Ahead of the Curve Read online

  I first saw the class in its entirety at the end of August, when they arrived for a one-week course called Foundations, intended to ease us into the RC. We gathered in the Burden Auditorium, a cavernous hall half buried in the middle of campus, with seats sloping steeply down toward a stage. As the students poured in, Analytics suddenly seemed very cozy. The director of the RC program, a short, thick-shouldered man called Rick Ruback, took the stage. He spoke in a Boston accent and told us that we should think of him as the plant manager, the man walking the shop floor making sure the employees aren’t bunging up the machines with chewing gum or taking illicit cigarette breaks. He was not to be confused with the chairman of the MBA program, who acted as a kind of company president, offering advice and oversight, nor the chief executive officer, the dean, Kim Clark. He said that our class consisted of 895 students, chosen from 7,100 applications, reflecting a 12.6 percent acceptance rate. We were very fortunate to have gotten in, he said. Thirty-four percent of our class was women and 32 percent international. The average age was twenty-seven, which put me, at thirty-two, on the high end. The course chairman, Carl Kester, followed Ruback and said how happy he was to welcome a diverse class. Within our ranks were Olympians and consultants, gay activists, the former assistant to J. Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and a Harvard MBA, and even the “former Paris bureau chief of The Daily Telegraph.” Me.

  Next came the dean. I had read his biography on the school’s website. He had arrived at Harvard as an undergraduate and never left, acquiring his doctorate and rising through the ranks of the business school. He had been a scoutmaster and a bishop in the Mormon Church, and had seven children. He wore a pair of half-moon spectacles on a chain around his neck and spoke in a sepulchral whisper. He oozed seriousness of purpose and offered us three pieces of advice: work hard; be humble, or rather “cultivate the habits of humility”; and when you pass the dean on the street or on campus, don’t panic. Apparently some foreign students don’t understand him when he says, “How’s it going?” He said it’s fine just to reply, “Hi,” or “How are you.” He also warned us not to become cynical.

  After Clark, we heard from Margie Yang, the CEO of Esquel, a Hong Kong shirt manufacturer. HBS had been reevaluating how it taught business ethics since Enron collapsed under the leadership of one of its most fêted MBAs, Jeff Skilling. Yang’s talk was part of the school’s response. She told us that when doing business in as lawless a place as China, it was more important than ever to have a set of values to anchor you. But any business person operating in China over the past thirty years who told you he hadn’t done ethically dubious things, she said, was lying. Ethical lapses, she said, were sometimes necessary to survive. Her larger point seemed to be that behaving ethically in business was less about following a graven set of principles than about adapting to changing situations in as decent a way as possible. Business ethics were dynamic rather than static, and until you tried to do business in a place like China, there was no use pontificating about the subject.

  Finally a second-year student rose to welcome us and to reiterate the importance of values to our future in business. He told us that simply by getting into HBS, “You’ve won.” From now on, it was all about how we decided to govern our lives. There was something creepy about his Kennedyesque cadences and his well-practiced call to arms. But what he said would be repeated throughout my time at Harvard. HBS was a brand as much as a school, and by attending, we were associating ourselves with one of the greatest brands in business. We were now part of an elite, and we should get used to it. I struggled with this idea. It seemed so arrogant on the part of the school, and somehow demeaning to those of us who had just arrived. Regardless of who we were when we arrived, or what we might learn or become over the next two years, simply by being accepted by HBS, we had entered an überclass. It was HBS, not anything that came before it, that conferred the “winner” tag on all of us. At the end of Analytics, Frances Frei had explained that now that we were at Harvard, the professors were at our disposal. They would help us to learn and build businesses. They would even help our children get into HBS, if needed. It was a brutal acknowledgment of the legacy admissions system, whereby the children of alumni are preferred, and it immediately set me thinking: How many in this room were here simply because someone had pulled strings? What kind of capitalism is going to be taught here? The meritocratic, level-playing-field, competitive version? Or another kind?

  From Burden, we walked to our first class of the RC, called Learning to Lead. The case we studied in this class dealt with a small family-owned ice cream company whose chairman was in trouble. His underlings could not agree, and the company’s profits were in free fall. The atmosphere had changed dramatically since Analytics. People were suddenly full of confidence, eager to speak and to make their mark. The battle for classroom air time had begun. Students now talked about “take-aways” rather than lessons, “going forward” instead of the future, and “consensus building” rather than agreeing. I had always been uneasy when talk turned to consensus building, which seemed like the prelude to a dismal group compromise. “Philip, why aren’t you helping us build consensus? Come on, let’s just build some consensus here.” I kept wondering what a young Bill Gates or Rupert Murdoch would have made of this course. Not much, I imagine.

  The following day we played “Crimson Greetings,” described to us as “a game to bring fun to all kinds of learning.” The entire class was divided into separate “universes,” in which six or seven teams of around ten students competed in building and running a greeting card business. The goal was to run the most profitable business. We would have to purchase supplies, manage inventory, design and manufacture the cards, decide on a price, and then sell the cards in a series of timed sessions over the next two days. After each session, each universe gathered with a professor to measure, evaluate, and discuss its performance. The academic content of the exercise, however, was secondary to the larger purpose, which was for the students to get to know one another.

  We began in a classroom on campus watching a video of a stilted Englishman. “Your assignment will be to develop the operations of a greeting card company and to make it profitable,” he said. He spoke with the robotic menace of a Bond villain and could easily have been dispatching us to drive poisoned umbrella tips into enemy agents. We then made our way over to a gymnasium across the road from the business school. A room packed with 895 type-A personalities engaged in a business game sounds roughly like the African jungle. The lions roar, the birds squawk, the apes pound their chests, and the alligator snaps his jaws. My group contained three management consultants, from Austria, Indonesia, and Canada; a Korean banker from Los Angeles; a Chinese shoe marketer from Texas; an Argentine central banker; an Argentine engineer; a Lebanese American investment banker; a biotech executive from Boston; and Linda, a small, angry New Yorker who had been a management consultant and managed a software company but who said her real passion was racial and sexual equality.

  Our first task was assigning roles. Linda quickly seized control. She was an expert negotiator, she said, so she would purchase supplies. She would also help with sales. Gunther, the Austrian, rallied to her side. The rest of us were left to divide up the production and distribution roles. One person had to check for quality. Another had to make sure we delivered our cards on time. I volunteered for the four-man production team, alongside the Argentines and the Lebanese American, cutting up paper, applying glue and glitter, and writing festive greetings.

  First, we had to design a Christmas card. We gathered as a team to decide on a simple yet elegant drawing that could be produced at speed. We settled on a tree, drawn as a triangle and flecked with silvery glitter. Inside the card would be the nondenominational “Season’s Greetings.” Linda scampered off to buy supplies while production huddled to lay out our table. I stood at one end with scissors to cut the cards. The Argentines stood poised to dispense glitter and write the message. And the Lebanese
American banker picked out a green pen to draw trees. Around us were the rest of the team braced to deliver supplies and finished product, keep tabs on inventory, accounts, and the clock and to check for quality. A horn sounded, and we were off. I cut as fast as I could, and the Argentines glittered like demons. For the next half hour, we churned out cards until the horn sounded again. Then we moved to the side of the gym to debrief and recover, while the organizers inspected our tables and gathered up the records of our performance.

  Linda sat down cross-legged and scowled. Her disappointment was obvious. “The group next to us delivered way more cards,” she began. “And we wasted a lot of supplies. We need to do a deep dive on production to improve our metrics.” The Argentines looked at me, and I could see they were about to burst out laughing. But we nodded seriously.

  “The quality wasn’t good enough,” Linda said, running down the list on the clipboard she had procured with our supplies money. “And we missed out on delivering a batch of cards just before the end. We need to drill down on that.” She had strict ideas about the colors for our cards, the kind of decorations we would use, and the negotiations she, naturally, would need to perform to get our supplies at a good price and dig us out of the hole we production losers had dug. The Argentines, Raphael and Ernesto, were now whispering to each other. Linda raised a single tiny digit.

  “One conversation, guys. We need to be having one conversation.”

  They fell silent.

  Gunther then rose to his feet. “We need to start thinking about the presentation we’re going to have to make at the end of this, right,” he began. “I think that at the least, you know, we need to build a chart that shows time on the x axis and financial performance on the y, so we can show how we improve performance.”

  Linda looked up adoringly. Finally, someone who understood.

  The Indonesian woman nudged me in the ribs. “What did he say he was putting on the y axis?”

  “Financial performance,” I whispered back.

  “Hey, guys, would you like to share?” said Gunther, wheeling round to stare at us. “If you’re gonna talk, you should share.” Linda beamed in approval.

  The second round of the game involved making a Halloween card. We were struggling to come up with an inscription when I had my first HBS brain wave.

  “How about Boo!?” It would be both appropriate and easy to write. The idea was taken up. Production was far slicker the second time around, but Linda circled the table scowling. When we had finished our first batch of cards, she picked them up, flicked through them, and tossed them angrily to the table, shouting, “What are these?!” She then screwed up the supply negotiations, bringing us the wrong cards and markers. A Canadian woman, who up to now had been silent, began cursing under her breath.

  During our next break, Gunther took up position again beside our whiteboard. “We should have done a GANTT chart!” he exclaimed.

  “A GANTT chart!” Linda squealed, shaking with laughter.

  “What’s a GANTT chart?” I asked Raphael. He shrugged.

  “It’s a bar chart used to lay out a project schedule,” the Indonesian said.

  Fortunately, a revolt ensued. On production, our savior was Ernesto, whose hobby was handicrafts. After two rounds, he could crank out beautifully made cards at a blistering pace. He instructed the rest of us in a few basic folding and cutting tricks, and in no time, we were off. When the time came to make the presentation, Linda and Gunther had drafted such a complicated set of time and process charts, they had completely lost sight of our central task. In fact, it wasn’t clear at all that we had been making greeting cards. In the meantime, the Canadian and the Korean had been at work on their own presentation, which made far more sense. Since I had an English accent and some experience in public speaking, it was suggested that I present to the rest of our universe. I shared that responsibility with the Chinese Texan. Asked what I had learned from the exercise, I spoke about communication and described the moment when I, an Englishman, had found myself in a discussion with an Indonesian and two Argentines about why “Boo!” was a good thing to put in a Halloween card. I added that we also had the “Martha Stewart of Argentina” on our team. Afterward, Ernesto found me and asked, “Who is this Martha Stewart?”

  My experience of Linda and Gunther convinced me that it took just two consultants to screw up a project. One to drive everyone insane, and the other to laugh at her PowerPoint jokes. At the end of the second day of Crimson Greetings, I ran into Justin and we swapped notes. I told him about the “one conversation” put-down.

  “Ah, the old ‘one conversation’ Nazi,” he said.

  “The what?”

  “Every organization has one. They’re always the ones who can never stay on point, but they insist that everyone listen to them in silence.”

  We agreed that it was exhausting to be meeting so many people in such a short space of time. Our faces ached from all the smiling and rote conversation. It was a necessary ritual, but wearing nonetheless. During coffee breaks from Crimson Greetings, I had noticed how many of the class seemed to know one another or at least know people in common. The networks of certain universities and companies ran very deep. For those like me, who knew no one, it was a question of drifting through the crowds until I spotted familiar faces from Analytics. Yet whenever I felt pangs of regret for my old life—the job, the status, the structure—I reminded myself that I had chosen this path for a reason. However uncomfortable I found the bonding exercises or the forced introductions, they were the necessary prelude to something bigger and more important. I reminded myself of the dean’s injunction: don’t become cynical.

  After the lunacy of Crimson Greetings, we returned to our classrooms for the first of six classes studying the roots of modern capitalism. Sitting to my right was a willowy blonde with heavy bags under her eyes. She had spent the past three years toiling at a New York-based private equity firm, specializing in real estate. She said she had come to HBS for the vacation. Pure and simple. She did not expect to learn much, but she was looking forward to sleeping, working out, and taking long vacations. To my left was a former financial journalist who feigned cool by arriving each day without his textbook, but then spent the entire class providing me with his muted commentary on the discussion. In one of these classes, we studied the history of Rolls-Royce and the current state of capitalism in Britain. It was intriguing to hear what others in the class found interesting. During the Second World War, Rolls-Royce was called upon to churn out planes and engines for the war effort. In just a few months, it put together a large network of subcontractors to help it guarantee fast, dependable manufacturing. A woman who had worked as an engineer at Boeing said that outsourcing on such a scale was unthinkable at her old employer, where they preferred to do as much in house as possible. A Frenchman who had run a factory in Russia for a French food conglomerate told us, “Where I used to work it took six or seven months to decide to subcontract, then five months to negotiate with the subcontractor to get the arrangement right, then another six months for the process to start. And we were just making biscuits.”

  The professor called on me to say whether or not I thought Britain was in decline. I said absolutely not. Or, rather, it depended from what point you started. Of course, Britain no longer had an empire, but it remained a stable, thriving economy. It was one of the richest countries in the world yet retained a broad welfare safety net for the least fortunate. My remarks aroused some opposition. A Russian man said that in his experience, the British were lazy and incompetent. A young American banker who had lived in London for a year said that the Underground didn’t work and that the overall level of service from shops, restaurants, airports, and utility providers was terrible. The idea that Britain was still a great country, he said, was a joke. I said that having lived in Britain, France, and the United States, I found things to recommend and object to in all of them, and one could not say one was better than the other: The lack of vacation time in the United State
s versus Europe. Universal health care in France and Britain versus the $11,000 check I had just written to insure my family privately for the year in the United States. I could see the American banker glowering at me from across the room, but the Frenchman approached me afterward to say he appreciated my standing up for our continent.

  “I’m just sorry about the shark,” he said. Sharking was a term used to describe students who gratuitously sought to discredit the remarks of others. I had not fully appreciated the banker’s hostility, but to the rest of the class, it was clear. I had been sharked.

  On the final day of Foundations, we returned to Burden for another talk and slide presentation from Ruback. He showed us the HBS anxiety curve. It placed time on the horizontal axis and stress on the vertical. The line started high, fell as the semester wore on, shot up again for exams, and went off the chart during the recruiting season. His next slide broke down the working week to show us what the faculty expected of us: 55.1 hours per week on academic work, made up of classes and at least two hours of preparation per case. Based on my experience in Analytics, I knew that was a woeful underestimate. It doesn’t leave much time for anything else, he said, but that’s all part of the challenge. HBS is not about letting everyone do everything. It is about forcing you to make choices. What are your ambitions? What are your obligations? Do they tally? If not, what should you do to change one or the other? How should you spend your time to get what you want?