Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School | 
| Author: Philip Delves Broughton
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
List Price: $25.95
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Rating:  32 reviews
Sales Rank: 5731
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 304
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 1594201757
Dewey Decimal Number: 650.07117444
EAN: 9781594201752
ASIN: 1594201757
Publication Date: July 31, 2008
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Product Description
As One L did for Harvard Law School, Ahead of the Curve does for Harvard Business School providing an incisive student s-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 HBS s plush campus. Over the next two years, he and his classmates would be inundated with the best and the rest of American business culture that HBS epitomizes. The core of the school s curriculum is the case an analysis of a real business situation from which the students must, with a professor s 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 Liar s 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 school s success at teaching the traits it extols as most important in business leadership, 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 27 more reviews...
Behind the curve? August 16, 2008
M. Skousen (New York, New York)
33 out of 40 found this review helpful
I was interested right away in this book because I taught at Columbia Business School several years ago, and wondered if the same crazing, hard-driving lifestyle existed at other ivy-league schools. Delves Broughton is brutally honest in this insider's look at Harvard's B school, including his admission that he never got a job offer after his 2 year stint (which may explain his cynicism).
He wrote his book when the school was headed up by devote Mormon economist Kim Clark, who has since left for another challenge -- making Ricks College (now called BYU-Idaho) into a top rated 4-year college.
His main conclusion is that MBA students at Harvard are insecure overachievers and "a factory of unhappy people" who, when they graduate, work too much at their jobs and don't spend enough time with their families and outside interests (p. 268) He said most of the famous CEOs who came to speak at Harvard were successful in business but failures in their home live (multi-divorces). On p. 270, he tells the story of a Goldman Sachs exec who came to Harvard to talk about leadership and values, and then confessed he had four ex-wives. However, he fails to mention that dean Clark has managed to have a successful career and a good family life with seven kids and a loving wife.
I'm citing the page numbers because shockingly this book, published by Penguin, doesn't have an index. Talk about behind the curve!
If you want to know what the author thinks of dean Kim Clark, go to pp. 5-6, 19-20, 28, 85-86, 111, 164, and 208. "Clark has whittled his life down to just four things: work, family, faith, and golf." (p. 85)
As far for his suggestions for improvement at HBS (at the end of the book), I thought he had some good ideas. One was that professors who teach entrepreneurship should not be pure academics but practitioners who have had lots of real world experience. Amen. I found that at Columbia B school, over half the professors had no experience running companies, and the micro they used for microeconomics was a standard micro text, not a managerial econ textbook.
The reason for this strange situation is that years ago top B schools decided they should compete with top academic departments by hiring PhDs who write abstract papers in top journals rather than running successful businesses.
The other major drawback to today's top B schools is that they don't teach hardly any history of finance or business, other than case studies (and those are usually from the recent past). Robert Heinlein wisely said, "He who refuses to study history has no past and no future."
What a sad commentary on today's ivy-league B schools. Fortunately, other B schools, such as Acton and Market-Based Management at Wichita State do teach applied courses by practionioners, not just academics.
The author cites a delightful statement by Jack Welch when he visited HBS: "Government generates no revenues. Government lives off taxes generated by business and people that work in business. Don't ever forget that." (See p. 233)
I could find only one sin of omission: Broughton never discussed the "Biggie" course at HBS, the macroeconomic course on "Business, Government and International Economics."
And one sin of commission: I liked his writing style, but he overdid the use of 4-letter words and vulgarities. Isn't it a sad commentary on the business, finance and academic world that top graduates can't control their tongue?
 An fascinating account of two year's at Harvard Business School July 31, 2008
M. Barnes
31 out of 44 found this review helpful
This book is exceptionally informative about what it is like to study for two years at Harvard Business School. The author, Philip Delve Broughton, a former jornalist for Britain's leading serious newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, writes very well and succeeds in really taking you with him into the classrooms, group study sessions and meetings with guest speakers. But the book offers far more than just a blow by blow account of life at HBS: it is a drole, thoughtful, profound reflection on the attractions and horrors of modern business life and it also provides a lesson for those of us who fancy ourselves as potential captains of industry: the world of business is often immoral and hypocritical, despite its Orwellian efforts to promote ethical standards, and for most of its foot soldiers it is often very boring. This is a great book and it is about far more than just HBS. It deserves to become a classic.
A Thoughtful and Introspective Memoir That Should Be Required Reading for HBS Applicants September 2, 2008
A. Kruglov
12 out of 13 found this review helpful
First, some disclosure: Philip and I were classmates at HBS, did a project together (which he doesn't directly mention in the book), I've had dinner at his house, and I consider him a friend. If you choose to ignore my perspective because of the above bias, I wouldn't blame you, but I want to make sure that myths (generated by some press coverage) of what this book is about are dispelled: by no means is Ahead of the Curve a tell-all insider-guide bashing of the HBS experience. In fact, I suspect that some of the negative reviews are written by folks who either didn't read the book or didn't read it all the way through.
What the book is instead is a rather touching introspective memoir on Philip's personal experience at HBS as an outsider - someone who, because of his age, career background, nationality, but most of all personality did not fit into the traditional HBS mold. Despite that, the reader comes away clear on the fact that Philip learned a great deal from HBS, respects its educational method tremendously, made some very good friends, and overall came away a bigger person after it. I want to elaborate on that last point - Philip was already a fully formed individual before coming to HBS: a father, a husband, a successful journalist, a well-traveled man. To feel growth after HBS, where the average age is ~5 years younger and the average experience is much more junior is a BIG DEAL.
The book really has two elements to it. One is a witty description of the HBS stereotypes, fun stories about interactions, and, ultimately, a fascinating tale of what it's like to be immersed into the HBS experience. The second (one that I didn't find as exciting having gone there) is a reasonably in-depth description of the cases and educational method. The first element is a joy to read and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. Moreover, it's quite an experience to observe Philip's thought process and see how life touches him. Highlights include getting stuck in a white wedding limo in the parking lot at the Google headquarters and frantically taking notes on a loose-leaf sheet of paper during a McKinsey interview. The second element is geared to the book's main target audience: potential b-school applicants. To be honest, I was shocked by how well Philip recollects the cases and formulae from HBS. I certainly got quite a refresher!
In the end, Philip chooses to opt out of the post-HBS grind, having fully opted into the experience while there. Funnily enough, too many people do the opposite. They float through HBS, barely read cases, sign up for courses on Tue-Thu so they can travel all second year, and then opt into a grueling i-banking or hedge fund job. Personally, I think Philip has come out a better person having learned much from what HBS has to offer and still chosen to pursue life in his own manner. He's the type of graduate HBS should be proud of - I certainly am proud to have gotten to know him while there!
Despite everything I wrote above, I must point out that PDB is a writer and as such, he left plenty out that didn't fit his theses. For example, I was a part of a team of three with him on a first-semester project in our second year. Of the three of us, exactly zero has jobs we accepted after graduation. Of course, all of us has unusual ambitions, but comparisons are driven by one's choice of peer groups. Philip stands out dramatically when compared to i-banker types, but he may not be so unusual amongst others, albeit smaller, HBS groups. One of his section-mates, for example, joined a record label in a creative role after school for a salary of at most 1/4 of what he would have gotten had he gone back to his investment banking career.
Overall, Philip gives a balanced perspective on HBS. He gives an even more balanced perspective on himself and it was a joy to follow his personal travails. Yes, he does omit descriptions of some of the more "out there" folks from HBS, but no, he doesn't break any sacred bonds of the HBS classrooms. If you went to HBS and are fuming based on the press coverage of this book, please read it first before forming an opinion. And if you think about going there, PLEASE READ IT!
"Ahead of the Curve" -- Interesting Book August 8, 2008
R. Reise
11 out of 14 found this review helpful
I found "Ahead of the Curve" very interesting and enjoyable. I enjoyed the author's insights into the challenges of attending Harvard Business School. I found Delves Broughton's anecdotes on the professors, guest lecturers and classmates particularly interesting. The author painted a general picture of what attending Harvard Business School was like. I found myself relating to the author's challenges in dealing with his family life at the same time he was attending Harvard Business School. This book was looking at Harvard from the eyes of the author. Surely if some of the author's classmates had written about their views of Harvard Business School, they probably would have painted somewhat different pictures. I found certain parts of the book more engaging than others, but overall I would strongly recommend the book to others.
R. Reise
Wonderful for Anyone Thinking about getting an MBA August 8, 2008
Katie
10 out of 21 found this review helpful
A must read for anyone thinking about getting an MBA. It will give you an idea of what things will be like.
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