Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School | Philip Delves Broughton

Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School | Philip Delves Broughton | Fantastic

books:

Ahead of the Curve...

	Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School Philip Delves Broughton Penguin Press HC, The, 2008 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 37 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

A Journalist's Take on Harvard Business School's MBA Program

Philip Delves Broughton was on top of the journalism world as the Paris bureau chief for The Daily Telegraph of London when he got itchy feet and decided he wanted to go to business school. Setting his sights on Harvard, he was pleased to get in. The book's title refers to the grading system at Harvard and alludes to the competition to get a leg up on other MBA students in gaining a lucrative job.

I attended Harvard Business School while in law school many years ago. I was surprised to find out how many things are similar to when I attended. The student complaints were similar, too.

I thought that Mr. Broughton did an excellent job of explaining what the case system is all about and what occurs in preparing for and during a class. If you've always wanted to go to HBS, here's a chance to take a peek.

The book's strength is in exposing the values behind HBS, people seeking the highest-paying jobs despite the personal cost to family life and one's own soul. Mr. Broughton made some half-hearted attempts to seek out such opportunities, but ended his two years at Harvard with a large loan to show for the experience . . . and no job.

The book's weakness comes in Mr. Broughton's desire to teach you some of the basic concepts about business management. I doubt if you are interested. He doesn't always get it right, either.

I found myself comparing Ahead of the Curve to One L, Scott Turow's brilliant description of the bad old days of being a first-year law student at Harvard. One L is a better book. But both are powerful in explaining what it feels like to be a student in the middle of the gigantic forces moving to shape you like a vise into a new form that will be attractive to employers.

for more information click here

Fantastic

An extremely well-written, engaging look at Harvard Business School by an atypical alumnus. The look at Harvard is honest and thorough, including both the positives and negatives of the life-changing 2 years. The conclusions drawn are extremely thought-provoking. Highly recommended.

Must read for anybody thinking about a MBA

Prospective students get bombarded with student testimonials handpicked by the admissions office, and tons of material to pump them up to attend business school. Rarely does the unfiltered truth get aired in public. The good and the bad of a MBA at an elite school is illustrated in this book. With the current situation of Wall Street, this book is even more relevant now than when it was written. Props to the author who had to courage to go ahead with this project.

for more information click here

Multi-dimensional account

In his highly personal review of two years at Harvard Business School, Broughton always maintains a certain detachment and a sense of humor about the rather odd things that are happening around him. His endless interviews at Google and some of his classmates' obsession with total preparation for class are easy targets. Broughton was not the typical HBS student, a fact that he readily acknowledges. This would have been a different book if it had been written by a middle-class Pakistani who was at HBS to bring the lessons of economic development to his native land, or by a student from Iowa who wanted to run a nonprofit, or by a top Harvard undergraduate who planned to make millions at a hedge fund.

With all that understood, I enjoyed the book immensely. Broughton has a journalist's eye for detail, and this is by no means a one-sided demolition of the HBS experience. Broughton has a great deal of empathy for the people he writes about.

for more information click here

That curve was no rainbow

The travails of an MBA education can be scattered with the GARCH bumps and the Fourier dips that roil financial projections. In "Ahead of the Curve" Philip Broughton presents his convexities and inversions while attending Harvard Business School. Broughton slopes to all angles and applies no cosmetic smoothing to his HBS term structures.

Broughton is seeking the golden passport to success from his HBS degree, but is disillusioned that his MBA career conditioning would become a leaden anchor for his life. It is this consternation that dominates the book. He intellectualizes about this conflict, and it ultimately becomes a real-life struggle as he graduates with a degree but no job offer.

The book is no indictment of HBS because admittedly Broughton was not the right candidate for an HBS MBA degree. The book does shed an interesting perspective on the HBS program. Noteworthy was how the faculty reconciles their moral dilemma of arming fiduciary neophytes with a nuclear arsenal of MBA weapons (a la Enron).

for more information click here

reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

products you might be interested in