Ahead of the Curve Read online

  For many in the class, 55.1 hours a week of academic work sounded like a breeze. They were used to working from eighty to one hundred hours a week at their previous jobs. Much of the first-year material would be familiar to them. I was not one of them. As he wrapped up, Ruback told an anecdote of an MBA student arguing with someone in the HBS administration. As tempers rose, the student burst out, “Why are you treating me like this? I’m the customer, goddamnit.” “No, you’re not,” said the HBS employee. “You’re the product.” “I guess you’re somewhere between,” said Ruback, once the laughter had abated. “Sometimes you’re the customer, other times you’ll feel like the product.”

  After Ruback’s speech, we walked over to Aldrich to meet our sections. The section was HBS’s most aggressive act of socialization and network building. For the whole of the first year, you had to attend every single class with the same ninety people. They would be the focus for your academic and social lives. Each section was intended to be a microcosm of the 895-strong class, with the same proportion of men to women, American to international students, the same mix of backgrounds and ethnicity. For the rest of our lives, HBS would regard us as a section. We would be reunited as a section every five years. Fund-raisers would appeal to us as a section. As far as HBS was concerned, I would forever be a member of Section A, class of 2006.

  Our classroom, Aldrich 107, was located in the basement, beside the men’s lavatories. When we arrived, our name cards were in place. I was sitting halfway down on the left-hand side, facing the blackboards. It was a nice, neutral spot. Not too close to the front, somewhat invisible. Before the class began, we were given access to a database containing photographs and short profiles of the entire class, so when we arrived we could look around and spot the German, the athlete, the UPS employee, the investment bank analyst, the ones who liked yoga, running, or African dance. It was an extraordinary thing, after having grown so used to controlling the extent of one’s friends and acquaintances, now suddenly to be plunked into a room full of strangers with the message “For the next year, this is your world— and as far as the HBS network goes, here is where it all begins.” But looking around, I found it hard not to feel excited. After ten years of work, this was a second chance at university.

  I had been placed between two students from the military. To my right was Bob, who had flown the Stealth bomber. I had met him during Analytics, and he frightened me. He was short and trim with strawberry blond hair and pale blue eyes. He had four children and ate his lunch from a Winnie the Pooh plastic box that he brought from home. He seemed humorless and resolute. Just the man you’d like to have flying billions of dollars’ worth of military hardware. He had come to business school because he had grown tired of air force life and wanted greater opportunities for himself and his family. He was thirty-five and had little time to waste.

  To my left was Lara, who would be returning to West Point to teach once she had obtained her MBA. While Bob had been dropping bombs on Iraq from far above the clouds, Lara had been running the supplies and accounting division of her unit on the ground. She operated on a drip feed of diet soda, and preferred Mountain Dew for its caffeine rush.

  Bob and Lara represented one of the three Ms said to characterize the HBS class: Mormons, Military, and McKinsey. The Mormon thing began with Dean Kim Clark. The head of admissions was also a Mormon, and in our section were four Mormons, including Bob. For many of the international students, and the Americans, this was their first encounter with Mormons, and their suspicion prompted the usual polygamy jokes.

  As for the military: five students had served in the military, again including Bob. McKinsey, the consulting firm, seemed to regard the school as its private training and recruitment facility. We began with five McKinsey-ites in our section, and by the time we left, they had converted four more.

  Our section chair was Ben Esty, a youthful finance professor who would serve as our link to the administration. He would never teach us a course but would serve as our reference point and guide on official matters. He strode up and down the classroom, flicking the hair out of his eyes and explaining at martial volume how important our section would be to us. We would remember these people forever. They would become our first calls in our business lives, and perhaps even our personal lives. We would be marching through the jungle of the required curriculum arm in arm, hoisting each other across the marshes of ignorance and ineptitude toward the sun-drenched heights of competence and opportunity. It felt like one of those movies where a bunch of misfits, each gifted in his own way—one in explosives, another in disguise, another in forgery or karate—are thrown together to achieve a dangerous mission.

  Then we had to play another get-to-know-each-other game. This time we were given ten minutes to huddle in our rows and find something we had in common. It felt like the kind of punishment human resources departments were constantly inflicting on people who would really rather be doing their jobs, a snappy little bonding exercise to pass the time. Bob volunteered to lead our discussion. Eva, a chic Mexican cement company executive, looked horrified and barely spoke. I sympathized. Others in the room, though, seemed to dig it. They were laughing and whispering and plotting, as if they had done this a million times—which in fact many of them had.

  First up was the second row in the middle. A man on the far right began: “Hi, I’m Joseph. I’m from New York and used to be a bond trader.” He then sat down. For a moment, we thought he had missed the point. Then the person next to him said, “A bond trader? How funny. I used to trade stocks in Milan.” The next person rose: “Milan? I once did an assignment there when I was a consultant based in London.” And on down the row until the connections game was complete.

  Bob rose next and said, “In this row, we all once taught a class.” Mission accomplished. As he sat down, Esty said he might want to elaborate a little, to laughter from the room. After the row that came before us, we felt a little dull, out of the loop compared with the giggling consultants and bankers for whom this seemed to constitute thrilling entertainment. Once all the rows had had their turn, Esty asked if there were any questions. A hand rose behind me. It was attached to a small body from which came a scared midwestern voice. “Anyone got any plans to meet up this weekend?” You could see people looking up toward the ceiling. “Perhaps you could deal with that afterward,” said Esty. He wished us good luck and dismissed us.

  At the back of the class, Misty, an army veteran, shouted “Who’s coming to the Red Line for a beer?” A fragmented cheer went up. She stood at the door waving people through as if they were paratroopers leaping from a plane. After the sense of discovery I had experienced in Analytics, I was suddenly despondent. This was what I had left Paris for? Snickering twenty-seven-year-olds who relished HR games? Stampedes for beer? People hoping to kick-start their social life? Outside, on the lawn between Aldrich and Spangler, the Student Association had set up a tent with a bar and a thumping sound system. A song by the Black Eyed Peas was playing. I strained to hear the words. Could that really be the chorus? I listened again while heads bobbed all around me. Yes, it was. “Let’s get retarded in here, let’s get retarded.”

  Chapter Two

  STARTING OVER

  Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.

  —THEODORE ROOSEVELT,

  QUOTED ON THE

  HBS ADMISSIONS WEBSITE

  When I was a child, I was often told the story of my great-grandmother. Daw Ma Ma was Burmese. She lived in Rangoon and was married to an Anglo-French civil servant. When she was thirty-five, her husband died, leaving her with nine children and a meager inheritance. With no prior experience of business, she struck upon the idea of bringing Hollywood films to Burma. Within a few years, she was the country’s largest film distributor and owned the biggest cinema in Rangoon, the Pa
lladium. One of my mother’s clearest memories of childhood was watching Ben-Hur from the family box. Daw Ma Ma’s success allowed her to acquire houses and land in Rangoon’s fanciest neighborhood, alongside Inya Lake. Here on this compound of stately wooden houses, my mother grew up alongside fifty-two first cousins. Throughout the day, businesspeople, politicians, and diplomats thronged the compound, seeking my great-grandmother’s favor. When she died, her house was filled with bouquets from the great men of Hollywood and an enormous white cake sent by the Rank Organisation.

  Soon after her death, Burma was taken over by a military junta and Burma’s economy slowly fell to pieces. My great-grandmother’s businesses were dismantled or acquired by the state, and the compound by Inya Lake was broken up and fell into disrepair. Most of my mother’s family left Burma. Some went to America, others to Australia and Scandinavia. My mother met my father, an Englishman, in Bangladesh. Her family was trying to arrange visas to emigrate to the United States. My father was a Church of England missionary at the time, in charge of Dacca’s Anglican church. They fell in love, married, had me, and moved back to England. All the various branches of my mother’s family have survived, some have thrived, but none has forgotten what Daw Ma Ma created for them in Burma and what they lost. Her success as a businesswoman produced a golden age for my family, and I was reminded of it constantly.

  People apply to business school for all kinds of reasons, but they usually can be placed into two broad categories: those who know exactly why they’re going; and those who just sort of do. In the first category are those from companies with a long tradition of sending employees to business school. These tend to be Wall Street banks, consulting firms, and large corporations where access to upper management requires an MBA. But they also include people who have a specific career change in mind. They want to give up making engine parts and become investment advisers or financiers. They know what they need to learn, and they arrive on campus with a purpose.The second category includes people who know they want a change but don’t know what kind. They hope that business school will provide an answer, or at the very least give them some fresh options. They also feel that two years of navel-gazing at business school is more respectable than lobbing paper balls into their wastepaper bin all day hoping against hope that somehow the glacier of their career will crack and send them sliding off on some exciting new adventure. I fell into the second category. I wanted control over my time, my financial resources, and my life, and I imagined that a general competence in business would stand me in better stead than sticking with what I had been doing up to then.

  My path to Harvard Business School was circuitous. After returning to England when I was two, my father took over a parish in Northampton, a godless town best known for making shoes. For most of my childhood the conversation in our home revolved around flower-arranging rotas for the church and parish church council meetings. For a while, my parents supplemented my father’s derisory stipend by buying and selling cheap houses and renting them out to a rag bag of tenants. There were Ong and Lo, Korean brothers studying butchery; Christine, an attractive young secretary and dope fiend, who also turned out to be a prostitute; Ian, a John Lennon look-alike and inveterate bum who stopped paying rent and defeated my parents when they took him to court; and a series of dubious students from Nene College, the local fourth-rate educational establishment, who appeared to major in petty theft and vandalism.

  We also had tenants in the vicarage. There was Mick, a cobbler whose great passion was CB radio. We could hear him in the evenings talking into his microphone: “Iron Duke calling Rubber Duck. Come in, Rubber Duck.” And there was Jim, a rather forlorn middle-aged lawyer who kept a stack of pornographic magazines beside his bed. Mick was very good to me. Whenever I asked him to come out into the back garden and dig holes, a peculiar passion when I was five, he would comply, emerging from the house, his hair greased back and a cigarette hanging from his lips, holding a can of Carlsberg Special Brew. Later, after I had been sent away to school, he fell in love and moved out. The last we heard, he had been arrested for breaking into a building site one night and setting fire to a JCB digger.

  The larger point of this is that business, aside from Daw Ma Ma’s legend, was not a way of life in my family. Rather, it was a necessary evil. It meant the telephone ringing in the evening and my father rising from behind his newspaper, setting down his drink, and, with a heavy sigh, leaving the house to deal with a burst pipe or a police raid on the hooker. It meant the local Indian wheeler-dealers who would come to buy a house with a briefcase full of cash, and the dusty auction rooms where my parents could buy all the furniture they needed for five bedrooms and a kitchen for under fifty quid. At the boarding school I attended as a teenager, I remember looking at the fathers who would come on Sundays to pick up their sons. They sat at the wheels of their BMWs reading the Sunday papers, wearing yellow cashmere V-necks, their cheeks riddled with burst veins. They were my clichéd vision of businessmen: gin-swilling, golf-playing, dull, predictable slaves to money. This prejudice persisted through university, where I was determinedly antivocational, studying classics, Latin and Greek literature, history and philosophy. Shortly before graduation, I tagged along with friends to the recruiting presentations given by the big investment banks and consulting firms. I ate their sandwiches and drank their champagne, but when I listened to the employees describe their work, I knew this was not for me.

  One particular business story, however, did capture my attention around this time. It was a biography of the British billionaire Sir James Goldsmith. He had built his fortune over many years in all kinds of ways. As a teenager he incurred large gambling debts, which his father had to pay off. He came to national attention in Britain at the age of twenty when he eloped with the eighteen-year-old daughter of a Bolivian tin magnate. Their escapade was lapped up by the newspapers. When Goldsmith’s wife died giving birth to their first child, he turned serious about his work. He was opportunistic, buying and selling pharmaceutical and food companies, frequently risking bankruptcy. His financing was the subject of frequent media investigations. Then, in the 1980s, his moment truly arrived. Using junk bonds, Goldsmith borrowed, bought, and asset-stripped his way to a great fortune. He was the model for Sir Lawrence Wildman, Gordon Gekko’s English nemesis in the movie Wall Street. Shortly before the markets crashed in October 1987, Goldsmith sold everything he had and retired to the palace he was building for himself on Mexico’s Pacific Coast. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine above the headline “The Lucky Gambler.” Goldsmith’s life, as his biographer described it, was a grand adventure, full of risk, daring, and rich human encounters. Nothing like business as I had previously understood it. It got me thinking.

  The summer after graduation I spent mooning around my parents’ house reading travel books and dreaming of a poet’s life on a Greek island: a stone bed, honey and yogurt for breakfast, a few worn tomes on a shelf hewn into the wall, evenings in some harbor-front bar. Only after yet another impatient stare from my father did I finally take a job with a telemarketing company in London, arranged by my friend William. The work consisted of four of us sitting in a room on Lots Road trying to sell advertising space for a new publication called The Truck Driver’s Hand Book. We were paid solely on commission, 20 percent of any advertising we sold. William was both naturally good at this and driven to succeed by the financial requirements of a fast-escalating cocaine habit. He would laugh at me as I stared at the telephone.

  “Come on, you loser. It’s easy. Watch.” He would dial an engine parts supplier in Watford, charm the secretary, speak to the owner, and wrap up the call with a confirmed sale. “Go on. Let’s see you do it.”

  I would dial a number as slowly as I could, jabbing wretchedly at the telephone as if it were diseased. The secretary of the firm I was calling would ask me to repeat what I was saying. “Truck Driver’s what? No, he’s not in. No, he won’t be in later. No. Not until next week or the week after. No we don’t do adver
tising anyway.” Click. On the tenth day, I made a sale. In theory, I should have made six hundred pounds for myself. But I celebrated by taking the next two days off and watching a cricket match on television. The owner of the firm, a nasty drunk, withheld the money and sacked me. Business and I were clearly not meant to be.

  From this nadir, journalism was an obvious next step. I wrote to the editor of The Daily Telegraph and was given a few shifts on the paper’s gossip column. I turned out to be good at going to cocktail parties and returning with fifty-word items about how an MP’s dog had urinated on a duchess’s rose bushes, or a writer had found inspiration for his latest book while sailing with the archbishop of York. This evolved into a ten-year stint on Fleet Street, including six as a foreign correspondent.

  My first foreign posting was to New York. I was twenty-five years old and carried all my possessions in a suitcase. Over the next two years, I traveled all over the United States and Latin America—to Terre Haute, Indiana, when Timothy McVeigh was executed; to Florida during the presidential election recounts; to the Arctic to interview Inuit; and to Tijuana to meet policemen and newspapermen who stood up to the local drug cartels. It was exciting and occasionally daring stuff. My telephone would ring well before dawn as my editors in London reached their desks, and I would be dispatched, sore-headed from the night before, to the scene of a plane crash, a dramatic arrest, or a sudden political development. I spent six weeks in Chile after General Pinochet was arrested in London, flew overnight to the Galápagos Islands after an oil tanker went down, interviewed the first female president of Panama over the thrumming of a military helicopter deep in a Central American jungle, and spent a frightening week in a violence-torn Port-au-Prince. But at some point, a poisonous notion entered my brain and began to spread: newspaper journalism was dying. All people spoke about in London were our dwindling readership and the lack of investment by our owners. Those long flights and hours spent in clammy airport departure lounges, breathing the noxious fast food odors, began to feel worthless, and I started looking for a way out.