Ahead of the Curve
Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School Philip Delves Broughton,
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
ISBN: 1594201757
DDC: 650.07117444
Edition: Hardcover; 2008-07-31
Summary:
As One L did for Harvard Law School, Ahead of the Curve does for
Harvard Business School—providing an incisive student’s-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
worldIn 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 HBS’s plush campus.
Over the next two years, he and his classmates would be inundated
with the best—and the rest—of American business culture that HBS
epitomizes. The core of the school’s curriculum is the “case”—an
analysis of a real business situation from which the students must,
with a professor’s 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 Liar’s 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 school’s success at
teaching the traits it extols as most important in
business—leadership, 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.
Click on a subject to see other books listed with the same
subject or to drill down into components of the subject -- such as
geographical locations, dates and so on.
We query many merchants so that you can instantly
compare prices and
availability. You can even check historic prices and subscribe
for notifications. For a manual check, clicking on a link will open a
new window with a search for this book on the merchant's site of your
choice.
