Ahead of the Curve

by Philip Delves Broughton

  My own “social, networking, and extracurricular” activities had expanded since the first year to include twice-weekly racquetball games with Oleg, a Russian student in my section who resembled the young Boris Yeltsin, with a heavy, smiling face and a thatch of thick blond hair. Oleg had spent part of his youth in New York, where his father was a Soviet diplomat, which explained his fluent, colorful English. His slow amble onto the court was deceptive. He was a nimble and ferocious player who slammed into walls and cursed enthusiastically. After each game, we chewed over the latest example of HBS insanity.

  “I can’t see why they’re worried about us not working hard enough,” said Oleg one afternoon, wiping his brow. “I’ve never worked so hard in my life. I work and I go home and see my wife. I’m not going to nightclubs in Boston on a Monday. I wish I had time to do some networking. I mean, are you my network, Philip? Fuck. Shit. I’m in big trouble. Come on, you loser, let’s play another game.”

  Grade disclosure unleashed the pent-up feelings among students about the culture of the school, and became a referendum about the school’s purpose and methods. Our study groups had broken up after the first year, but I still bumped into Stephen, the ex-diplomat, and he was indignant on the subject. “How can this be a safe learning environment if students have to worry about grades all the time? You remember Analytics? We knew nothing. Then the next thing, we’re being put on a forced curve with a bunch of bankers and consultants who could pass the first-year exams in their sleep. It’s ridiculous. And look at the way they’re just going to try to impose it on us. Didn’t they read their own LEAD cases about building consensus?”

  “But it’s not going to affect us,” I replied. “We’re safe.”

  “That’s not the point,” he said, angrily. “The point is that the students at this place are not respected. The only people whose opinions they care about are the recruiters and the alumni, because they’re the ones who give all the money.”

  I agreed with him. The grades were useful for me in terms of telling me how I was doing, especially in the more technical courses. But the fact that I earned ones in LEAD and Dynamic Markets and twos in Biggie, the macroeconomics course, and LCA, was trivial. It was no indicator of how good a businessman I might be.

  Grade disclosure forced us to consider the purpose of a business school. A senior journalist on the Financial Times once told me that the real secret to making money was wanting to make money. Not in the sense of “oh, I’d like to make a bit more money.” But every day waking up and thinking, right, look at all that money sloshing around out there. How am I going to divert as much of that as possible into my bank account? He, of course, had become rich by marrying a European heiress and was marking his retirement by building a large house overlooking the Mediterranean. But his point was that business success, all other things being equal, was a question largely of motivation. His proof lay in the range of people who made great fortunes, from Mafia bosses to Stanford computer science Ph.D.s, from the men selling vegetable peelers on late-night television to the quantitative geniuses who traded derivatives. People who are barely literate can do much better than those with an alphabet soup of graduate degrees. Business in this sense is not like law or medicine, where every practitioner needs to know a certain body of facts. At most levels, it is a more primal pursuit, requiring character, guts, instinct, leadership, and the application of pure common sense. The last thing it is about is frameworks, spreadsheets, and academic papers. These are just tiny props in a far bigger drama. Consequently, many people have argued that business cannot be taught, only experienced and learned.

  In his book What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School, the late sports agent Mark McCormack wrote, “In fairness to Harvard Business School, what they don’t teach you is what they can’t teach you, which is how to read people and how to use that knowledge to get what you want.” He said that early in his career he made the mistake of hiring Harvard MBAs, assuming they would have the confidence and expertise to solve certain problems. Instead, he found them to be “congenitally naïve or victims of their business training. The result was a kind of real-life learning disability—a failure to read people properly or to size up situations and an uncanny knack for forming the wrong perceptions.” McCormack concluded that graduate degrees were no guarantee of “business smarts.”

  McCormack isn’t the only one to have relished attacking Harvard MBAs. During the summer between my two years at Harvard, I spent an hour with an investment banker in Boston who spent the entire time referring to the business school as “Cambridge Community College,” and finding it funnier every time he said it. Scarcely a week went by at the school without some business titan coming through and saying Harvard MBAs were all well and good but they needed to talk less and do more. The school needed to produce more problem solvers and fewer windbags.

  In early December, Ruback attended a student debate on grade disclosure. The argument in favor of it was that it would refocus students on their academic work, and mark a return to a policy that had worked for the school’s first ninety years. The argument against was that it would discourage students from taking academic risks—my taking Dynamic Markets, for example—and diminish the importance of extracurricular activities. It would also be unfair to nonnative English speakers, given the emphasis on class participation; to anyone from nontraditional HBS backgrounds, for whom all the material was new; and to those trying to switch careers, who would no longer be able to conceal poor finance grades while they tried to find jobs in, say, banking. The final speaker made the point that if HBS admitted students on the basis of their range of achievements and brilliant leadership qualities, why would it then put them all on a forced curve based simply on academics and have that as the only grade they received?

  The vote went forty-four to six against grade disclosure. In the end it did not matter. The administration decided to go ahead anyway, and the dean wrote to say that “Harvard Business School’s reputation is deeply rooted in the transformational experience we provide in our classrooms, an experience that is vitally dependent upon maintaining high academic standards. The relatively recent policy of prohibiting disclosure is inconsistent with our commitment to these standards.”

  The experience reminded me of the anecdote Ruback had told in the first week about the angry student being warned he was not the customer at HBS but the product. But it also reminded me that however much I was enjoying business school, I was too old for a lot of its culture. I did not need any additional motivation to do the work. My motivation came from having left my job and incurred large debts to come to the school with a family. Once I had gotten over the insecurities of the first semester, I had given up worrying about grades as a reflection of what I was learning. I knew what I was learning, and that was enough. When I heard that HBS was now considering admitting more students straight out of college and fewer over thirty, it made sense in terms of creating a more controlled, teachable student body, but no sense in terms of including the widest possible range of experience. What would all those case discussions have been like with a class half full of twenty-two-year-olds with minimal work experience?

  During my time at HBS, I often ran into Bob, my first-semester section neighbor. All my early fears about him had dissolved. Behind the glacial Air Force exterior was a warm, funny man with an elegant mind and a keen ambition to do the best for his family. When we talked about our futures and the opportunities presented by HBS, we would always remind each other that the class of 2006 was not our peer group. Their average age on arrival was twenty-seven. They had not done the same things as we had. In many cases all we had in common with them was HBS. We were not the classic HBS product, and if we tried to compete with those who were, we would be rejected. As we struggled to figure out our route back into real life, we had to bear that in mind. Staring up the curve would kill us.

  Chapter Thirteen

  BIG HAIRY GOALS

  Absurdly profitable company seeks

&n
bsp; journalist with ten years’ experience

  and a Harvard MBA for extremely

  highly paid, low-stress job in which

  he can wear nice suits and loaf around

  in air-conditioned splendor making

  the very occasional executive decision.

  Requirements: acute discomfort in

  the presence of spreadsheets, inability

  to play golf, poorly concealed loathing

  of corporate life, knowledge of

  ancient Greek.

  —THE HELP WANTED AD I SOUGHT BUT NEVER FOUND

  It was mid-January and we had not seen the sun in Cambridge for months. From our apartment high above the Charles River, all I could see were clouds and slush stretching to the Boston skyline. And I still hadn’t a clue what I wanted to do. Everyone else on campus seemed to be fielding multiple job offers and bidding wars for their services. The careers service was telling us that this was the greatest job market they had ever seen. I just wasn’t sure I wanted an MBA job. But graduation was bearing down on us, I had two young sons, and I needed to figure this out. I e-mailed a journalist friend in Washington. Any bright ideas? He e-mailed back: How about being a foreign correspondent in Paris? Most days, I would scan the online HBS Job Bank, where companies posted their positions. Every single job, it seemed, wanted people with “2-4 years in investment banking or management consulting.” My decision not to take one of these jobs over the summer seemed ever more foolish. Would it really have hurt to institutionalize myself for ten weeks? I scrolled listlessly down the screen. Even the nonprofits seemed to want ex-consultants. The only job that seemed to match my qualifications was with the CIA.

  The company presentations on campus slid me into an even deeper funk. The low point was a presentation by a big publishing company from New York, led by a large woman in a blousy suit emblazoned with orange flowers. She had the complexion of a forty-a-day smoker and a sour smile, and spoke in such a stilted, corporate way that I imagined her getting home each day and unleashing her frustration with a string of violent expletives and punches to the kitchen wall.

  “We are passionate about our work,” she said in a listless monotone. “Passion affects everything we do.” The fruits of this passion were laid out on a table before us: financial information, educational and business books, some of the most sleep-inducing magazine titles I had ever seen. One by one the publisher’s recent MBA recruits got up.

  “It’s been really exciting,” said the first, without conviction. “On my first day, I got to work in Manhattan and they told me I had to visit a warehouse in New Jersey. And that’s where I spent the next few weeks. I’ve already presented to senior management, and they acknowledged my proposals.”

  The second recruit, an African American woman, was aggressively peppy. “The great thing at our firm is the passion. Everyone here really wants to do the best job they can and improve not just the company but the world around them. I’ve been on a rotation in all the different divisions of the company—marketing, finance, strategic planning—and I get up each morning and really want to go to work.”

  The cursing smoker intervened. “We’re looking for people who are really smart, passionate, and committed—the very best—to work here.” I was fidgeting furiously with my ballpoint pen and wanted to grab this monster by the neck and scream into her yellowing eyeballs, “And what are you going to do with all these smart, passionate, committed people? Plug them into your dull, trivial culture and waste their lives on the hamster wheel of corporate life?”

  To my self-disgust, I had capitulated, and deposited an application with the consulting firm McKinsey. They made it easier than buying an airline ticket. All you needed to do was fill out an online form with some personal details, which I did late at night after completing my cases. I told myself that if I were a consultant in New York focused on media, I could do it. It would be good for my future. I could put up with the long hours, the weekends in the office, because right now, I needed to earn a living. I could not come out of HBS with nothing. At that moment, all that I had told myself mattered—evenings with my family, the control over my time—went out the window. That was the pressure I was feeling.

  Ben, the parks official I had sat next to in Analytics, offered to help me prepare for my McKinsey interviews. He had spent the summer between the first and second year at the firm’s Boston office and enjoyed it. More than that, he said he had never met such an intelligent, admirable group of people, or been in a company that cared so deeply for its culture of knowledge, education, and improvement. He saw that the hours could pile up and the work might become repetitive, but he was impressed, and I respected his opinion.

  We met over breakfast in Spangler, where he pulled out a large file of caselets—mini business scenarios that consulting firms used to test potential recruits. The interviewer, he said, would begin by offering me a few details about a case. “The client is a beer company whose new light beer is failing to sell in key markets. The company has a history of success and cannot understand why this beer has not succeeded.” A few numbers would follow. When the interviewer stopped talking, you were supposed to begin asking questions. But first, Ben said, you had to ask for a moment.

  “Yeah, right, a moment,” I said.

  “No, seriously, you have to say, ‘Would you mind if I took a moment here?’ ”

  “Those words exactly.”

  “Pretty much. You have to show you’re digesting the information. Then you should repeat the scenario to make it clear that you’ve understood it.”

  “So, I say, ‘One moment please,’ then say, ‘We’re dealing with a beer company that can’t sell its light beer.’ ”

  “Exactly.”

  “No deviation.”

  “Best not.”

  Once you had taken your moment and repeated the problem, you were then expected to start asking questions. “What’s their marketing strategy?” or “Does their beer taste good?” The interviewer slowly revealed facts and numbers as you asked for them and required you to do some quick calculations. What’s the break-even on this business? What’s the market size? The whole exercise would take about twenty minutes. After Ben’s briefing, I attended a special McKinsey-run interview practice session on campus. Eight of us sat around a table while an exhausted-looking junior associate peppered us with caselet questions. Every time she laid out a scenario, the student answering her would say, “Would you mind if I took a moment here?”

  My McKinsey interviews occurred at the Doubletree Hotel, an ugly cube just a short walk from the business school. Arriving in the lobby, I saw scores of students from my year, even people who had vowed never to go into consulting. They were all wearing suits and carrying leather folders containing a notepad and pen. It was like arriving in some deviant sex club and finding all your religious friends gawking at the act. Everyone made excuses: “Oh, I’m just doing it for the experience.” “It’s a fall-back option if the private equity job doesn’t come through.” “It’s the only firm offering to send people to South America.” I even caught Bo there: “I’m just going to meet some dudes in the healthcare practice,” he said, looking uncomfortable in his dark suit. “I mean, we’re at HBS. Gotta have a McKinsey interview at some point. It’s part of the experience.”

  “You traitor,” I said.

  “Well, look at you,” he shot back, poking me in the shoulder. “So much for Mr. Entrepreneur.”

  One by one, we were summoned up to a hotel suite with a McKinsey employee. In the first interview, an associate quizzed me about what to do with a failing drugstore. It all came down to adapting the product selection and range of promotions to the needs of the customers. It seemed to go well. In the second interview, a partner at the firm asked me to develop an approach for an investment fund manager with lower margins than its rivals. We were sitting in armchairs and I realized now why everyone had those leather folders. I had to lean my piece of paper against my knee to scribble my notes. I failed to ask for m
y moment, and flunked the answer. The partner took pity on me. The light had gone out in the sitting area of his suite and I could see through to the rumpled sheets in his bedroom. The room smelled faintly of cigarettes. We sat there in the semidarkness like a pair of guilt-stained adulterers and he asked me what I thought of HBS. I said what I usually said, which was that I felt I had learned a lot, even though the place was a little loopy.

  “I hated it when I was here,” he said. “Compared to being an undergraduate at Harvard, the intellectual experience was nothing.” He asked me where I had last gone on holiday and whether I made a good colleague. These were clearly not the questions he reserved for likely hires. We were just killing time. After twenty minutes, he got up and we parted ways. That evening, he called to say I didn’t seem like the right fit. I agreed.