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Wouldn't have read the book except that my two engineer sons are thinking about MBAs. I was always curious about what exactly they taught you at HBS and this book pretty much tells you that. And also how much the 2 years cost: 5,000. I got the impression at first that this was going to be a negative book but it didn't turn out that way. Nice anecdotes throughout the book which I enjoyed.

I was disheartened to see how many grads went to Wall Street. I was hoping that all this effort was to make the American and world economies better with new ideas for tangible stuff instead of the financial product crap that we have now. So much for that. Go to HBS and learn how to play financial hot potato. Luckily we have a government that can print money and bail these creeps out.

Saw one minor error which the fact checker should have got. Averell Harriman's father, E.H., was president of the Union Pacific Railroad, not the "..U.S. Pacific Railroad." And one an editor should have got, "principle/agent" should of course be "principal/agent." Again proving what my disgruntled writer friend told me 40 years ago, "Those that can't do, teach, and those who can't do or teach, edit."

Hope that Mr. Broughton has found his post HBS niche and not one like Bob Dylan sang about: "20 years of schoolin' and they put you on the day shift."

Good book

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"Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School" Overview

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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