This is a well written, witty and revealing book that gives an insider’s look into “the Cauldron of Capitalism” that is the Harvard Business School (HBS) and describes the strengths and weaknesses of this institution.

 

Philip Broughton, (born in Bangladesh, grew up in England), abandoned a promising career as a journalist for a two year Harvard MBA, 2004-6. Broughton thought a Harvard MBA would open the doors to a successful and secure job in business. He writes of his time at Harvard using an approach similar to the participant observation method of anthropology.

 

HBS teaches finance, strategy, accounting and process through professors that have experience beyond academia and visiting influential entrepreneurs. The school relies heavily on the use of case studies to learn business skills. There were 500 during Philip’s two years study. The case study approach teaches how to make business decisions with partial information, as in the real world.

 

HBS courses include Entrepreneurial Marketing; International Financial Management; Strategy and Technology; Coordinating and Managing Supply Chains; and Dynamic Markets. They also had some courses in business integrity and moral judgment but it was well understood that the main reason that people were there was to learn how to make lots of money.

 

This book is useful as a look into how the HBS works and is useful to anyone (least of which are potential MBA students) because it shows how some of the people who (or used to) run the world, think. Broughton points out in his book that many people don’t like business people with MBA degrees (especially from Harvard) because of their part in the 2008 international financial crisis.

 

After he did the course and wrote this book, Philip Broughton wrote in the Sunday times of London (2009), that the Harvard MBA degrees are now “scarlet letters of shame” and the Harvard Business school brand has been damaged, “time after time and scandal after scandal”. The school, graduating 900 students a year, found many of its graduates in the thick of the 2008 financial meltdown.

 

The assumption was that if you’ve done a Harvard MBA you are automatically part of a world leading business and financial elite. Many Harvard MBA graduates were involved in the thick of the decision making process that caused the financial meltdown. For example, some of the Harvard Alumni involved include:-Stanley O’Neal and John Thain, former CEOs of Merrill Lynch and Co. ( in charge during the companies decline); Rick Wagoner who was the ousted CEO of General Motors Corp; and Christopher Cox, former chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. There are many other Harvard MBA graduates that face allegations of corruption and greed in the wake of the 2008 collapse of financial markets.

 

The school may bear some responsibility for these graduates’ decisions but the school also deserves credit for producing many graduates that are providing leadership and whose financial companies have survived.

 

Harvard graduates tend to focus on things like cost-benefit analysis and making as much money as quickly as possible as distinct from considering humanity and business ethics. The Global economic meltdown of 2008 highlighted this weakness for HBS in that their graduates were at the forefront.

 

Oliver Staley writes in Bloomberg.com 1/4/09, his article headlined, “Harvard begins case study as Tainted MBA’s reveal damaged brand.” Harvard BS is using the world financial collapse as an opportunity to create self reflection and reform in the school. Harvard has moved to fix the ethics problem in appointing a new Dean, Nitin Nohria, a specialist from the school in business ethics. Another example is a student initiative called the “Harvard MBA oath” which students make an Oath (like the medical Hippocratic Oath) to be good ethical business citizens.

 

Philip found his two years at HBS personally rewarding but his quest for employment in the well paid corporate sector, showed that you need to be a business type to get maximum gain from a HBS MBA. As an ex-journalist “square peg”, he couldn’t find a job after graduation.

 

Broughton writes in his book that he was happy he did the course (even though it cost him $170,000 US for two years study at HBS) because ”you emerged from the school un-intimidated by business and it’s practitioners” and that it pushed him “so aggressively against the window of my soul.” He found through the experiences of classmates that the highest paying jobs that Harvard MBA grads aspire to, have a cost to family life and to “the soul.”