Ahead of the Curve (6 page)

The summer after graduation I spent mooning around my parents’ house reading travel books and dreaming of a poet’s life on a Greek island: a stone bed, honey and yogurt for breakfast, a few worn tomes on a shelf hewn into the wall, evenings in some harbor-front bar. Only after yet another impatient stare from my father did I finally take a job with a telemarketing company in London, arranged by my friend William. The work consisted of four of us sitting in a room on Lots Road trying to sell advertising space for a new publication called
The Truck Driver’s Hand Book.
We were paid solely on commission, 20 percent of any advertising we sold. William was both naturally good at this and driven to succeed by the financial requirements of a fast-escalating cocaine habit. He would laugh at me as I stared at the telephone.

“Come on, you loser. It’s easy. Watch.” He would dial an engine parts supplier in Watford, charm the secretary, speak to the owner, and wrap up the call with a confirmed sale. “Go on. Let’s see you do it.”

I would dial a number as slowly as I could, jabbing wretchedly at the telephone as if it were diseased. The secretary of the firm I was calling would ask me to repeat what I was saying. “Truck Driver’s what? No, he’s not in. No, he won’t be in later. No. Not until next week or the week after. No we don’t do advertising anyway.” Click. On the tenth day, I made a sale. In theory, I should have made six hundred pounds for myself. But I celebrated by taking the next two days off and watching a cricket match on television. The owner of the firm, a nasty drunk, withheld the money and sacked me. Business and I were clearly not meant to be.

From this nadir, journalism was an obvious next step. I wrote to the editor of
The Daily Telegraph
and was given a few shifts on the paper’s gossip column. I turned out to be good at going to cocktail parties and returning with fifty-word items about how an MP’s dog had urinated on a duchess’s rose bushes, or a writer had found inspiration for his latest book while sailing with the archbishop of York. This evolved into a ten-year stint on Fleet Street, including six as a foreign correspondent.

My first foreign posting was to New York. I was twenty-five years old and carried all my possessions in a suitcase. Over the next two years, I traveled all over the United States and Latin America—to Terre Haute, Indiana, when Timothy McVeigh was executed; to Florida during the presidential election recounts; to the Arctic to interview Inuit; and to Tijuana to meet policemen and newspapermen who stood up to the local drug cartels. It was exciting and occasionally daring stuff. My telephone would ring well before dawn as my editors in London reached their desks, and I would be dispatched, sore-headed from the night before, to the scene of a plane crash, a dramatic arrest, or a sudden political development. I spent six weeks in Chile after General Pinochet was arrested in London, flew overnight to the Galápagos Islands after an oil tanker went down, interviewed the first female president of Panama over the thrumming of a military helicopter deep in a Central American jungle, and spent a frightening week in a violence-torn Port-au-Prince. But at some point, a poisonous notion entered my brain and began to spread: newspaper journalism was dying. All people spoke about in London were our dwindling readership and the lack of investment by our owners. Those long flights and hours spent in clammy airport departure lounges, breathing the noxious fast food odors, began to feel worthless, and I started looking for a way out.

One day, I was sent to interview Gustavo Cisneros, a Venezuelan billionaire and a friend of the then owner of
The Daily Telegraph,
Conrad Black. Interviewing and writing nice things about Black’s friends and potential friends was part of the job of the New York correspondent. Early in my posting, I had spent a harrowing day with the television presenter Barbara Walters, who ten minutes into our interview told me my questions were the most boring she had ever heard. Later she refused to let the photographer who accompanied me get within five feet of her, insisting he take his shots from the other side of the room. Black also sent me to interview Henry Kissinger in his office on Park Avenue. He growled at me for an hour or so about geopolitics. Later, I discovered that the tape recording of my interview skipped every few seconds. In my paranoia, I suspected some magnetic distortion machine in Kissinger’s office had done me in. I was missing every fourth or fifth word Kissinger had said. “The key to peace . . .
click, grumble
. . . negotiation between the Lebanese . . .
squeal, grunt
. . . Bush needs a strategic . . .
wheeeeeeeeeee.
” The piece I wrote was thin on quotes and long on description and analysis. What the journalism pros call “broad brush.”

Cisneros had his offices in a townhouse on the Upper East Side and had decorated them in accordance with his status as a Latin American plutocrat: dark wood paneling, oil paintings of conquistadors on horseback, deep, comfortable armchairs, and footmen offering perfectly brewed coffee. Cisneros himself was a smallish man. He wore a pale gray suit, white shirt, and blue, patterned tie. He sat tidily in his chair, using spare hand gestures to describe an acquisition here, a sell-off there, a sales thrust into new markets somewhere over there. His hair was a slight distraction, boot-polish black and combed so tightly back over his skull it seemed to be stretching the creases out of his forehead. His family had made its money in gritty businesses such as bottling, haulage, and agriculture, but he had expanded successfully into media and technology. All of that toil and sweat, however, was occurring thousands of miles from here, on the roads of Latin America and the production back lots of Miami. Here, Gustavo and I could sit, sip our coffee, and talk big picture—about the impact of globalization, the importance of local brands. If this was business, I could get used to it. As I was escorted out by his secretary, a door in the wood paneling creaked open and I glimpsed a small conference room where a man and a woman, both immaculate and beautiful, were sitting at their laptops and chatting. They looked toward me and smiled and continued their conversation. The secretary said, “Mr. Cisneros only hires Harvard MBAs to work in his private office.” I felt I had been given a glimpse of a better world.

Several of my friends had obtained MBAs, mostly from INSEAD, a school just outside Paris, and spoke well of their experience. The few who had been to HBS were dismissive of it. They mocked its self-importance, the earnestness of the students, the very opposite of British insouciance. All, however, said that the MBA had taught them the language of business. For that they were grateful. So, in August 2001, in a gray, windowless cubicle in an office tower close to Penn Station, I took the GMAT, the standardized test in English and math required for graduate business school. I waited a few moments for a computer to spit out my score: 730 out of 800. The average for Harvard was 700. I could do this.

September 11 knocked me off track. Reporting seemed important again. For several weeks, I was pushed to my limits writing and managing a team of other reporters and photographers flown in from London and all jostling to shine on the story. Then one evening, in the middle of it all, I went to a basement dive for drinks with the rest of the British pack in New York. Christmas lights hung all round the room, making everyone’s already booze-swollen faces look that much redder. “Sensational story,” said one, raising his beer bottle. “Never made so much money off a story in my life.” It was the same emotionally indifferent response I heard whenever a big story broke, a political scandal, a celebrity trial, even a terrorist attack killing thousands. The cynicism that once attracted me to journalism was turning me off. Furthermore, the experience of standing beneath the Twin Towers just before their collapse, watching people leap to their deaths, had forced on me the same question it must have forced on millions of others, and it grew louder as the days passed. If everything ended for you right now, would you be happy with the life you have lived? I had never felt the pressure of this question in the same way. For several weeks, I would wake up feeling as if I were being pressed into a corner with a knife at my throat, forced to give an answer. Have you lived the life you should have? Have you done everything you could have? Have you? Have you?

As a reward for my work in New York, I was offered the job of Paris bureau chief. Margret, whom I had met eighteen months earlier, and I were married just before we moved. Marriage and Paris distracted me again from thoughts of upending my career. There was a rambunctious presidential election to report on and all of France to discover, and one year after we were married, our first son, Augustus, was born. But the questions kept nagging at me.

A diplomat at the British embassy in Paris told me that whenever the ambassador invited the local British press over for lunch, he referred to it as feeding time at the trough. At the next embassy lunch, I looked around the table at the hacks who had stayed in Paris long after their staff jobs expired. Each month, they seemed to descend ever farther down the freelance ladder, their clothes deteriorating, their lips stained darker with cheap red wine. There was one who only ever asked one question, but he applied it to any topic: “Ambassador, what does all this mean for Europe?” The ambassador would pull at his cuffs and reply politely across the elaborately set table, but you could feel the ghost of the Duke of Wellington, a former occupant of the residence, cringing at this unseemly rabble. After long evenings of red wine and conversation with friends, I would lie in bed staring at the ceiling, my mind churning with ill-defined fears and desires. I looked up the totem pole at my newspaper and saw middle-aged men complaining about their salaries and the mediocrity of their managers and harking back to their days reporting from the road. I dreaded being called back to work at a desk in London. So I wrote a letter to myself describing my feelings. I wrote that it was exhausting to feel like this, constantly thinking about change. I was thirty-one years old and had one of the most coveted jobs in my profession and yet all I could think of was what would happen next. I was whipsawed between feeling self-indulgent and feeling sensible, worrying that if I let my next career change happen to me rather than making it happen myself, I would deeply regret it. I wrote about Daw Ma Ma and how the memory of what she built magnified my family’s sense of loss, wielding a nostalgic grip on us some fifty years later. Business had been her salvation, and business, I felt after avoiding it for so long, might also be mine.

The Harvard Business School website was cluttered with inspiring bait. Theodore Roosevelt’s challenge to “Dare Mighty Things” stood out in large crimson letters. Words like
passion
and
leadership
were sprinkled about like punctuation. There were photographs of eager-looking students and bespectacled professors, their hands poised in explanatory poses, exuding wisdom and energy. There on the banks of the Charles River people were daring, leading, imagining, and pursuing. I was drawn to Harvard for two main reasons. The first, I confess, was the name. However famous Harvard is in the United States, it is even more so overseas. It remains, for better or worse, by far the best-known university in America. The second reason was the particular education the business school promised. Even though most business schools teach much the same stuff, the approach and emphasis vary. Among the top schools, Stanford is known as a place for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Kellogg, at Northwestern University, is famous for marketing. If your dream is to build or manage a great American brand, Kellogg is the place. Wharton, at the University of Pennsylvania, is for financiers, those with their eyes fixed on Wall Street. Columbia is similarly plugged into all that happens in New York. The Sloan School, at MIT, is for engineers and scientists wanting to turn their ideas into businesses. And Harvard is about general management. It prepares you to manage and lead all the parts of a business without any particular specialization. These descriptions doubtless do all of these schools a disservice, but they are repeated so often that an applicant, forced to choose, can scarcely ignore them.

Over the Christmas holiday of 2003, I wrote application essays for four schools: Harvard, Kellogg, Stanford, and the Haas School at Berkeley. With no sense of what any of them would make of me, I hoped at least one would take me in. I cranked the essays out blind, as honestly as I could. I had no template to work from, no friendly advisers telling me what the admissions offices wanted to hear. The questions were of three kinds: Why do you want to come to business school? Why do you want to come to this business school? And what have you done in your life up to now that makes you think a business education at this school would be worth your time and ours? As an example of my leadership experience, I wrote about running a newspaper bureau on September 11, 2001. To illustrate an ethical quandary, I described the difficulty of staying impartial as a reporter when writing about the victims and supporters of General Pinochet in Chile. My intention in coming to business school, I wrote, was to be able to build and manage my own media company one day, creating and distributing the kind of news and entertainment I could be proud of.

My English referees were baffled by the forms they were required to fill out. “You have to help me with this, Philip,” my editor pleaded on the telephone from his home in rural England on Christmas Eve “Where on this scale of one to five am I supposed to rank your leadership qualities?”

The next stage in the process was to be interviewed by alumni. My Harvard alumnus was a Frenchman of formidable girth who had once been the publisher of a business magazine. He hobbled to the door of his apartment on Place Vauban to greet me, his leg in a cast. It was early evening and the spotlights shining on Les Invalides reflected off the ceiling. He had pulled out a chair embossed with the Harvard insignia and the year of his graduation. He invited me to sit on it and then retreated behind his enormous desk.