Spring Break
An Investigatory Report: Ahead of the Curve-An Alumni's Perspective
By Alex Godden, HBS '08
Issue date: 9/8/08 Section: News
I want to start by saying that I really, really expected to enjoy this book. Written by a fellow Englishman from a relatively respectable newspaper, taking a wry look at his time at the West Point of Capitalism, highlighting a few of the hypocrisies and pretensions of MBA students and maybe even taking a few shots at the administration. Sounded great to me.
My first warning sign was a review that quoted Mr. Delves Broughton's description of HBS as a 'factory for unhappy people.' Wha... huh? Unless ninety percent of my HBS friends and acquaintances are complete anomalies, there's something disturbingly wrong with this assertion. If HBS is a factory for unhappy people it needs some serious process improvement. The author seems to be extrapolating to the whole school from the one data point of his experience, which is ironic given the dim view he takes of consultants doing just this.
So, I read the book. To give you an idea of my overall impression... well, let's just say that my working title for this review was 'extremely dull and incredibly sad' (with apologies to Jonathan Safran Foer). I disliked his writing style (it reads like a book-length 'what I did on my vacation' fourth-grade essay) and disagreed with most of his opinions about HBS. It seems that all poor PDB got out of HBS was the subject of a book and a sense of deep loathing for corporate America. Actually, he seems to have started with the loathing, which does beg the questions of why he bothered at all. OK, so I admit I'm over dramatizing for the sake of making this review more readable (an approach this book would have benefited from) but I finished the book with an overwhelming feeling of depressing negativity.
Ahead of the Curve is basically structured as a simple beginning-to-end narrative taking us through the experiences of an older than average business school student from a non-traditional background, who is married with a young child. Even within the relatively diverse HBS class I found this an aggressively atypical experience, but even so I expect that someone curious about business school would probably find much of it informative. On a superficial level, reading this book was a pleasant trip down memory lane, and parts of it even made me laugh (particularly his visualization of the wonderful phrase Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal). Sadly, the book doesn't stop at telling the slightly staid story of his experience, but instead lurches off periodically in two very contradictory directions: summarizing parts of the course in order to explain exactly what it is HBS teaches; and gleefully exposing the glaring hypocrisies and flaws of the institution that is the Harvard MBA, and by extension, US business practices. The book, like the author, seems to be in the throes of an identity crisis.
My first warning sign was a review that quoted Mr. Delves Broughton's description of HBS as a 'factory for unhappy people.' Wha... huh? Unless ninety percent of my HBS friends and acquaintances are complete anomalies, there's something disturbingly wrong with this assertion. If HBS is a factory for unhappy people it needs some serious process improvement. The author seems to be extrapolating to the whole school from the one data point of his experience, which is ironic given the dim view he takes of consultants doing just this.
So, I read the book. To give you an idea of my overall impression... well, let's just say that my working title for this review was 'extremely dull and incredibly sad' (with apologies to Jonathan Safran Foer). I disliked his writing style (it reads like a book-length 'what I did on my vacation' fourth-grade essay) and disagreed with most of his opinions about HBS. It seems that all poor PDB got out of HBS was the subject of a book and a sense of deep loathing for corporate America. Actually, he seems to have started with the loathing, which does beg the questions of why he bothered at all. OK, so I admit I'm over dramatizing for the sake of making this review more readable (an approach this book would have benefited from) but I finished the book with an overwhelming feeling of depressing negativity.
Ahead of the Curve is basically structured as a simple beginning-to-end narrative taking us through the experiences of an older than average business school student from a non-traditional background, who is married with a young child. Even within the relatively diverse HBS class I found this an aggressively atypical experience, but even so I expect that someone curious about business school would probably find much of it informative. On a superficial level, reading this book was a pleasant trip down memory lane, and parts of it even made me laugh (particularly his visualization of the wonderful phrase Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal). Sadly, the book doesn't stop at telling the slightly staid story of his experience, but instead lurches off periodically in two very contradictory directions: summarizing parts of the course in order to explain exactly what it is HBS teaches; and gleefully exposing the glaring hypocrisies and flaws of the institution that is the Harvard MBA, and by extension, US business practices. The book, like the author, seems to be in the throes of an identity crisis.
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