The word leadership lurked in every corner of HBS. When the student clubs requested new candidates for “events organizer” or “speakers coordinator,” they emphasized that these were more than mere jobs. They were “leadership opportunities.” Every club position, no matter how menial, carried the title of vice president. One day we, too, might be part of corporate America’s bulging vice-presidential class, so we may as well get used to the weightlessness of the title. Within our section, we held elections for posts ranging from president to sports rep, alumni rep to international rep, with ten or eleven more in between. It was part of what the school called “making the section our own.” Everyone at HBS, it seemed, could be a leader of one sort or another.
In the run-up to our section elections, Ben Esty, our section chair, told us that we should run the section however we wanted. He then passed around a case concerning a section in which two members had taped up a poster of Britney Spears. Some in the section had found it offensive. Others said their right to put up the poster was a free speech issue. They ended up holding a vote in which more than half chose to leave the poster up. After a vigorous case discussion within our own section, we decided that our main duty was to create a positive learning environment.
Each candidate for the section’s leadership posts had to make a stump speech to the class. These candidates varied wildly in quality, from the aspiring Martin Luther Kings to one poor man who was so nervous he stood behind the desk fumbling with his notes and lost his chance for the presidency there and then. One student composed his own rap song to tell us why he wanted to be admissions rep, a job that involved arranging for applicants and recently admitted students to sit in on classes. Of the two leading candidates for section president, one spoke of the section as a family.The eventual winner, Brian, promised to get to know each and every one of us and keep us together over our lifetimes.
Dean Clark came to speak to us one lunchtime, and it was immediately apparent where HBS had derived its present image. He was focused and talked repeatedly about the HBS mission to educate leaders who would make a difference in the world. He spoke of the “transformational experience” of HBS as if it were a form of religious conversion. He must have given this talk dozens of times a month, but he managed to make it sound fresh and important. Several other university officials had accompanied him, and they sat in their seats like Politburo members while the party chief spoke. The Mormons in the class came to know Clark better than most of us because of their shared faith. One of them told me that at a meeting of the Mormon Club, Clark explained the secret of his success. He had whittled his life down to just four things: work, family, faith, and golf. As an academic, he used to arrive at his office at dawn and work in silence until lunchtime. Only then would he engage with the world, returning telephone calls, answering letters. On Saturdays he played golf, and on Sundays he spent the day at church with his family. Such discipline had propelled him to the leadership of the school.
When he invited questions, several hands went up. The first question was about HBS’s place in the media’s ranking of business schools. A Wall Street Journal poll had just come out ranking Harvard number thirteen. Numbers one and two were the business schools at the University of Michigan and Carnegie Mellon, respectively. Harvard’s low rank was in large part due to the negative opinions of recruiters, who had told the newspaper that HBS MBAs were “arrogant,” with a “sense of entitlement” and “ego problems.” Clark said he took these rankings seriously, but not too seriously. He said he didn’t want to talk about them too much as he could go on forever, but then spoke about them for fifteen minutes. If you looked at all the polls over ten years or so and averaged them out, he said, HBS came out decisively on top. Of this particular poll, “you’ve got to ask yourself, what are the questions to which this list is the answer.” The Wall Street Journal poll was taken among recruiters, many of whom find it hard to recruit HBS graduates. Harvard MBAs, he said, often chose between several job offers, so left many companies disappointed and complaining to newspapers.
Clark said that two of his biggest challenges were trying to change the image of HBS alumni as stuck-up jerks, though not quite in those terms, and encouraging a more diverse group of applicants by making clear to prospective students how nice and comfortable the HBS environment was. One of the most common reactions among students after their first month or so at HBS, Clark said, was how different the people were from how they had imagined they’d be. Once I had recovered from Crimson Greetings, I agreed with him. HBS was a civil place. Occasional horror stories would leak out from other sections—of sharks seeking to humiliate their classmates and fights over section norms. I had taken a dislike to Misty, who now bellowed, “Hello troops!” when she arrived in class each morning. But she was the exception. The rest of our section could not have been nicer. If I did not understand a concept discussed in class, there was always someone there to explain it. But I was quite removed. My days consisted of nothing more than attending class, studying, returning home to see Margret and Augie, and then studying before going to bed.
Those who lived more intimately in the bosom of the section had noticed darker rumblings. The skydecks had quickly become quite vicious, targeting the same few people in class who either spoke too much or made fools of themselves at section events. It was hard for them to complain, given the peer pressure to see the funny side. One man, an Indian, who was mocked again and again for his rambling contributions to discussions, now packed up and left before the skydecks began. “I don’t need to take that shit,” he told me later, when we bumped into each other in the cafeteria. “I don’t see why we have to be stuck with the same people day after day. One guy in the skydecks came up to me this week and told me if I talk again, they’d nail me in the skydecks. I don’t need this.”
Shortly afterward, the underlying disquiet about the turn the section had taken became explicit. Ted Fallows, a serious finance wizard from Louisiana who acted as our liaison with the professors, asked us all to stay back after class. He was perfect for his role as he displayed the same empathy and rigor whatever nonsense crossed his path. There had been several complaints, he said, about buzzword bingo. The game had been proposed during a skydecks session the previous week. The idea was to offer a prize to whoever could drop certain phrases into their classroom remarks. The phrases chosen were “as my father used to say” and “as future business leaders.” The game was goofy but harmless. It was supposed to break up the monotony of classes a little. Sure enough, it did. In the days before Ted called his meeting, several students had managed to use the phrases. Every time someone did, all round the class, heads jerked up and grins had to be checked. Even the professors seemed to sense the flutter in the class. Unfortunately, a number of students had told Ted they were worried that we were risking academic sanction. He explained that since we had received so many warnings about our academic performance and the importance of respecting the learning environment, everyone was a little jumpy. If we were going to get into trouble at HBS and jeopardize our academic records, buzzword bingo hardly seemed worth it. He invited comments. The skydeck came thundering in.
Rodger, one of the older students, who was still running his own technology business between classes, said that we needed to be able to strike a balance between joking among ourselves and being responsible. Annette, an African American ex-investment banker from Chicago, exploded. “Why are we being treated like kids with all these rules and regulations?” she exclaimed. “I feel like I’m being like a teenager. Why do professors have to stop talking and stare at someone if they arrive late? And then just cold call them for the hell of it? We are grown people.”
Eric, a former advertising executive, pointed out that evidently the classroom was not the safe environment we thought it was if we hadn’t heard from whoever had complained about buzzword bingo. Finally a twenty-three-year-old Arkansan, one of the youngest in the class, spoke up. He said he was not so much worried about an official sanction, but h
e found the game distracting. He often missed thirty seconds or so of what was said after the buzzword was used as conspiratorial smirks went round the room.
Since we were on the subject of rules, Misty had to raise her hand. She was unhappy with the number of people arriving late to class and getting up to go to the bathroom. Gurinder, an ornery Indian software engineer, said we were all adults and if people were late, that was their problem. Ted added that the professors had noticed the number of times people were going to the bathroom during class, and told Gurinder it was out of control. Misty beamed. Earlier in the year, Ben Esty had told us that every time someone went to the bathroom they took ninety minutes of classroom time away from their section. He had reached this number by adding the thirty seconds it took to leave the classroom and the thirty seconds it took to return and multiplying it by the number of students in the section. He assumed that none of us would be able to concentrate if one of us went for a pee. “If you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go,” Gurinder growled. “We can’t be setting up rules for this.” Bob intervened: “We’re all percolating. But where I come from, you show up on time and you go to the bathroom beforehand.” Gurinder shot back, “We’re not all in the army here.” The military folk bridled, and an angry frown usurped Misty’s smile.
Afterward, I bumped into Shelly, the former Home Depot employee cold-called by Ruback. She had been elected our Leadership and Values Initiative rep. Her job involved communicating news from the school’s Leadership and Values Initiative and proposing ways in which leadership and values could be encouraged in the section. In her pre-MBA job, she said, groups went through four phases: “formin’, stormin’, normin’, and performin’.” “We’re clearly still stormin’,” she said. Riding home that day with Bo, we concluded that it must have been difficult to go from the military, with its unified chain of command—where every point of order and discipline was codified and, if challenged, could be referred to a higher authority—to this loosey-goosey world of business school, full of truculent Indian software engineers and sarcastic English journalists. Misty, for one, hated it.
Soon afterward, I opened my mailbox to find a single piece of paper. It was just after lunch, and there were lots of students in Spangler doing the same thing. We stood there along the basement corridor, engrossed by what we had found. The letter was from a member of the class of 2005, addressed to the entire student body. It began with some generalities about the transformational experience of HBS and how the author had learned the importance of responsibility. Before HBS, he wrote, most of us had not assumed much responsibility beyond taking care of ourselves and our immediate circle. (This was not the case with many of the people I had met so far, but I let that pass.) As business leaders, he wrote, the scope of our responsibility would be far wider. “No longer will we be the most junior person at XYZ investment bank or consulting firm,” he wrote. “No longer will we assume a series of two-year jobs with business school to look forward to as a safe zone. Real life for HBS graduates entails power, leadership and success.” HBS had given him “heightened self-awareness.” Liberated from hundred-hour work weeks, he had been able to focus on the big questions, what mattered most to him and what he was going to do with his life. On he went, talking about how his moral compass had been reset by the school, until finally we got to the meat of the letter. Just before Christmas the previous year, he wrote, he had drunk too much at the end-of-semester party, Holidazzle, and been involved in a “regrettable property damage incident” in one of the campus apartment buildings. His moral compass had gone haywire that night and he was deeply sorry. The experience had forced him to reconsider the value of discussing moral situations at HBS. If he could fall off the rails so easily, perhaps he should not be so cynical about having to spend time discussing values. His behavior had made him realize he still had work to do figuring out who exactly he was.
The school had evidently required the author to write this letter and distribute it to the entire MBA class as a punishment. I felt bad for him. The letter reminded me of one of those videotaped statements made by kidnap victims. You know, the ones where the victims sit between a peeling radiator and a wilting potted plant, wearing an ugly sweat suit and read from a prepared statement. They thank their captors for treating them so well and say that fundamentalist terrorist organizations get an unfair rap, while all the while you can see a shadow of a Kalashnikov hovering against the wall above them. The author’s crime, Bo later told me, was coming back drunk from Holidazzle and peeing on the door of his neighbor’s apartment. Two months earlier I would have howled with laughter at this kind of thing. But now my cynical reflexes were in spasm. It didn’t feel right to laugh at this stuff anymore. It was serious, right? Leadership. Core values. Transformation. Not peeing on other people’s property. Being true to oneself.
I took the letter back to Margret, who read it standing at the kitchen counter. She didn’t flinch until she got to the phrase “regrettable property damage incident.”
“What did he do?”
“Bo says he peed on his neighbor’s door.”
She kept on reading. When she had finished, she set the letter down on the counter and looked me in the eye. “You know, these people are freaks. Why do they think they’re all going to be leaders anyway? Who wants them leading anything?”
“I know, I know,” I said. “I’m just worried that if I stop recognizing the freaks, I’ll become one of them.”
“That’s something worth worrying about.”
Our first midterms, in TOM and FRC, were fast upon us, and the challenge for HBS was to persuade nine hundred people incapable of not taking an exam very seriously not to take this one too seriously. It was almost impossible to fail out of Harvard Business School. If you showed up and said nothing, professors would eventually pick you out and make you talk so you could get some credit. If you kept coming in the bottom 10 percent in every subject, you would be given warnings, help, and every kind of supportto keep you there. To fail out, you basically had to stop showing up to class. And be mean to everyone who tried to help you.
Yet as the midterms approached, the section swung into action, delegating students who understood the course content to help those who didn’t. Our in-boxes were swamped with PowerPoint presentations of the “key takeaways,” summaries, anything and everything to try to get us through the multiple-choice quizzes, which would represent 20 percent of our final grade. Zeynep tried telling us not to get too worked up, but to no avail. Eddie Riedl drew a bell curve to show the distribution of students at business schools. HBS students, he said, were at the far right of the curve, the very smartest and likeliest to succeed. Even if we came last in our HBS class, he said, we would still be way ahead of most other MBAs. But then again, he said with a resigned shrug, “these are exams, there’s going to be pressure, what can you do?”
The night before our TOM midterm, I received via e-mail a six-page summary of the course from a student in another section. There were dozens of names in the recipient box, but almost none from Section A. Without even hesitating, I sent the summary to the entire section, receiving various messages of thanks or “I had this already.” Within five minutes, however, an e-mail came back, addressed to us all, from Misty.
A-Team,
I realize everyone’s trying to be fair sending out these study notes. It shows real section spirit. But are we risking breaching community standards? I reckon we’re getting pretty close with this. Let’s discuss.
Happy studying, y’all.
Misty
I hadn’t even considered the possibility that my action had violated community standards. I was just trying to be fair. The next morning, before class, a man I had never spoken to in the section, a former hedge fund analyst, came over to my desk to reassure me: “Thanks for sending out the note. That woman is insane.” As promised, there were no surprises in the midterms. There were twenty multiple-choice questions. I came in the top 20 percent in TOM and the middle 60 percent in FRC. It was s
atisfying to know that my struggles with the numbers were paying off.
To blow off the mid-semester blues, the Australia and New Zealand Club organized one of the biggest events on campus, the Priscilla Ball. The men were to dress as women and the women as sluts. The cost was $120 per person. Since we were living on loans and not that into cross-dressing, Margret and I decided to pass. But we took Augie along to the pre-ball party hosted by the section. One man looked like Virginia Woolf in a white boa and black wig. Another was dressed in Gothic black leather, nose rings, and studded bracelets, while another wore a skimpy Heidi outfit and women’s underwear, which failed to contain his errant balls. A Frenchman, Vincent, had vowed to me that afternoon that he would be “the most beautiful woman” at the ball, and sure enough he arrived as an impeccable Marilyn Monroe.
Chapter Seven
TO BETA AND BEYOND
I am standing on the edge of the Efficient Frontier. Somewhere out in the darkness, I see the winking light of extreme risk and extreme reward. And beneath me lies a Milky Way of ill-judged investments. The Efficient Frontier drops away in an arc like Sagittarius’s bow, but I am clinging to a sharply sloping tangent, my heels pressed deep into the ice. Far behind me lies the clean, breathable air of the risk-free investment. But I have chosen to don the oxygen mask and climb ever higher, my feet and lungs aching, my nerves fraying, driven by faith in a religion called diversification and a hope that I can bring my risks and rewards into perfect balance.
“We call this OCRA. It’s my favorite vegetable.” My reverie was snapped by Ruback’s piercing voice. He was a nice man and an eminent professor. But for me, a financial ingénu, he was death. Death on a bad day, with a chill in his bones and an itch in his cape. He made me desperate for something other than the case method. There were elementary, practical things to learn in finance, and I wanted a simple lecture to help me understand them. For those in the section who had studied finance as undergraduates and then worked in the field, the subject matter in FIN 1 was elementary. For those of us new to the subject, it felt like learning physics starting at E = mc2 while having to figure out the basic laws of motion on the fly.
Ahead of the Curve Page 10