother, had three children by the age of twenty-one, and loved cookies. She know nothing about finance or business." Uh, no. Not a single sentence he remembers is true. She was married, her husband a wealthy stockbroker working in Palo Alto (not in the "hills", but on University Ave). The "little Missus" liked to bake, so as an indulgence he spotted her a store in a food mall down the block from his job. The very 1st Mrs. Fields store was right in pricy downtown Palo Alto (inside a mall later razed and now hosting a Z-Gallerie store). And if she knew nothing about finance, her husband (now ex) certainly did.

I was never in the classes the author attended. Maybe those accounts are accurate. But every time I ran across something in this book I know about, his story is just plain wrong and/or shows he didn't bother spending even a few minutes to check his account is correct. So I'm skeptical, to say the least, about the rest of the book.

Wouldn't have read the book except that my two engineer sons are thinking about MBAs. I was always curious about what exactly they taught you at HBS and this book pretty much tells you that. And also how much the 2 years cost: $175,000. I got the impression at first that this was going to be a negative book but it didn't turn out that way. Nice anecdotes throughout the book which I enjoyed.

I was disheartened to see how many grads went to Wall Street. I was hoping that all this effort was to make the American and world economies better with new ideas for tangible stuff instead of the financial product crap that we have now. So much for that. Go to HBS and learn how to play financial hot potato. Luckily we have a government that can print money and bail these creeps out.

Saw one minor error which the fact checker should have got. Averell Harriman's father, E.H., was president of the Union Pacific Railroad, not the "..U.S. Pacific Railroad." And one an editor should have got, "principle/agent" should of course be "principal/agent." Again proving what my disgruntled writer friend told me 40 years ago, "Those that can't do, teach, and those who can't do or teach, edit."

Hope that Mr. Broughton has found his post HBS niche and not one like Bob Dylan sang about: "20 years of schoolin' and they put you on the day shift."

Good book

For someone without any financial background, I found the book very entertaining and informative. It's nice to hear a personal and insightful view of a HBS graduate who had a very different career prior to attending the school.

I don't regret having read this book. It was honestly written, gives a fair assessment, and is sure to teach any prospective student at least a few things about the MBA experience, Harvard or otherwise.

My main problem is that the book's useful moments only seem to appear sporadically, interspersed throughout a story isn't written in a very compelling manner. I found the author's editorial voice a bit flat and unengaging, and when he tries to paint a picture of anything, he usually gets bogged down in minutiae or goes off on tangents. He often recreates anecdotes of people, places, and classes in unnecessary minute-by-minute detail; heck, he even wastes an entire chapter venting his opinions of the Myers-Briggs personality test. The abrupt transitions within chapters disrupt the narrative flow, and as a former reviewer pointed out, the constant racial/ethnic (as well as physical) descriptors are pointless and distracting. For a guy who spent a decade in journalism, Broughton could learn a thing or two about effective storytelling.

Around the halfway mark, however, Ahead of the Curve finally starts showing signs of life, getting into the meat of the MBA experience and taking a deeper look at the school, the students, and where the degree can take you. Allow me to mention some of his juicier insights.

Chapter 8 begins with Broughton generalizing his class as being full of "insecure overachievers" who pursue careers like investment banking and consulting entirely for the money and status, despite the tedium, repetition, and draining nature of those jobs and that no one seems to like them. He describes business as the practice of "potentially thieving, treacherous, lying human beings" and claims "everyone in business is basically bullshitting his way through." As a former journalist and [undergrad] business school veteran myself, I agree with most of this, and I identify with his gripes on how PR people lack the capacity to talk in plain, honest English and that business classes use jargon and formulas to make obvious ideas sound more substantial than they really are. He likens Harvard Business School to a monoculture, and touches on an important point that some students feel the school fails in its promise to give career changers a fresh start, since most of the companies that recruit on campus are in the finance and consulting industries and/or usually look for candidates who already have prior experience in those fields. [...]

On a philosophical note, he questions the very idea of business school, reasoning that business has little to do with frameworks, spreadsheets, and academic papers (which comprised the bulk of his education) and more about character, guts, instinct, leadership, and common sense -- stuff that can't be taught. It's interesting to note that the book almost ends on the same conclusion as the book "Snapshots From Hell," which is that in the end, an MBA mainly opens doors to jobs that pay well but are inherently CRAP and require 70-hour work weeks that rob you of your personal life and lead to misery, dissatisfaction, and fractured families.

[...]

There is a genre of memoir that recounts the strange and exotic experiences of an author who has chosen to take a less traveled road, for example to join the French Foreign Legion. Such a memoir is fascinating to the reader in part because it is so far outside the reader's experience. For this reader this book belongs to that genre.

The book provides what appears to be an accurate and well balanced account of the Master of Business Administration (MBA) program of the venerated Harvard Business School (HBS). The writer is admittedly an atypical MBA candidate, but nonetheless has apparently succeeded in capturing the culture of HBS and the philosophy of its MBA program. Broughton encapsulates the MBA curriculum and provides some detail about the famous `case study' method developed by HBS,. He also provides a mostly sympathetic description of his fellow members of the `Class of 2006' and their motivations. Broughton himself is somewhat conflicted as to why he wants to acquire an MBA , but he gives a straightforward account of how one goes about achieving a Harvard MBA. Also he is willing to share some of the kind of knowledge that he gained while in the program which gives tangible examples of what HBS students actually learn.

So what is taught in the HBS MBA Program? Well by this account, essentially it is number crunching. HBS graduates know a lot about financial risk, costs and revenues, leverage, and increasing profitability. They also know how to document such knowledge using spreadsheets and graphs. Not surprisingly the majority of Broughton's MBA class went into either financial services (investment banking, hedge funds, etc) or management consulting. Indeed one gets the impression that HBS has more or less focused on financial management to the exclusion of management of people or processes. The information provided by Broughton is a fascinating account of what to some of us is a very exotic place, but perhaps more importantly a good summation of what those considering trying for a Harvard MBA have to expect.

I had to give the book 5 stars because I couldn't put it down and because it was so thought-provoking.

I can't help comparing is book to Robert Reid's earlier book, Year One. Reid describes professors and fellow students more vividly than Broughton does. But Broughton seems to be describing an HBS that has changed since Reid's day. Reid didn't refer to expensive (and apparently useless) group trips, tasteless pranks and parties and psychological tests. HBS seems to have more students with military background as well as a higher number of twenty-somethings.

Of course, a big difference is that Reid actually understood and enjoyed business careers. As a career consultant, I was intrigued by Broughton's lack of direction and even more appalled by HBS's apparent lack of career and interview coaching.

For instance, Reid's book, Year One, described a female student who wanted to work for a small firm -- the kind that didn't recruit at HBS. She did her research, initiated an interview process, and found a job. Why didn't Broughton do that? And why didn't he study marketing, which would be closer to his journalism background, instead of finance? In fact, HBS was all wrong for him. He could have chosen Wharton, which has a big entrepreneurial center, or Northwestern, the marketing giant.

I hate expressions like "alignment of goals and values," but the book inadvertently presents a clear case of incongruence. In one disturbing paragraph (p 117), Broughton writes that, "business can never escape the fact that it is the practice of potentially thieving, treacherous, lying human beings." But what element of society is exempt from being practiced by people have might steal and lie? Michael Nifong prosecuted innocent Duke students -- causing enormous financial and personal loss -- to further his own career. He is not unique Doctors are seduced by pharmaceutical companies. A specialist at my college reunion said, "I have to perform a certain exam on pre-surgical patients. Often I find they don't need the surgery and I say so. So surgeons don't send me referrals." As for government...are our fearless leaders really free of greed?

At least we have consumer protection laws. We have far fewer protections in any other sector. More important, if Broughton despises business, he will have trouble finding success there.

Harvard does seem to waste a lot of the students' tuition money. I was especially horrified to discover that HBS endorses the Myers-Briggs test. Broughton devotes a lot of speculation to a value system that explains why so many Fortune 500 companies use Myers-Briggs. The real problem is that the test has no scientific value. Might as well use astrology. I recommend The Cult of Personality, by Annie Murphy Paul, published just before Broughton entered Harvard.

I won't comment on the "be your best self" exercise. In Year One they just built towers out of paper and cardboard.

Apart from describing what one learns at HBS, Broughton ultimately shows that if you're a maverick a prestigious MBA won't mold you into a corporate success story. That's a lesson I've learned myself, all too well.