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Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School | 
| Author: Philip Delves Broughton
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
Buy New: $12.96
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Avg. Customer Rating:  26 reviews
Sales Rank: 1855
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 1594201757
Dewey Decimal Number: 650.07117444
EAN: 9781594201752
ASIN: 1594201757
Publication Date: July 31, 2008
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Product Description
As One L did for Harvard Law School, Ahead of the Curve does for Harvard Business Schoolproviding an incisive students-eye view that pulls the veil away from this vaunted institution and probes the methods it uses to make its students into the elite of the business world
In the century since its founding, Harvard Business School has become the single most influential institution in global business. Twenty percent of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are HBS graduates, as are many of our savviest entrepreneurs (e.g., Michael Bloomberg) and canniest felons (e.g., Jeffrey Skilling). The top investment banks and brokerage houses routinely send their brightest young stars to HBS to groom them for future power. To these people and many others, a Harvard MBA is a golden ticket to the Olympian heights of American business.
In 2004, Philip Delves Broughton abandoned a post as Paris bureau chief of the London Daily Telegraph to join nine hundred other would-be tycoons on HBSs plush campus. Over the next two years, he and his classmates would be inundated with the bestand the restof American business culture that HBS epitomizes. The core of the schools curriculum is the casean analysis of a real business situation from which the students must, with a professors guidance, tease lessons. Delves Broughton studied more than five hundred cases and recounts the most revelatory ones here. He also learns the surprising pleasures of accounting, the allure of beta, the ingenious chicanery of leveraging, and innumerable other hidden workings of the business world, all of which he limns with a wry clarity reminiscent of Liars Poker. He also exposes the less savory trappings of b-school culture, from the booze luge to the pandemic obsession with PowerPoint to the specter of depression that stalks too many overburdened students. With acute and often uproarious candor, he assesses the schools success at teaching the traits it extols as most important in businessleadership, decisiveness, ethical behavior, work/life balance.
Published during the one hundredth anniversary of Harvard Business School, Ahead of the Curve offers a richly detailed and revealing you-are-there account of the institution that has, for good or ill, made American business what it is today.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 21 more reviews...
A fellow MBA who enjoyed this book September 29, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I've read most of the b-school books about student life and I truly enjoyed this one. It was an intelligent take on the experience. The b-school content - and the fever around recruiting/careers - is perfectly captured.
For many of us (and possibly you, the reader), this is an authentic perspective, albeit a somewhat conservative one. I'd also recommend Snapshots from Hell (also about Harvard) and The Blushing MBA (woman's view, based on Harvard or some top-tiered school).
 Recommended at a personal and professional level September 28, 2008
Harvard Business School is a mystery for anyone outside of that exclusive and influential club, until now. Ahead of the Curve provides an intimate, detailed and comprehensive look inside an experience that influences businesses and government around the world. Philip Delves Broughton achieves a unique balance of personal diary, travel log review, and business book in this book one that makes it highly recommended. Ahead of the Curve can be read from each of these perspectives with the reader gaining different lessons from the author's experience.
From a personal perspective, Broughton continually highlights the struggle between work and family throughout the book. It seems like everyone at HBS is locked into a struggle between being successful at work and having some semblance of a home life. As I recall, not one person had a balanced life where they were described as having both a strong position home life and a successful career. The extremes of either multiple divorces or putting their life on hold is a theme many will resonate with and use as a reason to explain their current situation.
From the travel log perspective, the book gives you a Fodor's view of what it feels to be two years in the pressure cooker of HBS. The layout of the classroom, the structure of the sections, the top flight facilities, living in Cambridge, the John Jakes style encounters with HBS professors and titans of business all are strong points of the book. This travel log perspective gives the book a sense of reality and its more novelistic touches. These also make the book very readable and plausible. This was the color and contrast that turned what could have been a binary morality play about work and personal life into something that was real.
The gem of this book however is in its explanation of the core business concepts that are the foundation of HBS. Broughton effortlessly puts concepts like Porter's four forces model, corporate finance, and other into prose that is understandable and powerful. While this is not the focus of the book, each chapter contains a few paragraphs or a page that describes what these concepts are, how they fit in the context of the HBS experience, and what they are intended to mean in the larger business world.
Broughton is a journalist, so some of this was to be expected, but rather than reporting on the concept, he explains it in a way other people can understand not just comprehend. While Broughton did not get a job after his two years at HBS, his ability to make these concepts simple and accessible points to a gift - one that we are in dire need of as business faces tough and complex challenges.
Overall, highly recommended and I have already passed my copy on to a colleague who hopefully will return it so I can pass it on again.
it's about life, stupid. September 25, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
As the father of a recent HBS graduate, I was drawn into the book to understand more about the inside workings of Harvard. As a graduate of a community college in New York, and the father of eight children, and owner of a 30 year successful technology business, I quickly realized that this book was about true success. The balance of family, love of work, and of course, making a living. The chapters replayed much of what my daughter talked about, but I could now truly understand the life and pressure of those embarking on this trip. It was amazing to hear from somebody almost half my age that he truly understood what most people didn't.He heard of the loss by those that did not follow their hearts, but allowed the brand they wore to set their direction in life. The guilt I sometimes feel for being a parent that pushed their child to fufill their own dreams is now diminished, since I know, just like Philip chose to stay true to his heart, my child may elect to do the same. This book is not aobut Harvard, it is about life. I want to thank him. Although many books have talked about life-work balance, "ahead of the curve" shows us what we need to consider when raising our children, and helping them in their life choices.
Enjoyable read September 24, 2008
I enjoyed reading Ahead Of The Curve, however I am at a loss as to how any student can spend the amount of time the author claims preparing for class (I have an MBA, though not from Harvard). Anyway, the anecdotes/descriptions/comments on in-class and out-of-class behaviors of fellow students/ professors and vistors is great. I could spot old classmates, and current colleagues, behaviors and attitudes (loved the 'sharking' term) throughout the book.
I passed it on to a colleague who is thinking about grad school in the near future (an MBA).
Multi-dimensional account September 23, 2008
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.
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