Product Description As One L did for Harvard Law School, Ahead of the Curve does for Harvard Business Schoolproviding an incisive students-eye view that pulls the veil away from this vaunted institution and probes the methods it uses to make its students into the elite of the business world
In the century since its founding, Harvard Business School has become the single most influential institution in global business. Twenty percent of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are HBS graduates, as are many of our savviest entrepreneurs (e.g., Michael Bloomberg) and canniest felons (e.g., Jeffrey Skilling). The top investment banks and brokerage houses routinely send their brightest young stars to HBS to groom them for future power. To these people and many others, a Harvard MBA is a golden ticket to the Olympian heights of American business.
In 2004, Philip Delves Broughton abandoned a post as Paris bureau chief of the London Daily Telegraph to join nine hundred other would-be tycoons on HBSs plush campus. Over the next two years, he and his classmates would be inundated with the bestand the restof American business culture that HBS epitomizes. The core of the schools curriculum is the casean analysis of a real business situation from which the students must, with a professors guidance, tease lessons. Delves Broughton studied more than five hundred cases and recounts the most revelatory ones here. He also learns the surprising pleasures of accounting, the allure of beta, the ingenious chicanery of leveraging, and innumerable other hidden workings of the business world, all of which he limns with a wry clarity reminiscent of Liars Poker. He also exposes the less savory trappings of b-school culture, from the booze luge to the pandemic obsession with PowerPoint to the specter of depression that stalks too many overburdened students. With acute and often uproarious candor, he assesses the schools success at teaching the traits it extols as most important in businessleadership, decisiveness, ethical behavior, work/life balance.
Published during the one hundredth anniversary of Harvard Business School, Ahead of the Curve offers a richly detailed and revealing you-are-there account of the institution that has, for good or ill, made American business what it is today.
A frustrating but worthwhile readJanuary 4, 2009 As a prospective HBS applicant, I definitely found the book to be a worthwhile read and, in many ways, very enlightening.
However, the book ended up being a very quick skim because 70% of the time he goes into great detail into the curriculum and conversations of his classes. After the third description of a case study, you really do get the idea, and long specific examples scattered through the book were not very effective.
PDB does a great job of entering the psyche of his classmates, though I must say I think his review is a bit biased because he was so disenchanted with the recruiting process. For anyone without a child, two years in consulting make a ton of sense--you travel the world helping companies solve problems before being headhunted to become a VP at another top company--what could be a better start to your career?
Definitely worth the read for a prospective HBS applicant.
Dissecting the HBS brand, with loveDecember 23, 2008 The most influencial academic institution whose alums control the flow of billions (trillions, as corrected by one HBS student) of dollars in the global economy, has many faces. The author takes us through a campus tour and tells us a story. A story about the wild parties, the academic rigor, the intellectual stimulants. Also the moral dilemma, insecurity, mindless rat race and a quest for self discovery. Getting into HBS is hard, but harder is to stay true to one's primal instincts and beliefs once inside the system. HBS claims to explain 'how the world works', but we learn that at times it probably couldn't be farther away from the world outside. It is a witty, thought provoking account of soul-searching. If you are considering applying to HBS, read it to get an idea of the curriculum, the professors and the cases - if nothing else. Because chances are, HBS would soon strip you of your inner emotions and turn you into a conformist foot-soldier of American capitalism, no matter how hard you were warned before.
A disappointmentDecember 21, 2008 1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Having gone to an Ivy League business school myself and later turned to journalism, I find this book a huge disappointment.
The rigor of the program, the competition amongst the peers were exhausted to death, but even more so were the different lessons and takeaways from various core classes. I mean what's the point of explaining the "efficient frontier" in such detail, taking up several paragraphs, for example.
I wished Broughton would've spent more time analysing the characters of his classmates and faculty members and really make these people come alive, and delve further into their lives, rather than making one or two sentence comments on these colorful people, or taking a simple quote here and there.
Also, HBS is a legacy, he should immerse more into the lives, ambitions, disappointments, change of events of his colleagues. What brought them there, and what are the events which fostered such a group of Type A personalities.
It is interesting in and of itself to following the careers of his classmates. Rather than just pointing out the consulting guy is ambition, the military guy is methodical, or the investment banker unbearable. I wanted to read more, but Broughton's work really disappointed me.
It's realy a sophomoric attempt at exposing HBS.
Worth Buying!December 15, 2008 My local libraries have both the PDF and audiobook format editions via Overdrive, of this book, and I have consumed both. I might have even bought it here given the necessity, in retrospect! In addition to Amazon's HQ, the Seattle area has good library systems!
What did I miss by not being at HBS? I have a few inclinations here. However, the way things are done there makes me glad I am back on the West or Left Coast, despite having spent 2/3 of my life on the East after being born in California.
I hope the author is earning enough to pay down his self-reported loan debt of $175,000.00 he obtained to attend the grand institution.
well written book, but I have doubts ...December 10, 2008 4 out of 4 found this review helpful
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 [...] 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. And Clarke left SGI long before SGI even erected the complex (and then immediately cratered). 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.
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