What They Teach You at Harvard Business School

What They Teach You at Harvard Business School Plot Summary

Introduction

The sun was setting over the Charles River as Philip Delves Broughton stood at the edge of the Harvard Business School campus, contemplating the decision that would change his life. At 32, he had achieved success as a journalist, serving as Paris bureau chief for The Daily Telegraph. Yet something was missing. The business world fascinated him - its power, its complexity, its ability to shape societies. But he approached it as an outsider, observing through the lens of journalism rather than participating in its creation. This tension between observation and participation had brought him to this moment, standing at the threshold of the world's most prestigious business school. What draws someone to leave a successful career and enter the pressure cooker of elite business education? For Broughton, it was a complex mix of curiosity, ambition, and a desire to understand the forces shaping our world from the inside. Harvard promised not just knowledge but transformation - a new identity, new capabilities, new connections. Yet this promise came with questions: Would the transformation be worth the cost? Would he find his place among the future titans of industry? And most importantly, would he emerge with his values intact, or would he become someone he no longer recognized?

Chapter 1: First Impressions: Stepping into the Elite Business World

The moment I stepped onto the Harvard Business School campus that sultry August evening in 2004, everything changed. My wife and one-year-old son were still in New York, I knew no one at the school, and for the first time in a decade, I had neither an employer nor a monthly paycheck. I was among two hundred students summoned early for "Analytics" — informally known as Math Camp — designed to bring us up to speed with the remaining seven hundred classmates who would arrive in three weeks. After registering, I was handed my first case study and told to report to a conference room to meet my study group. The case began with "Once upon a time many, many years ago, there lived a feudal landlord in a small province of Western Europe." The baron had two peasants farming different plots of land, and I needed to help determine which one performed better. As I sat outside reviewing the materials, I noticed two students warming up on the tennis courts. They began hitting gently, then worked deeper into each half of the court, their arms whipping through the air with increasing precision. I wondered how many hours had gone into training those perfect forehands, that unerring focus. My study group consisted of two military veterans, a former employee of the New York City mayor's office, a Taiwanese management consultant, and a nervous blonde woman from a Boston mutual fund company. As we tackled the baron's accounting problem, I quickly realized they all knew far more about business than I did. While they flipped open laptops and dove into spreadsheets, I stuck with pencil and paper. After all, J.P. Morgan had never used Excel and he once ran most of the U.S. economy. But when I volunteered an answer about which peasant performed better, I was immediately corrected: "You forgot to depreciate the oxen." The next morning, classrooms were jammed with Math Campers struggling with unidentified industries. We had to match twelve industries with unlabeled financial ratios. The halls rang with discussions of profit margins and leverage ratios. Someone authoritatively explained that banks tend to have huge short-term liabilities — otherwise known as customers' deposits — and similarly huge receivables in the form of loans. For banks, loans are assets while customer deposits are liabilities. It took me a while to grasp this: the money they have is a liability, whereas the money they've given away is an asset. The Harvard case method of teaching begins with a "cold call" — the professor picks a student to introduce the case prepared the night before. This can be harrowing, lasting anywhere from two to fifteen minutes. Once the cold call ends, any student can raise a hand to comment. Our first professor, David Hawkins, was a bluff Australian who had swum in the Olympics. He explained that the purpose of the baron case wasn't to find the right answer, but to demonstrate how difficult divining economic truth can be, even in simple situations. These first encounters with the elite business world reveal a fundamental truth about transformation: it begins with humility. Standing at the threshold of a new environment, we must acknowledge what we don't know before we can begin to learn. The journey from outsider to insider requires not just acquiring knowledge but adopting new ways of thinking, speaking, and seeing the world. For many, this transition is uncomfortable, even painful, but it's precisely this discomfort that creates the conditions for profound personal growth.

Chapter 2: The Case Method: Learning Through Intellectual Combat

The HBS classroom is designed for intellectual combat. Ninety seats ascend in five semicircular rows, divided by two aisles. Most rooms have no windows, creating a casino-like atmosphere immune to time and nature. Each student has two laptop widths of space along the curving desks and a swiveling office chair. Name cards identify us to professors, who can then call on anyone at any moment. The professors stand in the pit, with a desk for notes and blackboards and projector screens to play with. The more adventurous ones roam up and down the aisles, spurring students to talk. My first accounting cold call came unexpectedly. Eddie Riedl, our Financial Reporting and Control professor, was a livewire New Yorker who spoke quickly and strutted around with one hand tucked into his tight gray pants. After the briefest introduction, he looked one way and then pointed to me. I stared down at my notes while he moved to the blackboard, chalk poised. "So this is a case about a baseball club, the Kansas City Zephyrs, in which the owners and players cannot agree about how profitable the club is," I began. Looking around, I saw looks of curiosity mixed with sympathy. The case involved owners using accounting tricks to reduce reported profits and justify not paying players more. Finance classes were equally intimidating. Rick Ruback, our finance professor, began one session by saying, "We call this OCRA. It's my favorite vegetable." I was lost. Six weeks into Harvard Business School, and Ruback was talking in dog whistles. Others heard him, but not me. I felt like a grizzly bear watching fish go by in a stream, plunging my paw in but coming up empty. Every so often, I managed to seize something—discounted cash flow!—but missed ten others. "What is OCRA?" a Scottish doctor finally asked. "It's the optimal combination of risky assets," Ruback explained. "The point where you get maximum benefit from diversification." The case method forces you to make decisions with incomplete information. In one marketing case, Black and Decker's power tools division was in decline. Some blamed the company's decision to make toasters and kettles, which diminished the brand. Others saw low-cost Japanese competitors as the main threat. The company was considering launching DeWalt, a line of bright yellow power tools aimed at professionals. Our professor emphasized that the answer would be found by focusing on what customers wanted rather than what the company could offer. What made the classroom experience so powerful wasn't just the content but the diversity of perspectives. When studying Rolls-Royce's history, a woman who had worked at Boeing said outsourcing on such a scale was unthinkable at her employer. A Frenchman who had run a factory in Russia told us, "Where I used to work it took six or seven months to decide to subcontract, then five months to negotiate with the subcontractor, then another six months for the process to start. And we were just making biscuits." The case method isn't merely a teaching technique; it's a powerful simulation of real-world decision-making under pressure. By placing students in the position of protagonists facing complex problems with imperfect information, it develops judgment that textbooks alone cannot cultivate. The intellectual combat of the classroom becomes a training ground for the high-stakes decisions graduates will face throughout their careers, teaching them not just what to think but how to think when confronted with ambiguity and competing priorities.

Chapter 3: Identity Crisis: Navigating Values in a Competitive Environment

Before arriving at Harvard, we were required to take two personality tests. The first was the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which categorizes people into sixteen personality types. I was diagnosed as an ENTJ: "Frank, decisive, assume leadership readily. Quickly see illogical and inefficient procedures and policies, develop and implement comprehensive systems to solve organizational problems." It sounded flattering until I read the characteristics of other types, which seemed equally positive. The second test, CareerLeader, suggested my interests were "creative production, theory development and conceptual thinking" and that I would be happiest in a "work culture marked by cooperation, interpersonal sensitivity, and perhaps a degree of altruism." The school's focus on self-examination continued throughout the program. In our Leadership and Organizational Behavior (LEAD) class, we studied a woman named Taran Swan, who had set up Nickelodeon Latin America. She was team-focused, supportive, a great leader. But the case closed with her pregnant and ordered to bed rest, still working sixty-five-hour weeks remotely. In another LEAD class, we watched a video of Meg Whitman, CEO of eBay, giving career advice. She outlined her nine-point personal philosophy, beginning with "do something you enjoy" and ending with "never, ever compromise your integrity." Most striking was her admission that she had given up trying to be perfect in every facet of her life. "You probably won't look back and wish that you'd worked harder," she said. "In the end your family and friends are the most important thing." Near the end of the semester, our LEAD professor gave us the profiles of six members of the class of 1976, written for their tenth and twentieth reunions. Among them was a man who had devoted himself to restaurants only to have his daughter chase him down the street crying because he was working for the forty-second day in a row; a woman who had divorced her husband and rarely saw their daughter; and a self-described "entrepreneurial maverick" who remained single by avoiding "several near Mrs." By far the most contented person was a man who went to Wall Street after graduation and stayed with the same firm, defining a good place to work as a "place to have fun and make money." These were our possible futures. A mixture of success and failure. Work stress and family struggles. The ceaseless tussle between wanting to make money and following your heart. One of the Mormons in our class, a man with three children, spoke emotionally about the pressure to succeed according to the HBS template: "Why has it taken until now for us to read about this guy who takes a banking job and likes it? We never hear about the HBS grads who say, 'I'm not in this for the money. I'm going to open a small firm in my hometown, be home every day at five to see my children, and take four weeks of vacation each year.'" We patted these people on the head and said "Bravo," but didn't take their success as seriously as that of hyperactive wing nuts like Jack Welch. I had not fully appreciated how much my identity would be challenged at Harvard. As a former journalist, I was used to observing the world rather than participating in its financial machinations. But at HBS, I found myself halfway to convincing myself I could be an investment banker. There was the money, of course, and the status. But there was also the sense that it would be an exciting life—in the thick of things, forever transacting, dealing with different people and companies at a pace I had never experienced. The identity crisis that unfolds in this competitive environment reveals the deeper transformation taking place beneath the surface of business education. It's not just about acquiring skills or knowledge, but about fundamental questions of who we are and who we want to become. The pressure to conform to certain definitions of success can be overwhelming, yet it also creates an opportunity for authentic self-discovery. Those who emerge with the greatest clarity are often those who have wrestled most honestly with these questions of identity and values, finding their own path rather than simply following the well-worn tracks of those who came before.

Chapter 4: Money and Power: The Seductive Pull of Finance

The race for summer jobs began the moment we returned from Christmas break. A good summer internship was regarded as essential for a good post-HBS job. For some companies, especially the top-tier banks, private equity firms, and hedge funds, if you didn't spend the summer with them, you had no chance of working for them later. It was an opportune moment for The Harbus, the student newspaper, to republish an article headlined "Being Depressed at HBS." The author wrote that she had almost killed herself three times during her first year. Everything had been fine at first, but then she started to feel different. She began crying herself to sleep and staying in her room. "I started hating myself for ever applying to HBS," she wrote, "and then one day I just didn't get out of bed." I was invited to interview at two investment management firms. The evening before my first interview, the California firm held a get-to-know-you dinner at an Alsatian restaurant. Thirty of us crowded into a basement room with executives who were throwing back red wine. I was seated opposite a fund manager with bristling silver hair and a burning red shaving rash. He told us he had been a technology consultant for years before achieving his dream of stock-picking. "I lived and breathed stocks," he said, staring at me goggle-eyed. "That's the only way to do this." The next morning, my interviewers asked: "In fifteen minutes, you have to make a realistic bid to purchase Harvard Business School. How much do you bid?" They were trying to see how I approached valuation. I began building a balance sheet, listing assets, liabilities, and equity. The real estate on the Charles River, the buildings, the endowment. I asked questions about whether the school could retain the Harvard name and its professors. With time running out, I offered "around seven hundred million" — a deranged muddle that earned me strange stares. Neither company wanted me for a second interview. I thought I wouldn't care, but I did. I wanted to adhere to the HBS culture because it seemed to promise so much, but then again I didn't, because it seemed so formulaic. Fortunately, I wasn't alone in my ambivalence. Luis, an entrepreneur from Spain, told me: "This pressure, man, it's insane. When I got here, I knew I wanted to pursue the entrepreneurial path. But now, with this interview thing—and you see all these big famous companies coming to campus like Google and Skype—I'm thinking maybe I should go and work for one of them." What I learned through this process was that finance isn't just about numbers—it's about identity and values. The allure of money and power is strong, but it comes with costs that aren't always visible until you're deep in the system. As one classmate who left a Wall Street career told me, "I knew that if I went back, that was it. I would be there for the rest of my career. The money and status are very addictive." The seductive pull of finance reveals a fundamental tension at the heart of business education: the gap between what we say we value and what we actually pursue. The promise of wealth and status can override our deeper aspirations, leading us down paths that may not align with our authentic selves. Yet this struggle itself becomes valuable, forcing us to confront our own susceptibility to external validation and material rewards. Those who navigate this tension successfully don't necessarily reject finance or ambition, but rather integrate these pursuits with a clearer understanding of their personal values and what truly constitutes success in their own eyes.

Chapter 5: Leadership Lessons: From Theory to Real-World Application

Leadership permeated every corner of HBS. When student clubs requested candidates for "events organizer" or "speakers coordinator," they emphasized these weren't mere jobs but "leadership opportunities." Every club position carried the title of vice president. Within our section, we held elections for posts ranging from president to sports rep, with ten or eleven more in between. It was part of what the school called "making the section our own." Everyone at HBS, it seemed, could be a leader of one sort or another. LEAD was the course in which some of this would be unraveled. It dealt with the role of human behavior in business, understanding people's motives and psychological needs, as well as one's own role in a company. The business big shots who came to speak always said this was the most vital stuff we would study, yet students held it in the lowest regard. Jeff Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, said in a speech on campus, "I hated organizational behavior at business school. But OB just turns out to be the most important class you can take here. Because the ability to attract people, to pay them the right way, to create culture and values and reinforce them, that's what makes companies great." Our first LEAD case analyzed Erik Peterson, a recent MBA graduate who had gone on to run a small cell-phone operation. From the moment he arrived, Peterson realized he was in trouble. He was working constantly, had no clear reporting structure, and dealt with an idle subcontractor and impatient owners. His chief engineer was lazy and misogynistic. The staff envied each other's salaries. When the company president visited, Peterson met him in a noisy restaurant and let him roam the offices to discover the problems himself. By the end of the day, Peterson "felt stunned and humiliated." He was a classic malfunctioning MBA and a warning that MBAs could be losers, too. LEAD allowed us to take an anthropological approach to companies. Instead of focusing on numbers and financing, we examined the causes and effects of curious behaviors in business settings. We studied psychological contracts between employees and employers—the unwritten understandings that employees often regard as rights. Companies that underestimate their importance often find themselves in trouble. We studied a plating company that rewarded high-productivity employees with extra time off while turning a blind eye to their intimidating and casually racist behavior. Rather than applying noble principles, the manager had developed a culture that worked in the short term but introduced a slow-working disease that would eventually hurt the company's reputation. Warren Buffett visited campus and was asked how he would resolve America's inheritance tax inequity. He came alive with a riff about what he called the Ovarian Lottery: "Imagine you're in the womb the night before you're born and a genie comes to you and says you can design the world however you like. But before you enter the world, you will have to grab a ticket from a barrel that will say man or woman, United States or Bangladesh, crippled or athlete. How does that change how you design the world?" The best advice on choosing a career, Buffett said, was to find something you loved. After that, the money would seem unimportant. The leadership lessons that emerge from these experiences transcend simple formulas or frameworks. True leadership isn't about techniques or position, but about understanding human nature and creating environments where people can thrive. The most valuable insights often come not from success stories but from failures that reveal the gap between theory and practice. By studying these failures compassionately rather than judgmentally, we develop a more nuanced understanding of leadership as a deeply human endeavor that requires continuous learning, self-awareness, and the ability to balance competing values in complex situations where there are rarely perfect solutions.

Chapter 6: Ethics in Business: Navigating Moral Dilemmas

Despite the onslaught of recruitment, there was still a course of academic study to pursue. Besides more finance, the second semester introduced us to strategy, negotiations, entrepreneurship, macroeconomics, and business ethics. Leadership and Corporate Accountability (LCA) was introduced into the required curriculum in 2003 to allow students to discuss the perils of chasing dollars down ethical sewers. Our guide was Joseph Badaracco, an owlish professor who had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He had carved out a well-padded niche as a business ethicist and prided himself on the leisurely life of the tenured Harvard academic. Before LCA began, it was the subject of considerable scorn. For hard-core financiers, it was precious time taken away from studying derivative structures. For aspiring entrepreneurs, it had nothing to do with creativity or cash flow. The only ones who looked forward to it were the wafflers, those who loved to talk about nothing in particular. My friend Bo loved the course for his own reason: it required very little work. The cases were short, with no numbers to run, and could easily be dealt with while watching a basketball game. The first real dispute in class flared up during a discussion of bluffing in business. We read an article by Albert Z. Carr titled "Is Business Bluffing Ethical?" Carr compared business to poker, where bluffing short of outright cheating was perfectly legitimate. He said many successful businesspeople lived by one set of ethical standards in their private lives and another in their professional lives. Business was a game with specific rules, and knowing you could win playing tricks you would never inflict on friends or family made for an uncomplicated life. Lisa, an ethical jihadist from Louisville, Kentucky, was seething. Whenever an ethical dilemma arose, she was first to raise her hand and say what mattered most was "doing the right thing" whatever the cost. If you were in rural China trying to get a factory built, you should under no circumstances offer a bribe, whatever the local norms. If you found hackers had broken into your credit card system but stolen nothing, you must tell all customers immediately. You had to be honest, and the market would reward you. Joe, a keen poker player and ex-potato chip salesman, shot back: "If you're a good poker player, you don't explain your bluffs. You play them to win over the long term. In business, you'd be insane to be completely open about everything. You're protecting what's yours from others playing the same game. If you didn't bluff, you'd just lose again and again." Right in the middle of our ethics course, the school found itself in its own ethical bind. Someone had figured out how to access the website storing application information and posted instructions on an MBA message board. Scores of applicants followed the instructions, leaving an electronic trail. Those who had been admitted had their offers retracted. Dean Kim Clark issued a proclamation: "This behavior is unethical at best—a serious breach of trust that cannot be countered by rationalization. Our mission is to educate principled leaders who make a difference in the world." The ethical dilemmas faced in business rarely present themselves as clear choices between right and wrong, but rather as complex situations where multiple values come into conflict. The challenge isn't simply knowing what's right, but navigating competing obligations to shareholders, employees, customers, communities, and oneself. What makes ethical leadership so difficult is precisely this complexity, combined with the pressures of competition, time constraints, and organizational culture. The most ethically sound businesspeople aren't necessarily those who never compromise, but those who develop nuanced judgment about when and how to balance competing values, and who maintain their core principles even as they adapt to different contexts and challenges.

Chapter 7: Life After Harvard: Alumni Reflections and Career Realities

Five years after graduation, I reconnected with several classmates to understand how their Harvard experience had shaped their trajectories. Oleg, now running a chain of movie theaters in Russia, laughed about his discovery that the business wasn't really about films but about selling popcorn at 2000% margins. "You think running a cinema is about movies," he said, "but then you find out it's about popcorn." Despite this cynical observation, he spoke warmly about how the case method had prepared him for the complexities of real business decisions. When facing a safety issue with an amusement ride his company operated, he immediately recalled the Johnson & Johnson Tylenol case and made the difficult but correct decision to shut it down despite financial pressure to continue. Annette had turned down a lucrative return to Wall Street to pursue her passion in the fashion industry. The decision had cost her financially - her classmates in finance earned multiples of her salary - but she spoke of a satisfaction that transcended compensation. "After doing this job for a year, I feel I'm on my way to being able to run my own business," she explained. "I could advise other brands. I could acquire a business. I feel like I can manage people in a way I never would have had the chance to on Wall Street." Still, she acknowledged the trade-offs, noting that her younger brother pursuing music seemed more entrepreneurial than she was despite her Harvard credentials. Luis had returned to Madrid after graduation and was now working with investors to acquire underperforming businesses. He reflected on how the structured thinking he developed at Harvard had become second nature - sometimes to a fault. "My friends tell me to stop speaking like I'm in business school, always saying 'there are two or three ways to look at this,' even when we're deciding where to go for dinner," he laughed. Yet this analytical approach had served him well professionally, allowing him to evaluate opportunities with a clarity he hadn't possessed before. Perhaps the most striking pattern across these conversations was how many graduates had already pivoted from their initial post-MBA paths. Some who had joined prestigious consulting firms or investment banks had left within two years, seeking greater autonomy or purpose. Others had used their first jobs as launching pads for entrepreneurial ventures or transitions into industries they were passionate about. The degree had provided not just knowledge but optionality - the ability to change direction as their priorities and circumstances evolved. This flexibility proved to be one of the most valuable aspects of the experience, though it wasn't featured in any curriculum. As graduation approached, I had found myself torn between different paths. The allure of finance was strong, but so was my desire for a balanced life. I had come to HBS to gain control over my time and financial resources, not to become a slave to a high-paying job. My wife was pregnant with our second child, and I wanted to be present for my family. Yet I also felt the pull of the HBS culture, the pressure to pursue prestigious, lucrative careers. The alumni reflections reveal that the true value of elite business education often emerges years after graduation, as graduates integrate their technical knowledge with personal values and life experiences. The most successful alumni aren't necessarily those with the highest salaries or most prestigious titles, but those who have found ways to align their work with their authentic selves. The Harvard experience doesn't determine one's path so much as expand the range of possible paths, providing tools that can be applied across diverse contexts and careers. The transformation that begins in the classroom continues long after, shaped by the choices graduates make as they navigate the complex intersection of ambition, values, relationships, and purpose in their post-MBA lives.

Summary

The Harvard MBA experience is a crucible that transforms not just careers but identities. Through the case method, students are forced to make decisions with incomplete information, developing judgment that will serve them throughout their professional lives. The classroom becomes a laboratory where future business leaders test their assumptions, challenge each other's thinking, and learn to navigate complex problems without clear solutions. Yet the most profound lessons often come not from the cases themselves, but from the personal journey of self-discovery that unfolds alongside the academic curriculum. What makes the HBS experience so powerful is its ability to force students to confront fundamental questions about who they are and what they value. In the pressure cooker of recruitment season, surrounded by peers chasing prestigious jobs and astronomical salaries, it becomes impossible to avoid asking: What does success really mean to me? Am I willing to sacrifice time with family for career advancement? Do I want to be remembered for my net worth or for the impact I've had on others? As Meg Whitman wisely observed, "You probably won't look back and wish that you'd worked harder... In the end your family and friends are the most important thing." The greatest gift of business education may be this forced reckoning with our own definitions of a life well lived.

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