Books: What They Teach You at Harvard Business School
Philip Delves Broughton
Christopher Hart, Sunday Times, UK - In 2004, the journalist Philip Delves Broughton walked away from what sounds like a peach of a job, Paris bureau chief for the Daily Telegraph, to enroll in Harvard's world-famous MBA course. . .
Feelings of unease emerge even before he arrives. He reads a student guide on What to Bring. "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." Immediately, his bolshie British bullshit- detector thrums into life: "Who were these people? And why did they talk like this? Why can't I bring my cynicism? Or my books? Aren't they a part of the 'diverse rest of me'?" . . .
He is surprised at the large presence of earnest Mormons and unimaginative former-military men in this cauldron of capitalism. But gradually this begins to make sense, for HBS is pervaded with an oppressive atmosphere of unquestioning obedience and creepy religiosity. There is the confessional My Reflected Best-Self exercise, to encourage students "to create a developmental agenda for leveraging their reflected best-self" and "work maximally from positions of strength". Approved results sound like this: "I do not take on the negative energy of the insecure . . . I stay centered . . . I try to model the message of integrity, growth and transformation." . . .
The weirdest and creepiest episode is when a student writes to the entire school, confessing to a "regrettable property- damage incident", a gorgeous euphemism for urinating against a neighboring student's door. "His behaviour had made him realize he still had work to do figuring out exactly who he was." . . . Even more creepily, Delves Broughton finds that he no longer responds to such tosh with a healthy snort of laughter. "It was serious, right? Leadership. Core values. Transformation. Being true to oneself." It takes his wife - his American wife - to inject some common sense. "These people are freaks.". . .
For all its vast reputation, power and pomposity, you feel that HBS neither understands the complexity nor acknowledges the chaotic unpredictability of the world economy any better than anyone else. More conclusively, it encourages its little alumni to major in hypocrisy. You go there for one simple reason: to make shedloads of money. Fine, so it's no crime in itself to want to be absurdly and pointlessly rich, although it's certainly no virtue. What sticks in the gullet is graduates' self-flattering delusion that they're on some kind of crusade, their "very American" insistence, as Delves Broughton puts it, on being not only "the most powerful, the richest and most successful", but also "the most morally good". At the same time as learning how to manipulate billions in order to profit, say, from ordinary people's fretful indebtedness during a recession, you can believe that you are a philanthropic leader of men. Yet these are people whose answer to their own question, "How will I know how much is enough?" is, "When you've got your own jet." Any notion that such jet-setting plutocrats are truly concerned about the rest of us, or the planet, or the future, is laughable. . .
These money-loving graduates must nurture "heightened self-awareness" and "a strong moral compass", they must "foster integrity strategies", acquire "leadership and values". But why the hell would the rest of us want to be led by these spreadsheet-reading, PowerPoint-presenting swots who've devoted the best years of their lives simply to making moolah?