Total Page : 304
Publisher : Penguin Non Classics
Publication Date : 2009 06 30
>> Tedious Reading
I received my MBA a few years ago in a school across the river from Harvard Business School We used the case method also and I have to say our program was more difficult than HBS Why Some of our instructors spoke such poor English that they were almost unintelligible People at HBS have great instructors Now about the book
Reading about what the courses were like and how teams sat around discussing financial ratios and balance sheets was a bore The author was overwhelmed by the curriculum because he was a journalist not an analytical type People who did best in business school were finance majors and project managers Not nurses microbiologists or English majors HBS wanted a diverse mix of students
Ahead of the Curve could have been a course description in a catalog I found Organizational Behavior myself to be a challenging course Operations Management fun Why HBS needed a math camp was a mystery to me If applicants couldn t do simple algebra they should not have been admitted Ratio analysis is simple fractions
What I got from this book is HBS is an elite school for the elite It s expensive and geared towards Wall Street and the old boy network When I interviewed for engineering jobs I was told about HBS hot shots who tried and failed to be productive There s a glut of MBA s The HBS degree opens doors closed to ordinary people with MBA s George W Bush received his MBA from Harvard People at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have Harvard MBA s They were responsible for the financial meltdown recently In all fairness people who wrote the software for the derivatives models were not MBA s
An MBA doesn t mean much if you re an idiot Rupert Murdoch dropped out of school at the age of 15 Bill Gates never got a degree If you need a HBS degree to get ahead maybe you should look at yourself more closely
>> Worth reading for the course descriptions
Wouldn t have read the book except that my two engineer sons are thinking about MBAs I was always curious about what exactly they taught you at HBS and this book pretty much tells you that And also how much the 2 years cost 175 000 I got the impression at first that this was going to be a negative book but it didn t turn out that way Nice anecdotes throughout the book which I enjoyed
I was disheartened to see how many grads went to Wall Street I was hoping that all this effort was to make the American and world economies better with new ideas for tangible stuff instead of the financial product crap that we have now So much for that Go to HBS and learn how to play financial hot potato Luckily we have a government that can print money and bail these creeps out
Saw one minor error which the fact checker should have got Averell Harriman s father E H was president of the Union Pacific Railroad not the U S Pacific Railroad And one an editor should have got principle/agent should of course be principal/agent Again proving what my disgruntled writer friend told me 40 years ago Those that can t do teach and those who can t do or teach edit
Hope that Mr Broughton has found his post HBS niche and not one like Bob Dylan sang about 20 years of schoolin and they put you on the day shift
Good book
>> Great insights of HBS
This book give you an overview of the HBS curriculum Of course the experience of the author is subjective Nevertheless the author provides interesting details and gives the reader a good sense of life as an MBA student In addition he explains various business concepts e g how do venture capitalists earn etc and also describes the interview processes of major companies such as Google and other consulting companies It is definitely an interesting read
