Does a Harvard MBA really open doors for graduates? Journalist Philip Delves Broughton ditched his job as the Daily Telegraph’s Paris bureau chief to attend Harvard to find out. His aim was partly to gain control of his career and partly to indulge a long-held fascination with business.His book, “What They Teach You at Harvard Business School: My Two Years in the Cauldron of Capitalism” in the UK (and “Ahead of the Curve” in the US), chronicles his experiences as an MBA student and gets a glowing review from Caroline Baum. It’s been greeted with more wariness by the business school itself, which sees it as a violation of trust.
One of less than 900 to be selected from an application pool of over 7,000, Delves Broughton joined students on a highly competitive course where professors are known to ‘cold call’ students to present real-life business case studies.
Yet once you’re in, it’s “almost impossible to fail”, he writes, with copious support forthcoming for the worst students. The only way to get kicked out, he reckons, would be to not show up to class or to be “mean to everyone who tried to help you”.
For people who’ve come from a corporate environment, it may even seem like a holiday — a student from the financial sector “did not expect to learn much, but she was looking forward to sleeping, working out and taking long vacations.”
Delves Broughton’s own background meant he felt at a disadvantage to those with a more business experience. But he makes some keen observations on the nature of MBAs:
“An MBA course tries to teach people in a classroom the lessons which can only be properly learned in the actual arena of business: valuation, negotiation, trading, hiring and firing. It also creates an ethical risk by turning the academic pursuit of business ingenuity into a goal in itself. Enron was the classic case of a Harvard MBA, Jeff Skilling, getting high on his own brilliance and ignoring such trifles as the law or fiduciary responsibility.”
He is critical of the Harvard MBA tradition of grading students on a curve from best to worst, ranking people using what he views as “the very narrowest criteria”.
“That’s just a wretched way to live, a wretched way to run a school. We’re all grown-ups by this point, and we shouldn’t all be comparing ourselves to each other, and they do that incessantly,” he’s quoted as saying.
He also struggles with fact that the MBA will land you a high-flying job — but will rob you of your private life, and decides to opt out of the fast track, even if “it feels like insanity”.
So does he regret the two years and high fees he gave over to getting the degree? Not a bit of it. He claims it was “unquestionably” worth doing.
In writing it all down, he’s offering prospective MBA students a glimpse of life behind the desk at one of the world’s most prestigious business schools.
