Review: What they teach you at HBS

September 3, 2008

I torpedoed my banking career before it ever got underway by admitting in my second interview that I actually didn’t want to be a banker.

“I want to be a writer,” I told the somewhat startled interviewer, a straight-laced associate at a now defunct merchant bank in London. “But I figure a couple of years inside a bank should give me a good grounding in comedic perception.”

Having shown me the door, he recommended Liar’s Poker, in which Michael Lewis infiltrates Salomon Brothers at the height of its 1980s madness. Lewis describes how the bank turned the mortgage market upside down and caught the change from its pockets. The exact details escape me but it involved helicopters from Wall Street to Atlantic City and the like.

Lewis had beaten me to the punch.

Philip Delves Broughton managed to keep his cards closer to his chest than I did, at least on his Harvard Business School application forms. Instead, he presumably claimed in his essays that he wanted to be a master of the universe like the other 900 students who enrolled with him in the class of 2004.

Now, having done the course, taken detailed diarised notes, and written the book, he claims in its first line: “I did not go to Harvard Business School planning to write a book about the experience.” Yea, right.

Pre-MBA Delves Broughton was about as journalism as you can get: New York and Paris Bureau chief for England’s Daily Telegraph, writer for the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Times and The Spectator. He claims he went to business school to stop looking at the world around him as a source of potential stories.

But having got to Harvard, he found the biggest story of our times right there.

The President of the United States and its Treasury Secretary, the President of the World Bank, the CEOs of General Electric, Goldman Sachs, and Procter and Gamble, together with 20 percent of the top three executives at Fortune 500 companies, were all Harvard graduates. Clearly the school occupies a special place in global capitalism.

Delves Boughton relates his business school experience pretty much blow by blow, from the weird dynamic that develops amongst a class of ninety overachieving smart alecs told they are destined to run the world, through to the frantic, all-consuming and soul destroying process of applying for a job as one of corporate America’s millions of road warrior executives.

On this last, he observes late one night at San Francisco airport: “They were like ghouls, haunting me whenever I wavered, urging me not to go corporate, not to give up my life to travel schedules and airports and sales meetings and bad food and a paunch and boasts about frequent flier programs, scratching at my face and mewling diabolically into my ears: Don’t do it!”

It may be true that Delves Broughton went to business school to find out about business, but there is an awful lot of it that he didn’t like. His journalist’s eye brings to life the weird monoculture of the investment bankers, consultants and private equiteers who surround the school, and Harvard’s decadent, patrician aura. He can hardly believe the juvenile, frat boy antics of his classmates, average age 27.

At the same time, there was a lot to learn, and he does a good job of summarising many of the business lessons learnt from hundreds of cases studies and classroom discussions. The excitement and privilege of studying under Michael Porter, attending discussion groups with Jack Welch and having CEOs beamed in from China for classroom question time is not lost on the sceptical journalist, who is genuinely torn between finding a place for himself amongst the masters of the universe and kissing his family goodbye for the ensuing twenty years, or forging his own place in the world.

“HBS challenged me in ways I never imagined it would,” writes Delves Broughton. “I never thought I would be pushed so aggressively against the window of my soul. Until I was there, I had underestimated capitalism’s power to sow such insecurity, even among people with the skills to do anything they liked. Why were my classmates straining so hard to secure jobs they knew would make them miserable?”

What they teach you… is not the first of its kind. Snapshots from Hell by Peter Robinson, published in 1998, is the author’s account of his first year at Stanford Business School. But the focus in Snapshots is much more on how much hard work there is to do when you study for an MBA from a top business school. Of which, boo hoo. It is Delves Broughton’s search for meaning, and his insight into the “transformational” nature of his years at HBS that make this a special book, and a must read for anyone thinking of doing an MBA, or anyone whose done one and wants to reminisce.

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