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What They Teach You at Harvard Business School: My Two Years Inside the Cauldron of Capitalism | 
 enlarge | Author: Philip Delves Broughton
Publisher: Viking
Category: Book
List Price: £12.99
Buy New: £7.34
You Save: £5.65 (43%)
New (20) Used (3) from £6.00
Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 4955
Media: Paperback
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6 x 0.4
ISBN: 0670917761
EAN: 9780670917761
ASIN: 0670917761
Publication Date: August 7, 2008
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Shipping: International shipping available
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| Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
 Masterly August 4, 2008
H. Mount
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
For those interested in business, this is a marvellous, easy-going guide to all those things you thought you vaguely understood but couldn't really define - price/earnings ratios, balance sheets, profit and loss.
But the wit and fine writing will appeal to those who couldn't care less about this sort of thing. Delves Broughton nails the idiocy of managementese; he skewers his dons and fellow graduates of Harvard Business School with beautifully chosen direct quotations and very funny analysis. He also manages to get in quite a lot on the point of life - don't kill yourself doing something you don't like; don't kill yourself making a fortune you don't really need.
An inside look at the economic elite August 11, 2008
Jay Oh (London, UK)
8 out of 10 found this review helpful
Philip Broughton went into the Harvard MBA like an anthroplogist goes to live with an obscure jungle tribe - this book works on the same principle of outsider wisdom, of the newcomer able to see just how strange the social norms of these hard-to-access cultures can be. Marvel at these elite MBA-ers and their language of "creating a developmental agenda for leveraging their reflected best-self"! Puzzle at the strong emphasis on business integrity and moral judgment, when fact is everyone's really there to learn how to make a lot of money. But, however odd, the Harvard MBA programme indubitably produces global business & economic leaders who shape a substantial portion of our lives, and so it's in everyone's interests to understand how this elite are taught to think.
'What They Teach You At Harvard Business School' is not just a guide to the economic and management concepts the MBA students study. Broughton does talk about these topics, giving examples of the Harvard study system of analysing hundreds of case studies. This method seeks to teach the students how to handle the chief challenge in business: making good decisions with inadequate information. It's no substitute for the actual course, largely because none of the examples' statistics are published in this book, but as a non-economist I definitely learnt a lot regardless.
But of wider relevance is Broughton's discussion of the 'hidden curriculum' of Harvard Business School, the assumptions it inculcates in its students and the distorted beliefs they already hold about work & the economy. What do they think is the value of the money they'll be earning, when will they know that they've made enough? "When you've got your own jet." Even the pre-arrival guide says, "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." Interesting notion of diversity, right? The idea that future business leaders are being trained to dismiss history and cynical judgments is telling, and Broughton, a former journalist with the Telegraph, is never able to buy in to this culture. Instead of getting a high-flying job like his coursemates, he remains a writer - but the strength of this book is that he's not bitter about this. It's not a rant, not really an expose (no truly horrific secrets are uncovered) - just an insider's look into a world most of us won't enter.
The compelling narrative is Broughton's own decision-making about his future career: Harvard forces him to confront the values that really matter to him, makes him question deeply what it is that he really wants out of life. This is something a lot of university graduates and prospective MBAs could benefit from reading - I know I was fascinated.
Very amusing indeed August 14, 2008
Chris (London, UK)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Very dry and witty - Delves Broughton brings alive all the madness and hype of the American MBA system. He half makes you want to enrol, and half to avoid the place for the rest of your life.
What is particularly good is that it is full of interesting business theory from the MBA course, which is very stimulating.
No doubt this book will make HBS very irritated - which is a good reason to buy it, I think!!
Takes you inside a top MBA September 1, 2008
T. Khan (Dubai, UAE)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Having just finished an MBA myself from London Business School, I saw this book at Heathrow on my way out of the UK and bought it with curiosity. I wanted to see whether my experience at London Business School would have been significantly different from that at a top American school; Harvard, of course, as far as MBA brands go, being number one in my opinion regardless of what competitors or any rankings say.
This book can be recommended to those interested in applying to Harvard or a comparable top MBA program to see if they have the right expectations of an MBA program; as well as to graduates of other programs to see how the experience at their schools compare against the holy grail of MBAs. It really goes inside what the MBA culture is about in general, especially at elitist schools, and at Harvard in particular. Broughton is not the only MBA who feels like this. The unreal world, the pressures, the tendency to go with the herd... despite having studied at a school across the atlantic, I continuously kept on smiling at the commonalities.
I disagree with the notion that this book disses the school, or the MBA in general. It just points out very well some of the absurdities of the program for all those who are not financial crackheads.
A fly-on-the-wall view of American's most prestigious business school September 11, 2008
Dr. P. J. A. Wicks (London, England)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Speaking as someone who is moving from academia to business, and from the UK to Boston, Philip Broughton's book about his experience as an English journalist also moving out to Boston for the MBA resonated very strongly with me. A cultural outsider by virtue of his background, culture, and has he suggests several times, his age (32 vs average of 27 at HBS), this book gives the kind of insight that a prospectus never could. Compressing two years of education into a paperback is quite a tall order, so Broughton gives a flavour of each of the modules he took there, from financial models to ethics and corporate strategy, as well as touching briefly upon the typical case studies he encountered there.
Where this book was at its most interesting for me were in some of the the narrow-minded, self-serving, and even dangerous beliefs of his fellow peers, who have little time for ethical considerations and firmly believe that a free-market business rationale should be applied to all spheres of life, regardless of little externalities like corporate responsibility. I also particularly enjoyed Broughton's almost comical experiences with the "milk round" recruitment circuit, with students all repeating the same rote-learnt mantras to get through rounds of interview. The author, being typically British about it, tries to be honest and open, and doesn't get invited back.
Where I do reserve some judgement, though, is the fact that if I had been in his class, I'd feel a little like the author hadn't fully committed to the process. He came to HBS ostensibly to get away from journalism, and two years later here he is publishing books, hardly a massive change in direction for two years and some 90k in forgone earnings and fees. Of course, this seems to be quite typical for HBS grads; all the bankers, consultants, and hedge-fund managers who came for a career-changing experience all obediently trotted right back to where they'd come from once the mortgage needed paying.
All in all this is an entertaining and engaging read if you have even a remote interest in business, the MBA, or Harvard Business School. Maybe it'll teach you that HBS isn't for you, maybe it'll have you submitting an application when you didn't think you were interested at all. Maybe now I should read "What they DON'T teach you at HBS" just to be thorough!
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