Rent: Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School

By Philip Delves Broughton

Add To Your Pool


How BookSwim Works!

About Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School - Book Description


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 world

In 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.


Those who read this book also rented...

show/hide


Log in to Rate & Review this book!

Overall Rating:
4.2000



Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School Reviews by BookSwim Members




written by BookSwimmer on 08/09/2008
A must read for anyone thinking about getting an MBA. It will give you an idea of what things will be like.
Flag as inappropriate or spam »


written by BookSwimmer on 08/09/2008
I found "Ahead of the Curve" very interesting and enjoyable. I enjoyed the author's insights into the challenges of attending Harvard Business School. I found Delves Broughton's anecdotes on the professors, guest lecturers and classmates particularly interesting. The author painted a general picture of what attending Harvard Business School was like. I found myself relating to the author's challenges in dealing with his family life at the same time he was attending Harvard Business School. This book was looking at Harvard from the eyes of the author. Surely if some of the author's classmates had written about their views of Harvard Business School, they probably would have painted somewhat different pictures. I found certain parts of the book more engaging than others, but overall I would strongly recommend the book to others.

R. Reise
Flag as inappropriate or spam »


written by BookSwimmer on 08/09/2008
Loved it, loved it, loved it. This book is about much more than 2 years at Harvard. It's a well told story about making life decisions and trying to determine how much is enough. Very funny and enjoyable read that will likely speak to a much larger audience than just those interested in Harvard. An absolute must read for anyone thinking about getting a top tier MBA.
Flag as inappropriate or spam »


written by BookSwimmer on 08/09/2008
The statistics are wrong, and forgot to mention that HBS MBAs make less money than their peers from Stanford, Columbia, and Wharton.
Flag as inappropriate or spam »


written by BookSwimmer on 08/09/2008
This book is exceptionally informative about what it is like to study for two years at Harvard Business School. The author, Philip Delve Broughton, a former jornalist for Britain's leading serious newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, writes very well and succeeds in really taking you with him into the classrooms, group study sessions and meetings with guest speakers. But the book offers far more than just a blow by blow account of life at HBS: it is a drole, thoughtful, profound reflection on the attractions and horrors of modern business life and it also provides a lesson for those of us who fancy ourselves as potential captains of industry: the world of business is often immoral and hypocritical, despite its Orwellian efforts to promote ethical standards, and for most of its foot soldiers it is often very boring. This is a great book and it is about far more than just HBS. It deserves to become a classic.
Flag as inappropriate or spam »
User Rating
Published07/31/2008
Similar Subjects Biographies & Memoirs, Business & Investing
PublisherPenguin Press HC, The

Our Partners
Purchase at Amazon
Share This
Discuss at BookSpoke
GoodReads
LibraryThing

 

Start creating a Pool!


» Make a Pool at BookSwim

Here's how it works: add desired books to your Pool, and then we ship them to you! Enjoy the books for as long as you want with no late fees!