Book review: What they teach you at Harvard Business School

Published on Sunday 31 August 2008 21:23

BY PHILIP DELVES BROUGHTON PENGUIN £12.99

Review by CHRIS BLACKHURST

EARLY on in Philip Delves Broughton's searingly funny account of life at Harvard Business School, the British reader and TV viewer is brought up short. The MBA students are in their first year, studying RC – Harvard code for required curriculum – when, as part of the course, they play "Crimson Greetings".

They're divided into separate "universes", or teams of ten students, and their task is to build and run a greetings card business. Whichever team creates the most profitable card business wins.

For anyone who has seen The Apprentice, the exercise is eerily familiar. On Sir Alan Sugar's programme they do the same. But nobody there says: "We need to do a deep dive on production to improve our metrics."

As Delves Broughton says: "I kept wondering what a young Bill Gates or Rupert Murdoch would have made of this course. Not much, I imagine." Sugar, undoubtedly, would be the same.

But then entrepreneurs of that calibre are born, not made. What the Harvard MBA is about is instilling in others what to a few comes naturally. So decision-making and risk-assessing are packaged into formulae and processes – management by numbers. There's nothing wrong with that. Every generation has its brilliant entrepreneurs and innovators, but when they leave the stage others have to pick up where they left off.

That's what an MBA does. It makes the challenge of running an organisation successfully more achievable – not in a gung-ho way, but with analysis and thought. I'd be lying if I said I've never thought of doing one myself, even at Harvard. Heavens, I seem to have met plenty of Harvard MBAs in my time and have found myself thinking how come they're sitting on that side of the desk earning a fortune when I'm not.

All credit to Delves Broughton, also a journalist (he was the Paris bureau chief of the Daily Telegraph), for having the gumption (and the cash – the fees aren't cheap) that I lack. The result is confirmation that if you want to go into business but don't have it in you automatically, an MBA is a pretty good place to start. And as the lecturers keep reminding the students and the students keep reminding each other, there is nowhere better than Harvard.

It's this last bit that gives the book its hilarious edge. Partly, it's the Brit-observing-Americans-in-their-own-backyard thing such as when he's told before he arrives: "Don't bring that guitar … Don't bring any books from literature or history classes … Don't bring your cynicism. Do bring all the diverse rest of you. We can't wait to share the experience."

And the glorious (to the eye of a cynical Briton) incident when a student drank too much at the end of a semester party, Holidazzle, urinates on a student's door and then writes to the whole school, admitting to a "regrettable property damage incident". His behaviour, he said, "had made him realise he still had work to do figuring out who exactly he was".

In the main, it's the arrogance and pomposity of the place that sees itself as the world's No 1 that provokes laughter. In one episode, the Dean berates the Wall Street Journal for having the temerity to rank Harvard 13th among business schools. His explanation is that the journal poll was among recruiters, many of whom find it hard to recruit Harvard Business School graduates. The reason? "Harvard MBAs, he said, often choose between several job offers so left many companies disappointed and complaining to newspapers."