What They Teach You at Harvard Business School by Philip Delves Broughton (3.5 stars)

Harvard MBAs are everywhere - working as CEOs of Silicon Valley startups, at the highest levels of government (George W. Bush has a Harvard MBA!?!), and at the head of some of the wealthiest companies in the world. Having been to Harvard and gotten the tourist tour, I was interested to hear about how the MBA works, and about what goes on behind the closed doors.

Broughton takes you inside the privileged world of the MBA, and he does a great job. Before chucking in the towel for a $170,000 2-year trip through MBA-land he was the Paris bureau chief for the UK Daily Telegraph.

Being a Harvard MBA is certainly interesting - they get amazing speakers (Al Gore, Bill Gates, Kofi Annan, various heads of state and fortune 500 companies), and the case-driven education that uses real-world scenarios seems effective and challenging.

Broughton also details a fair bit of ugliness, this passage made me sad:

Once you get accepted by HBS, you want to clear out your bank account so that you get more financial aid.
I'm sorry, I'm not getting this. You buy a BMW to get financial aid?
When you list your assets in the financial aid application, you don't have to mention your car, but you do have to list any savings or property. So you buy a car for twenty thousand dollars, maybe you get an extra twenty thousand dollars in financial aid, so basically HBS buys you a BMW. If you hadn't bought the car, you'd have to pay the twenty thousand dollars out of your savings.
...
This is unbelieveable. How many people do this?
Everyone coming from Wall Street knows about this. And the consulting firms. It doesn't always work. But lots of people try it.

Broughton counts among his MBA peers some amazingly motivated and bright students. For many, but not all, the motivation is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow:

New MBAs joining a top private equity firm such as Blackstone, KKR, Texas Pacific Group, or Bain Capital, could expect to earn $400,000 in their first year. First-year investment bankers, by contrast, could expect maybe half of that, provided everything went well. To exacerbate the bankers' inferiority, they knew they would probably have to spend most of their time raising money and pitching ideas for their friends in private equity...You could earn $200,000 a year straight out of school, and your peers would still think you had failed.

The counterbalance to the vast sums of money is the tails of woe from a personal perspective - crushing workloads, ridiculous hours, and terrible family lives. Broughton meditates on this theme for much of the book, especially as he attempts to get a job at the end of the second year, and finds himself applying for jobs he doesn't really want. Towards the end of the book the bitterness of not being able to find a job with a newly minted MBA seeps in.

The book ends with a postscript the author added when the financial crisis hit in 2008, just as the book was published. I thought this section was a terrible, sore-loser rant against HBS, its culture, and its methods. There may be a fair chunk of blame to be laid with Harvard MBAs, but this was a poor way to do it.

I'll leave you with one final quote. Bureaucrats everywhere, listen up to Toyota, king of Just-In-Time:

To implement jidoka, Toyota had to eliminate any sense of stigma for an employee who halted the production process. Above each station along the production line, the company installed a pull, an andon, which the worker was encouraged to pull whenever he spotted a problem...After diagnosing the problem, the [team] leader would then lead his team in the Five Whys, a means of getting to the root of any problem. If you just asked why, you would get the immediate cause of a problem. If you asked it four more times, you would get to the bottom of the problem. The company encouraged workers never to assume any process was set in stone and to seek constant improvement...Toyota was such a success because it considered nothing too small. The company was constantly seeking to improve even the minutest details of its operation, and every employee was involved.

3.5 stars