New book gives a crash course in the business of life
February 11, 2009
By Armando Vega
Staff Writer
“There are two types of education. One should teach us how to make a living, and the other how to live.”
John Adams may not have read Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School, yet he likely would have approved. The new book, written by Philip Delves Broughton, is a self-account covering the real-life tale of an accomplished career reporter and journalist who served for six years as bureau chief for The Daily Telegraph, a British publication.
Facing a sort of early mid-life crisis, the author hearkens back to the stories passed down his within his family, of his widowed entrepreneurial Burmese great-grandmother, who became that nation’s largest and most successful distributor of Hollywood films in order to successfully provide for her nine children.
This, the dwindling market for journalism, his own need for a fresh start, and the usual impetus of a desire for greater professional and financial mastery of one’s own life, prodded Broughton to vie for an MBA at Harvard Business School.
As the most renowned business school in the world, Harvard’s graduates collectively direct the flow of likely trillions of dollars in the global economy, and alumnus range from former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Michael Bloomberg, and George W. Bush, to CEOs such as Jeff Immelt and Meg Whitman (General Electric and Ebay, respectively).
One immediately appreciates the scale of the rigors entrant students must face, those plucky few to get accepted (the institution harbors a mere 12.6% acceptance rate). Having long-ago adopted the case-study method employed so famously at Harvard Law School, students are presented with real-life business narratives, coupled with the appropriate data of the business’ situation, in order to infer the best possible course of action that might be followed. They do not always have to go it alone: at HBS, it’s a common occurrence to have world-renowned CEO’s drop in for some charitable advice. (At one point Mr. Broughton’s wife remarks, “Are you kidding me? This is what you get to do everyday? You get chief executives beamed in from China to take your questions? It was amazing.”)
Such privilege isn’t easily had, we realize, as the author passes through a brutal regimen and at times wrenching self-doubt.
With many academic disciplines, there will be a substantial gap between what is taught in the classroom and what is bred in the real-world. This is especially and notoriously true with business. Entrepreneurship, “the relentless pursuit of opportunity beyond the constraints of the resources currently controlled,” is by and large an intrinsic characteristic, and it’s largely a question of motivation.
“People who are barely literate can do much better than those with an alphabet soup of graduate degrees,” opines Broughton in a hyperbolic assessment, and we are made to suspect that the author feels, perhaps, he too just doesn’t have “it.”
It is a tale of a man with a penchant for the written word shuttered, however voluntarily, from his life of classic literature and front-line journalism, to a place worlds apart, where for a brief two years he would become a methodical number-cruncher; a strategic contemplator. A man with a gift for the “big picture” of things stoops down to appreciate the minutia of man’s workings, and his understanding of the world is made all the richer for it.
Ahead of the Curve makes for a great read for any student of business, particularly those who could scarcely have imagined setting such a course earlier in their lives. To parse it in the proper lexicon, it is an investment which will surely yield great dividends.
