From the moment we set foot on the Harvard Business School campus, we were promised a “transformational experience”. Now the question dogs every mind: what exactly have I been transformed into? A consultant? An entrepreneur? A hedge fund manager? An artful manipulator of the global supply chain? An eco-warrior?
Halfway through the two-year MBA, the after-life now looms. Do I want to chase opportunity to China? Or pursue it at home, wherever that may be? Do I worry about the loans I’ve accumulated to get this degree, or follow Harvard’s oft-repeated advice and treat them as a “rounding error” on any estimate of my future wealth?
The recruiting stampede for 2006 technically begins in October, but in reality it has been going on since the start of the year, when the hunt for summer work began. Spurred on by the careers office, students drafted elaborate, colour-coded spreadsheets logging telephone calls to contacts, alumni, friends, friends’ cousins, dog-sitters’ friends, anyone who might give them work.
It’s that back to school feeling
For Philip Delves Broughton old habits die hard as he charts his progress at Harvard by journal entries rather than behaviour charts
Among those eager to go to Wall Street, some filed as many as 30 applications and found themselves with 30 thirty interviews in one week. It was completely nuts, though typical of the collective dementia that develops when you plunk 1,800 Harvard MBA students in a confined space for months on end.
I suffered through two interviews with investment management companies. In each case, it took roughly two minutes to establish our “lack of fit”. I remember an out-of-body moment in which I was asked to explain why stock prices moved. I felt as if I was floating above the room, watching the two men in white shirts stare at my hand as it moved up, then down, then all around in a strange whirring motion, clarifying absolutely nothing.
A lesson in moral leadership
The recent hacking by applicants into Harvard Business School’s admissions websites has provoked a widespread debate on the teaching of ethics on MBA courses.
But I look at it this way. Had I never come to HBS, I would never even have had this interview. I would never have researched the investment management industry and met people in it and never have known as conclusively as I do know that it is not for me. I can now safely remove it from my list of potential careers.
Business school for many students is a life-editing process as much as an educational one. You are given the time to think about what kind of work you will find fulfilling. You meet and hear people from so many fields of business and with each encounter think, yes, I could be like this person or work for them, or please, get me out of here. I’ve had both experiences many times this past year.
Hearing Terry Semel, the chief executive of Yahoo, explaining how he negotiates acquisitions, I thought wow; or David Rubenstein, the founder of the Carlyle Group, offering advice on managing a life between the public and private sectors; or Richard Perry, the founder of Perry Capital, elegantly demystifying the hedge fund business; or Larry Page of Google describing how search and translation technologies will change the world. There were speakers I never expected, notably a series of entertainment and media executives: Jeff Zucker of NBC Universal Television; Joe Roth of Revolution Studios; Brad Grey, the president of Universal Studios.
One wet evening in February, I found myself listening to one of my journalistic heroes, Alejandro Junco de la Vega, the president of Mexico’s Grupo Reforma, whose newspapers have gone after corrupt politicians in an unprecedented way for his country.
In this sense, business school has been a far less business-y experience than I imagined. Naturally there have been finance and accounting courses, game theory problems in strategy and a mind-freezing tussle with the balance of payments for international economics. But there has also been lots of encouragement to think about how all of this might work as part of a life.
And then there is all the pent-up energy in a school like this, which erupts in the least expected ways. Shortly before Christmas, a fellow student, one of our class, Avi Kremer, was diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, a progressive, neuromuscular disease. He wrote an article in the student newspaper about how he had gone from dreaming of running a Fortune 500 company to wanting to stay alive long enough to marry his fiancée.
His classmates promptly swung into action with sales, auctions and other events and by the end of the school year they had raised more than $100,000 for research into the disease. He is pressing on with his MBA and plans to graduate on schedule next year.
“We talk about ‘educating leaders who make a difference in the world’,” said Nate Boaz, Kremer’s class president, quoting from HBS’ mission statement. “Avi has given us the best lesson to date.”
For some, the return to work cannot come soon enough. For them the MBA is like a forced vacation, where they are the sort to lie on a palm-fringed beach cursing the fact there is no that they cannot get reception for their Blackberry. They cannot wait to get back on the career escalator.
After 10 years’ work as a journalist, I am enjoying the break. It has given me time I never had before to spend with my wife and son. This may have absolutely no impact on my prospects in business, but it is very nice all the same.
Subjects I once sneered at, I now find quite absorbing. Whoever would have thought supply chains would be such a kick? Or Sarbanes-Oxley? Or cash-flow curves for start-up ventures?
At a practical level, I have teamed up with a technology-minded classmate to set up a digital content company, Maby Media, to explore the creative and business opportunities in podcasting, a way of recording and distributing audio content online. We have drafted a business plan, spoken to potential investors, examined the market, road-tested the technology and kept our costs to a minimum.
It has been fascinating coming from newspapers into this new world of digital media, where everyone is probing and prodding, experimenting with parameters and business models, questioning everything from delivery systems to the very essence of news and entertainment themselves.
It is a turbulent frontier world, and enormous fun to inhabit, whatever becomes of our venture. Had I not come to HBS would I have had either the time or nerve to go wading in here? Perhaps not.
If you have a question here, there is always someone with an answer. It is, as the professors frequently say, a risk-free environment. This was especially apparent at this year’s business plan contest, won by a student with a plan for a company called Uplift, making bras for fuller-sized women.
She was inspired by her own frustration at trying to find a bra that fitted, thereby, by her own admission breaching the first rule of marketing: don’t imagine of yourself as the client. She won $10,000 in cash and the same amount in accounting and legal start-up services to help bring her vision to reality. So much for HBS being all theory and no practice.
Philip Delves Broughton: It’s that back to school feeling
Philip Delves Broughton: A lesson in moral leadership
For earlier diaries go to www.ft.com/businesseducation
