Pluses and minuses of business school

Ahead of the Curve
By Philip Delves Broughton, Penguin, 304 pp., $25.95

This is a fascinating book. At first look, it seems just another "Paper Chase"-like memoir of some bright kid’s journey through the halls of elite academia -- in this case, Harvard Business School. But Philip Delves Broughton’s recounting also offers us a disturbing meditation on American business, the limits of meritocracy, and the terrible personal sacrifices people are willing to make in pursuit of a buck. Even better, once done, you’ll think -- with good reason -- that you might know as much about business as any B-school grad. That, however, may be less a tribute to Broughton’s clear and witty writing than it is a sad comment on the shallowness of business education itself.

Thirty-two-year-old Broughton was married, a father, and Paris bureau chief for the Daily Telegraph of London when he decided to attend grad school, for reasons that he doesn’t make entirely clear. (To write this book, perhaps? Broughton says no, but, wow, he did keep good notes.) The new student, rusty after many years in the real world, found himself flailing, struggling with remedial math, trying to figure out Excel and intimidated by nomenclature and ways of thinking far removed from journalism. He’s up to the task, though, and Broughton’s journalistic talent is such that as he is illuminated, so are we. It’s not clear from his book that Broughton will ever really enjoy being in business, but he certainly enjoys learning about and writing about business.

But academics, we quickly learn, is not really the reason one attends HBS. Masons supposedly once secretly ruled the world; today, apparently, it’s HBS alumni. The school is less a learning experience than it is a club, and membership in the club -- "You’ve won," says one second-year student as he welcomes Broughton’s class to the school -- is the ticket to wealth and power. Ultimately, this poses a near-existential crisis for Broughton. After the first semester, jobs become HBS students’ singular focus. Yet Broughton, more in love with his wife than his wallet, is less obsessed. The job hunt goes badly: He is rejected by mutual funds, McKinsey (the giant consulting firm), and The Washington Post (which tells him journalists don’t make good businesspeople). He spends months failing to start up his own podcasting business. In one of the more amusing sequences of the book, Broughton recounts four months and 14 job interviews spent trying to get a job with Google, an experience so frustrating that he ends up removing Google from his computer and installing Yahoo instead.

Ultimately, Broughton spends the summer between first and second year jobless, working on a book, and tending to his pregnant wife. And when graduation rolls around a year later, he is still unemployed. Much of this is a consequence of his discomfort with the state of business these days and the unacceptable compromises a career demands. Fully 63 percent of his classmates end up in consulting or finance. Those fields — not starting up or actually running a business — are the hot areas that attract the best and brightest. That neither actually involves creating or managing anything, however, is worrisome. (Broughton particularly disdains the consultants, "taking something so obvious ... and overcomplicating it so that MBAs could charge a fee for offering it.") Business tycoons who regularly speak at the school to adoring audiences glory in their success even as they, almost braggingly, acknowledge their miseries. "I'm barely talking to my son," reveals one senior investment banker. Those tradeoffs loom far larger to Broughton than they do to his classmates.

Broughton's telling assessment of HBS: It's "a factory for unhappy people." His book, on the other hand, is a revelation.

Tom Keane is a Boston-based freelance writer. He can be reached at tomkeane@tomkeane.com.