Ahead of the Curve

by Philip Delves Broughton

  Harvey had been challenging authority for as long as he could remember. He was born in Hackensack, New Jersey, where his mother worked in the cooperative movement and his father, a mathematician by training, handled tax-delinquent properties for a real estate company. He almost failed to graduate from high school after refusing to sign a loyalty oath to the laws and Constitution of the United States. “I could support the Constitution,” he said, “but I certainly wasn’t going to support all the laws. They told me I was failing the rest of the students in my home room. But I didn’t have much loyalty to my home room.” Eventually the school gave him his diploma anyway.

  “When I asked my mother why I should go to college, she didn’t have many answers,” he said, so he set off instead for Michigan, to work on cooperative farms and later to join the peace movement. In Michigan, a man who had recently returned from India lent him a book by Gandhi. He was immediately struck by Gandhi’s arguments in favor of self-reliance and against excessive consumption. In the late 1950s, Harvey spent six months in prison in Sandstone, Minnesota, for invading a missile base in Nebraska with a group of fellow peace activists. “Prison was a blast. I was in there with one of my very best friends and we played horseshoes and Scrabble and spent lots of time in the library.” His tenure as library clerk ended when he refused to compile a list for the prison authorities of the books each prisoner was borrowing. After prison, he traveled to New Hampshire, where he took shelter in a dilapidated chicken coop and tried to live as lightly off the land as he could. He bought a mimeograph machine and printed The Greenleaf, a newsletter in which he wrote about peace and self-reliance. He soon became a magnet for young people who had refused the draft, spent time in prison, or yearned for a simple life close to the land.

  By 1975, Harvey was overseeing four picking crews, fifty-five people, working in apple orchards in New England. He imposed strict rules on his crews, including no alcohol, drugs, or nonmarital sex. “That was pretty tough on some people,” he says, “but I just happen to think that’s the way people should behave. As for alcohol and drugs, that’s an open-and-shut case. They are harmful to people. As far as sex goes, well, it just seems to me that the raising of children and the relations between a man and a woman are fundamental to everybody.” In 1976, Harvey married one of his crew supervisors and they moved to Maine, where they acquired their house “virtually for free” and began farming blueberry fields for local landowners. It was around this time that Harvey had what he calls “some enlightening experiences.” On one farm, he found blueberries covered with white dust. It turned out the farmer was spraying his fields with DDT to kill birds. “That sure gave me food for thought. I wasn’t anti-pesticides then. But I did notice that wild blueberries weren’t inferior and did not require expensive chemicals.”

  Whenever government inspectors visited the blueberry farms, Harvey said they all told him that for blueberries to be sold legally they could not contain more than five maggots per quart. It seemed an arbitrary number to him, so he decided to investigate. He went to the library in Portland and looked up “blueberry” in the USDA book of regulations. He could not find it. So he telephoned the USDA and asked them about the five-maggot rule. After months of inquiry, he was told that inspectors were permitted to make on-the-spot decisions with regard to tolerable maggot quantities. But why, then, did they all agree on five? He never received a satisfactory answer and concluded that the inspectors were intentionally frightening farmers into buying expensive and unnecessary chemical treatments. Harvey’s suspicion of the USDA had taken root. He began what became a lifelong effort to keep the USDA honest.

  During the winter, Harvey continued his work trying to safeguard organic standards. When I visited him, he was trying to organize a network of students in every state to write to their congressmen to defend the standards. On his solar-powered computer, he went to Amazon.com to find the most popular books about organic food production. He then ordered copies of the books directly from their publishers and offered them for sale. When the orders came in, he sent out the book along with a letter explaining his efforts and asking for support.

  He was rueful about the final outcome of his legal campaign against the government. “A lot of my fellow inspectors are aware of the imperfections of the organic regulations but they continue to work because they say these are the growing pains and that eventually they will restore integrity. That’s true to a certain extent. But the dominance of the manufacturers at a legislative level complicates the picture. The next two years will tell us whether or not we’re on our way to a complete dismantling of the standard or not.”

  Harvey, I felt, had been caught in the maw of business and politics and emerged with his dignity. He represented something missing from HBS: the unmanageable, unembraceable, unsackable, incorruptible quixotic. He did not use quotes from Gandhi, as Gompers had done, to spice up an entrepreneurship class. He lived what Gandhi preached. He did not seek profit or competitive advantage, but he had managed to scare multibillion-dollar companies and the U.S. government. He was as far from the HBS formula for success as one could imagine, which was why I had sought him out.

  The search for the formula for success was a theme of a course called Professional Services. Our professor, Ashish Nanda, was a tremendously enthusiastic Indian who thundered around the classroom like a bee-stung elephant, pushing along rows, pounding on tables, and urging us to consider the implications of a merger of accounting firms or the ethical dilemmas faced by management consultants. For most in the class, this was jaw-dropping stuff. Such issues lay in their immediate future. I had signed up for the course because it had terrific reviews and I felt I had spent too much time considering finance and corporate strategy. I wanted to try something more human resource-y. The course certainly provided that, but not nearly in the way I had imagined.

  Early in the semester we were presented with this equation:

  It meant that the amount of change you were able to effect in either a company or your own life was a function of your current level of dissatisfaction (d), the new model being put in place (m), and the process by which this new model is being implemented (p). Plus E (error), or all the other stuff that might come into play. My first thought was this was not very useful. In fact, more than just not useful. It was actively designed to confuse the issue. It was taking something so obvious—that you would change something only if you were unhappy with it, and the unhappier you were, the more change you would want—and overcomplicating it so that MBAs could charge a fee for offering it in a consulting presentation. Quantification had overstepped its limits.

  Nanda was evidently a brilliant man, a graduate of India’s finest colleges, a popular professor. Early in his academic career, he had chosen to specialize in the practices of professional service firms. He was an authority on hiring practices at consultancies, staffing at investment banks, growth strategies for law firms. During his class, we studied the role of accountants and consultants in the Enron debacle and how they had betrayed their professional standards to gorge on fees. We learned everything you could ever want to know about McKinsey. We studied a fictional HBS MBA who became a successful investment banker only to work murderous hours and lose touch with his children. Most of the students in the class had already signed up for jobs in finance and consulting, so for them this class was a long exercise in trying to feel better about their decision. Once again, the national differences were blindingly apparent. The Americans seemed resigned to a fate of endless hours and slavish toil, their only hope being to find a suitable mentor who might lead them through Hades. The Europeans and Latin Americans felt that at worst, these jobs were a temporary fix and that soon enough they would be heading back to civilization. During one class, the senior partner of an American accounting firm that had merged with a French rival explained the difficulty of negotiating with Europeans. “It’s like the difference between American football and soccer. In American football, you drive down the field, play by play, until you score a to
uchdown. In soccer, you flick the ball around from player to player until you see an opening, and then you strike.” He was clearly very pleased with his comparison. But immediately, Xavier, a Frenchman, and one of the older students in the class, raised his hand.

  “Yes, you say this about the different sports,” he said, “but a game of American football takes three or four hours, while a game of soccer is over in ninety minutes.” Touché. The Europeans laughed while the consultant looked shifty and cross.

  Whenever Nanda organized a speaker, he also arranged a breakfast so we could meet the speaker in a more informal setting. One gray morning, I found myself sitting next to a management consultant called Sherif Mityas. He had grown up in Wisconsin, the son of Egyptian immigrants, both scientists. Mityas trained as an aerospace engineer but soon found that knowing engineering alone would not take him to the top of his industry. He needed to know something about business. So he went to Kellogg, Northwestern University’s business school, in Evanston, Illinois. Upon graduating in 1994, he decided to become a consultant and had remained one ever since, rising to the top of his profession. Mityas spoke of the intellectual thrill of his work, descending on a company, figuring out a problem, and proposing a solution. He enjoyed the variety of moving from industry to industry, problem to problem, and never spending more than a few months gnashing over the same issues. But then he mentioned the snow globes.

  Someone had asked him how he made the best of the relentless travel involved in consulting. How did he maintain his morale? A woman who had left HBS the previous year to become a consultant told us in an earlier class that the two most important things for a new consultant were a good suitcase and a dependable dry cleaner. It was not a pretty picture. Mityas said he would keep his team buoyed up by every so often letting them off an evening working session and taking them to a good restaurant. In order to stave off hotel fatigue, he might go to a local grocery store and buy some fresh fruit, anything to reconnect him with the world beyond the conference room. And each time he went somewhere new, he would buy his daughter a snow globe. She now had quite a collection. I immediately started thinking of my own son and the idea of returning home on a Thursday night in a crumpled suit, wheeling in my case and handing him a snow globe of the Woonsocket skyline. The thing was, Mityas seemed to be very happy with his lot. His work had its issues, but whose didn’t? He was excellent at what he did. He liked his colleagues. He had provided a more-than-comfortable life for his family. Why was I getting so hung up on the snow globe?

  Another visitor to the class was a graduate of the HBS class of 2005 who had gone to work at Morgan Stanley. He had been in the military before HBS and had decided that investment banking, at worst, would facilitate his transition from soldier to businessman. At best, it would be interesting, financially rewarding work. He told us that during his first year, he had once spent 127 hours in the office in a single week. Weeks had gone by when all he saw of his two children were their outlines under their blankets when he left in the morning and when he returned late at night. “I’ve been watching my children grow longer,” he said. His life was the reality for most MBA graduates. The degree enabled them to get jobs that robbed them of their private lives. The consolation was that the experiences and money they accumulated would eventually allow them to live the lives they wanted. But there was no fixed timetable for delaying satisfaction and living the life you wanted. Would there always be one more promotion, one more pay raise, one more bonus? When would be the right time?

  Nanda and I finally crossed swords over another equation. I had been growing impatient with the course as it descended into a therapy session for future consultants. How will I find a mentor? How will I get any work-life balance? How do I make sure I don’t get sacked after two years? It was obvious that most of those choosing consulting as a career were doing so because they were not yet sure what they really wanted to do. Consulting, despite the punishing workload, gave them more time to consider their options.

  One day we were grappling with the staffing requirements at a consulting firm. There were two tiers of consultant: associates and partners. Associates did most of the donkey work, while partners made presentations, managed existing clients, and solicited new ones. Most firms used a version of the forced curve, which they called “up or out.” Every few years, you were reviewed and either promoted or fired. This created a pyramid structure with associates at the bottom and partners at the top. One of the main challenges for these firms was having the right number of people to do the work. Too many, and they would cost too much and be bored. Too few, and the work suffered and you could not grow. Then what did you do in times of boom or bust? Did you hire dozens of people in boom times knowing you might have to lay them off when the bust came? Or try to keep an even hiring pattern, thereby missing out on the upside of a boom economy?

  Nanda had applied himself to this problem and produced a formula: g = rp - δp + σλ. He wrote it on the blackboard with a flourish. From my seat in the back row, I squinted at it. G stood for the growth rate of the firm. Rp was the recruitment rate of partners and δp the attrition rate of partners. Sigma was the fraction of associates who made partner and λ was the ratio of associates to partners. All of which seemed a fussy way of saying that your ability to grow was determined by the number of partners and associates you had to do the work.

  “Why are you making that face?” Nanda said, thundering up the steps of the classroom toward me.

  “I’m trying to understand your equation,” I said.

  “Tell me what it means.”

  I went through the various terms, apparently to his satisfaction. But I was still clearly looking a bit funny.

  “And what’s your problem with it?” he bellowed.

  “I just don’t find it”—I rifled through my mind for the right term— “meaningful. I don’t find it meaningful.”

  “What don’t you find meaningful about it?”

  “It seems too self-evident. It’s like saying that when General Electric makes lightbulbs, it needs enough raw materials and production capacity to make the lightbulbs.”

  “Well, perhaps we can find someone who does find it meaningful,” Nanda said, shooting me a filthy look and turning to the class.

  A man who was sitting across the aisle from me, and who had served in the Special Forces in Afghanistan before HBS, gave me a thumbs-up and mouthed the words “this is a joke.” But there was no shortage of hands, and soon the discussion was back to familiar territory. Quite justifiably, Nanda gave me my worst grade, a three.

  Chapter Fifteen

  GRADUATION

  People are delighted to accept pensions and gratuities, for which they hire out their labor or their support or their services. But nobody works out the value of time: men use it lavishly as if it cost nothing.

  —SENECA, ON THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE

  At the end of the final semester, Section A reunited for one last class. We voted for Felix to oversee it and our assigned reading was Peter Drucker’s article “Managing Oneself.” The main idea in the piece was that in a knowledge economy, we would have to do far more than previous generations to manage our own careers, education, and development. We should recognize our weaknesses, then focus on our strengths and develop them. We should work on our lives outside our careers in order to pursue a meaningful life even while our careers were sputtering. It was an idea that explained much of the personal development focus at HBS, the attention to “transforming” us into leaders. Earlier graduates could join a large company and stay there for their entire careers. We would have to take care of ourselves as individual assets, unique fragments within the business universe, moving from company to company, place to place, responsible for ourselves.

  The question that prompted the sharpest debate, however, was on a different topic. It was posed by a student who would be returning to Wall Street to sell bonds: “How will we know how much is enough?” The benchmark for being truly rich while I was at HBS was having your own
jet. This would probably require a net worth of over $100 million and separated you from the merely wealthy. Lisa, the ethical jihadist, said true wealth would come from having a work-life balance and a happy family. The skydeck strained to contain their smirks. A woman going to a New York hedge fund said that enough was knowing she could live comfortably without ever having to work again, which she intended to achieve long before the usual retirement age. The question encapsulated the fear to which all the cases and discussions had provided no answer. The world was still full of uncertainty. Sure, we were now better equipped to navigate that uncertainty, to weigh up a variety of choices. But the great existential questions remained unanswered. Who are we? And why are we doing this with our lives? How much will ever be enough?

  Overall, the section reunion was flat. All the forced section bonding of the first year had forged friendships within small groups of people. But now we looked at each other for what we were: a random group of people brought together in an educational experiment and now being flung back into the world as individual atoms. The prospect of returning to work weighed on the room. The bankers and consultants were coming to the end of their two-year vacation. Those changing careers were nervous about what that change held in store. After two years of looking at the world as barons and generals and CEOs, most of us would be forced back into the trenches, where a LEAD or Strategy frameworks would be as much use as an ermine cloak. The HBS bubble had protected us. For two years we had been treated as people of extraordinary promise. Now we would have to perform.

  The final weeks of HBS were an unsettling experience. I had achieved a status as the only person in my section without a job offer. The rest of the class was off to Google and Yahoo!, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers, McKinsey, Bain, and the Boston Consulting Group. Annette continued to resist the wads of money Wall Street waved at her and pressed ahead in the fashion industry. A couple were off to China and India—but surprisingly few, after all the noise made about the two countries over the past two years. Bankers who had vowed never to return to Wall Street were now doing so, incapable of resisting the pay. One woman was returning to her job with a West Coast private equity firm despite the fact she had spent most of HBS saying how miserable she had been there. But she had concluded that she had a rare talent for finance, and that in ten years, by her late thirties, she would have all the money she would ever need and could do something she liked. Her family was not rich, and she had the opportunity to make a serious amount of money. However wretched each hour and day might be, she was not going to throw it away. Justin had decided to spend more time in the belly of the beast and would be returning to the investment bank where he had spent the summer. Two years, he said. Then the conversion begun at HBS would be complete. He could then do anything he wanted to. Business and government alike would have to take him seriously after two years on Wall Street. Bo had bought a house in Kansas City, where he would be working for a foundation whose mission was to study and promote entrepreneurship through education programs and academic research. His job would involve touring universities, investigating how entrepreneurship was taught and how researchers and entrepreneurs collaborated to bring ideas from laboratories to the market. It was an ideal place from which to keep searching for that killer start-up opportunity. Cedric had accepted a job at a nonprofit that helped small enterprises in emerging markets, but he was already plotting to join an investment bank that would send him to Africa.