Ahead of the Curve (29 page)

In 1998, HBS imposed a policy whereby recruiters were not allowed to request a student’s grades. At the time, there were two MBA classes in each year, one that arrived in September, one in January. The caliber of the classes varied, and it was felt that it was not fair on students in the tougher class to have their grades compared with those in the inferior one. But since the two classes had been reduced to one, the policy had come under review. Recruiters wanted to know grades, and alumni of the school who had had to reveal their grades felt that the nondisclosure policy diminished HBS’s academic standards. At the end of November, we received a letter from Rick Ruback explaining the administration’s thinking. “In many ways, non-disclosure is inconsistent with our mission of developing outstanding business leaders,” he wrote. “Much of what business leaders do is define, measure, and seek ways to enhance performance.” Consequently, HBS was considering optional disclosure starting with the class of 2008. The president of our student association explained to
The Harvard Crimson
that the administration had been worried by a perception that “general academic motivation and rigor has gone down” and that “people are valuing social, networking, and extracurricular activities, rather than gaining general management skills.” Ruback countered: “We want to be sure we provide positive incentives for students in a way that helps them make the most of their time at HBS. We also believe students earn their grades, and thus it is fair they be able to use them to highlight their capabilities in a career search, should they so choose.”

My own “social, networking, and extracurricular” activities had expanded since the first year to include twice-weekly racquetball games with Oleg, a Russian student in my section who resembled the young Boris Yeltsin, with a heavy, smiling face and a thatch of thick blond hair. Oleg had spent part of his youth in New York, where his father was a Soviet diplomat, which explained his fluent, colorful English. His slow amble onto the court was deceptive. He was a nimble and ferocious player who slammed into walls and cursed enthusiastically. After each game, we chewed over the latest example of HBS insanity.

“I can’t see why they’re worried about us not working hard enough,” said Oleg one afternoon, wiping his brow. “I’ve never worked so hard in my life. I work and I go home and see my wife. I’m not going to nightclubs in Boston on a Monday. I wish I had time to do some networking. I mean, are you my network, Philip? Fuck. Shit. I’m in big trouble. Come on, you loser, let’s play another game.”

Grade disclosure unleashed the pent-up feelings among students about the culture of the school, and became a referendum about the school’s purpose and methods. Our study groups had broken up after the first year, but I still bumped into Stephen, the ex-diplomat, and he was indignant on the subject. “How can this be a safe learning environment if students have to worry about grades all the time? You remember Analytics? We knew nothing. Then the next thing, we’re being put on a forced curve with a bunch of bankers and consultants who could pass the first-year exams in their sleep. It’s ridiculous. And look at the way they’re just going to try to impose it on us. Didn’t they read their own LEAD cases about building consensus?”

“But it’s not going to affect us,” I replied. “We’re safe.”

“That’s not the point,” he said, angrily. “The point is that the students at this place are not respected. The only people whose opinions they care about are the recruiters and the alumni, because they’re the ones who give all the money.”

I agreed with him. The grades were useful for me in terms of telling me how I was doing, especially in the more technical courses. But the fact that I earned ones in LEAD and Dynamic Markets and twos in Biggie, the macroeconomics course, and LCA, was trivial. It was no indicator of how good a businessman I might be.

Grade disclosure forced us to consider the purpose of a business school. A senior journalist on the
Financial Times
once told me that the real secret to making money was wanting to make money. Not in the sense of “oh, I’d like to make a bit more money.” But every day waking up and thinking, right, look at all that money sloshing around out there. How am I going to divert as much of that as possible into my bank account? He, of course, had become rich by marrying a European heiress and was marking his retirement by building a large house overlooking the Mediterranean. But his point was that business success, all other things being equal, was a question largely of motivation. His proof lay in the range of people who made great fortunes, from Mafia bosses to Stanford computer science Ph.D.s, from the men selling vegetable peelers on late-night television to the quantitative geniuses who traded derivatives. People who are barely literate can do much better than those with an alphabet soup of graduate degrees. Business in this sense is not like law or medicine, where every practitioner needs to know a certain body of facts. At most levels, it is a more primal pursuit, requiring character, guts, instinct, leadership, and the application of pure common sense. The last thing it is about is frameworks, spreadsheets, and academic papers. These are just tiny props in a far bigger drama. Consequently, many people have argued that business cannot be taught, only experienced and learned.

In his book
What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School,
the late sports agent Mark McCormack wrote, “In fairness to Harvard Business School, what they don’t teach you is what they can’t teach you, which is how to read people and how to use that knowledge to get what you want.” He said that early in his career he made the mistake of hiring Harvard MBAs, assuming they would have the confidence and expertise to solve certain problems. Instead, he found them to be “congenitally naïve or victims of their business training. The result was a kind of real-life learning disability—a failure to read people properly or to size up situations and an uncanny knack for forming the wrong perceptions.” McCormack concluded that graduate degrees were no guarantee of “business smarts.”

McCormack isn’t the only one to have relished attacking Harvard MBAs. During the summer between my two years at Harvard, I spent an hour with an investment banker in Boston who spent the entire time referring to the business school as “Cambridge Community College,” and finding it funnier every time he said it. Scarcely a week went by at the school without some business titan coming through and saying Harvard MBAs were all well and good but they needed to talk less and do more. The school needed to produce more problem solvers and fewer windbags.

In early December, Ruback attended a student debate on grade disclosure. The argument in favor of it was that it would refocus students on their academic work, and mark a return to a policy that had worked for the school’s first ninety years. The argument against was that it would discourage students from taking academic risks—my taking Dynamic Markets, for example—and diminish the importance of extracurricular activities. It would also be unfair to nonnative English speakers, given the emphasis on class participation; to anyone from nontraditional HBS backgrounds, for whom all the material was new; and to those trying to switch careers, who would no longer be able to conceal poor finance grades while they tried to find jobs in, say, banking. The final speaker made the point that if HBS admitted students on the basis of their range of achievements and brilliant leadership qualities, why would it then put them all on a forced curve based simply on academics and have that as the only grade they received?

The vote went forty-four to six against grade disclosure. In the end it did not matter. The administration decided to go ahead anyway, and the dean wrote to say that “Harvard Business School’s reputation is deeply rooted in the transformational experience we provide in our classrooms, an experience that is vitally dependent upon maintaining high academic standards. The relatively recent policy of prohibiting disclosure is inconsistent with our commitment to these standards.”

The experience reminded me of the anecdote Ruback had told in the first week about the angry student being warned he was not the customer at HBS but the product. But it also reminded me that however much I was enjoying business school, I was too old for a lot of its culture. I did not need any additional motivation to do the work. My motivation came from having left my job and incurred large debts to come to the school with a family. Once I had gotten over the insecurities of the first semester, I had given up worrying about grades as a reflection of what I was learning. I knew what I was learning, and that was enough. When I heard that HBS was now considering admitting more students straight out of college and fewer over thirty, it made sense in terms of creating a more controlled, teachable student body, but no sense in terms of including the widest possible range of experience. What would all those case discussions have been like with a class half full of twenty-two-year-olds with minimal work experience?

During my time at HBS, I often ran into Bob, my first-semester section neighbor. All my early fears about him had dissolved. Behind the glacial Air Force exterior was a warm, funny man with an elegant mind and a keen ambition to do the best for his family. When we talked about our futures and the opportunities presented by HBS, we would always remind each other that the class of 2006 was not our peer group. Their average age on arrival was twenty-seven. They had not done the same things as we had. In many cases all we had in common with them was HBS. We were not the classic HBS product, and if we tried to compete with those who were, we would be rejected. As we struggled to figure out our route back into real life, we had to bear that in mind. Staring up the curve would kill us.

Absurdly profitable company seeks
journalist with ten years’ experience
and a Harvard MBA for extremely
highly paid, low-stress job in which
he can wear nice suits and loaf around
in air-conditioned splendor making
the very occasional executive decision.
Requirements: acute discomfort in
the presence of spreadsheets, inability
to play golf, poorly concealed loathing
of corporate life, knowledge of
ancient Greek.

—THE HELP WANTED AD I SOUGHT BUT NEVER FOUND

It was mid-January and we had not seen the sun in Cambridge for months. From our apartment high above the Charles River, all I could see were clouds and slush stretching to the Boston skyline. And I still hadn’t a clue what I wanted to do. Everyone else on campus seemed to be fielding multiple job offers and bidding wars for their services. The careers service was telling us that this was the greatest job market they had ever seen. I just wasn’t sure I wanted an MBA job. But graduation was bearing down on us, I had two young sons, and I needed to figure this out. I e-mailed a journalist friend in Washington. Any bright ideas? He e-mailed back: How about being a foreign correspondent in Paris? Most days, I would scan the online HBS Job Bank, where companies posted their positions. Every single job, it seemed, wanted people with “2-4 years in investment banking or management consulting.” My decision not to take one of these jobs over the summer seemed ever more foolish. Would it really have hurt to institutionalize myself for ten weeks? I scrolled listlessly down the screen. Even the nonprofits seemed to want ex-consultants. The only job that seemed to match my qualifications was with the CIA.

The company presentations on campus slid me into an even deeper funk. The low point was a presentation by a big publishing company from New York, led by a large woman in a blousy suit emblazoned with orange flowers. She had the complexion of a forty-a-day smoker and a sour smile, and spoke in such a stilted, corporate way that I imagined her getting home each day and unleashing her frustration with a string of violent expletives and punches to the kitchen wall.

“We are passionate about our work,” she said in a listless monotone. “Passion affects everything we do.” The fruits of this passion were laid out on a table before us: financial information, educational and business books, some of the most sleep-inducing magazine titles I had ever seen. One by one the publisher’s recent MBA recruits got up.

“It’s been really exciting,” said the first, without conviction. “On my first day, I got to work in Manhattan and they told me I had to visit a warehouse in New Jersey. And that’s where I spent the next few weeks. I’ve already presented to senior management, and they acknowledged my proposals.”

The second recruit, an African American woman, was aggressively peppy. “The great thing at our firm is the passion. Everyone here really wants to do the best job they can and improve not just the company but the world around them. I’ve been on a rotation in all the different divisions of the company—marketing, finance, strategic planning—and I get up each morning and really want to go to work.”

The cursing smoker intervened. “We’re looking for people who are really smart, passionate, and committed—the very best—to work here.” I was fidgeting furiously with my ballpoint pen and wanted to grab this monster by the neck and scream into her yellowing eyeballs, “And what are you going to do with all these smart, passionate, committed people? Plug them into your dull, trivial culture and waste their lives on the hamster wheel of corporate life?”

To my self-disgust, I had capitulated, and deposited an application with the consulting firm McKinsey. They made it easier than buying an airline ticket. All you needed to do was fill out an online form with some personal details, which I did late at night after completing my cases. I told myself that if I were a consultant in New York focused on media, I could do it. It would be good for my future. I could put up with the long hours, the weekends in the office, because right now, I needed to earn a living. I could not come out of HBS with nothing. At that moment, all that I had told myself mattered—evenings with my family, the control over my time—went out the window. That was the pressure I was feeling.