Philip Delves Broughton is a former journalist at the Daily Telegraph of London. In his book "Ahead of the Curve" he chronicles his love-hate relationship with the Harvard Business School, where he spent two years getting his M.B.A. He says HBS must share accountability for the financial crisis.
From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Bryan Burrough
In 2004, the 31-year-old Paris bureau chief of London's Daily Telegraph newspaper, Philip Delves Broughton, gave up the rigors of daily journalism. Too many long nights in dismal airport lounges and too many silly French press conferences had taken their toll. Casting about for a change in careers, he applied to business schools and, to his surprise, was accepted at Harvard.
Broughton tells what happened next in Ahead of the Curve, a useful primer for anyone considering a similar path, or just curious as to how Harvard churns out all those gleaming little masters of the universe. This book should really be called "Harvard B-School for Dummies," or maybe "I went to Harvard B-School and all I got was this stupid T-shirt," because it assumes the reader, like Broughton, knows precisely nil about the corporate world, and because the author somehow managed to graduate from the world's premier MBA factory without, well, an actual job.
The book doesn't work especially well as a conventional narrative. There's no suspense; Broughton writes that it's almost impossible to flunk out. Rather, Ahead of the Curve offers a good sense of Harvard Business School's day-to-day workings, everything from what the other students are like to the merits of each lecturer to impressions of business titans such as Warren Buffett and Stephen Schwarzman, who revolve through the doors offering pointers on how to get filthy rich.
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Friday, July 10, 2009 at 11:52AM 
