CS @ HBS

I originally planned to write this post about “Ahead of the Curve”, the new “Sensational” book about HBS. But considering the last week’s events, it felt more appropriate to start with that. More than anything, I think this week meant a lot of confusion and insecurity among HBS students. HBS administration did send us an email saying that recruiters (including in finance) are still recruiting MBA graduates and do not plan to decrease recruiting levels (or at least not at HBS) – not sure how much it helped to reduce stress levels. Networking events on campus this week held an impressive number of companies from all sectors – though I don’t know how this number compared to last year.

Many students at HBS are stressed and waiting to see how things unfold. I think that in our narrow world of MBAs, we still need to wait and see, but no doubt everyone acknowledges that this crisis will have a profound impact on Wall Street in particular and the US economy in general. In this context, the title of the book – and the post – seems quite ironic now.

But anyway, to the book…

Ahead of the Curve

Less than two months ago, a new book about HBS was published. It’s called “Ahead of the Curve” (a reference to HBS’ forced curve grading system) and was written by Philip Delves Broughton, HBS class of 2006.

Full disclosure: I have not read the entire book. I read about 40 pages of it while waiting at the airport, and 40 other pages of reviews / articles / Investigatory Report (!!), the latter featured in the Harbus, of course (HBS’ exquisite newspaper). Like my friend said this summer, why would I spend $17 to read about my life?

Based on this partial reading, I wasn’t particularly impressed with the book. It read more like a personal journal and less like anything insightful (”we had a marketing class this morning and after that I ate lunch with a classmate in Spangler and we talked about getting a job in finance”). In other words, kind of like this blog but less funny and costs $17. Another thing I didn’t like about it is that it reveals the “answers” to some of the more interesting , canonical first year cases (like contact lenses for chickens).

Internally at HBS, the book generated a lot of criticism since it does not spare criticism from the school itself, some of it is subjective at best and some plainly incorrect – for example the percentage of McKinsey consultants, Mormons and Marines at HBS…

The author is generally positive about his HBS experience, but also talks about the less positive things he experienced – which I found actually refreshing. People at school sometimes have a tendency to embellish the experience to the point of being ridiculous, and it’s nice to hear it like it is, for a change. I think that’s what angered most people, and obviously the press was happy to quote only the negative parts in the book. In a thorough research I conducted for this post (=Amazon Book Search) I found that the word “unhappy” appears 7 times in the book, whereas the word “happy” appears 22 times!

I would recommend this book to people who just *have* to know what HBS is all about, or to HBS alums who want to feel nostalgic about school. I think this article in the Harbus by Adam Ireland sums is up rather nicely.

And if you still want to buy, you can do it here.