Download Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School AudioBook Free
In the century since its founding, Harvard Business Institution has become the single most influential institution in global business. Twenty percent of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are HBS graduates, as are quite a few savviest entrepreneurs (e.g., Michael Bloomberg) and canniest felons (e.g., Jeffrey Skilling). The very best investment lenders and brokerage properties consistently send their brightest young actors to HBS to groom them for future ability. To these people and many more, a Harvard MBA is a golden solution 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 900 other would-be tycoons on HBS's plush campus. Over the next two years, he and his classmates would be inundated with the best - and the others - of American business culture, which HBS epitomizes. The key of the school's curriculum is the "case" - an research of a genuine business situation, from which the students must, with a professor's guidance, tease lessons. Broughton researched over 500 situations and recounts the most revelatory ones here. He also discovered the shocking pleasures of accounting, the allure of "beta", the clever chicanery of leveraging, and many other concealed workings of the business enterprise world, which he limns with a wry clearness similar to Liar's Poker. He also exposes the less savory trappings of business-school culture, from the "booze luge" to the pandemic obsession with PowerPoint to the specter of major depression, which stalks way too many overburdened students. With acute and often uproarious candor, he assesses the school's success at teaching the traits it extols as most important in business: authority, decisiveness, ethical tendencies, and work/life balance.
