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. Read more
