Ahead of the Curve Read online

  One day, I was sent to interview Gustavo Cisneros, a Venezuelan billionaire and a friend of the then owner of The Daily Telegraph, Conrad Black. Interviewing and writing nice things about Black’s friends and potential friends was part of the job of the New York correspondent. Early in my posting, I had spent a harrowing day with the television presenter Barbara Walters, who ten minutes into our interview told me my questions were the most boring she had ever heard. Later she refused to let the photographer who accompanied me get within five feet of her, insisting he take his shots from the other side of the room. Black also sent me to interview Henry Kissinger in his office on Park Avenue. He growled at me for an hour or so about geopolitics. Later, I discovered that the tape recording of my interview skipped every few seconds. In my paranoia, I suspected some magnetic distortion machine in Kissinger’s office had done me in. I was missing every fourth or fifth word Kissinger had said. “The key to peace . . . click, grumble . . . negotiation between the Lebanese . . . squeal, grunt . . . Bush needs a strategic . . . wheeeeeeeeeee.” The piece I wrote was thin on quotes and long on description and analysis. What the journalism pros call “broad brush.”

  Cisneros had his offices in a townhouse on the Upper East Side and had decorated them in accordance with his status as a Latin American plutocrat: dark wood paneling, oil paintings of conquistadors on horseback, deep, comfortable armchairs, and footmen offering perfectly brewed coffee. Cisneros himself was a smallish man. He wore a pale gray suit, white shirt, and blue, patterned tie. He sat tidily in his chair, using spare hand gestures to describe an acquisition here, a sell-off there, a sales thrust into new markets somewhere over there. His hair was a slight distraction, boot-polish black and combed so tightly back over his skull it seemed to be stretching the creases out of his forehead. His family had made its money in gritty businesses such as bottling, haulage, and agriculture, but he had expanded successfully into media and technology. All of that toil and sweat, however, was occurring thousands of miles from here, on the roads of Latin America and the production back lots of Miami. Here, Gustavo and I could sit, sip our coffee, and talk big picture—about the impact of globalization, the importance of local brands. If this was business, I could get used to it. As I was escorted out by his secretary, a door in the wood paneling creaked open and I glimpsed a small conference room where a man and a woman, both immaculate and beautiful, were sitting at their laptops and chatting. They looked toward me and smiled and continued their conversation. The secretary said, “Mr. Cisneros only hires Harvard MBAs to work in his private office.” I felt I had been given a glimpse of a better world.

  Several of my friends had obtained MBAs, mostly from INSEAD, a school just outside Paris, and spoke well of their experience. The few who had been to HBS were dismissive of it. They mocked its self-importance, the earnestness of the students, the very opposite of British insouciance. All, however, said that the MBA had taught them the language of business. For that they were grateful. So, in August 2001, in a gray, windowless cubicle in an office tower close to Penn Station, I took the GMAT, the standardized test in English and math required for graduate business school. I waited a few moments for a computer to spit out my score: 730 out of 800. The average for Harvard was 700. I could do this.

  September 11 knocked me off track. Reporting seemed important again. For several weeks, I was pushed to my limits writing and managing a team of other reporters and photographers flown in from London and all jostling to shine on the story. Then one evening, in the middle of it all, I went to a basement dive for drinks with the rest of the British pack in New York. Christmas lights hung all round the room, making everyone’s already booze-swollen faces look that much redder. “Sensational story,” said one, raising his beer bottle. “Never made so much money off a story in my life.” It was the same emotionally indifferent response I heard whenever a big story broke, a political scandal, a celebrity trial, even a terrorist attack killing thousands. The cynicism that once attracted me to journalism was turning me off. Furthermore, the experience of standing beneath the Twin Towers just before their collapse, watching people leap to their deaths, had forced on me the same question it must have forced on millions of others, and it grew louder as the days passed. If everything ended for you right now, would you be happy with the life you have lived? I had never felt the pressure of this question in the same way. For several weeks, I would wake up feeling as if I were being pressed into a corner with a knife at my throat, forced to give an answer. Have you lived the life you should have? Have you done everything you could have? Have you? Have you?

  As a reward for my work in New York, I was offered the job of Paris bureau chief. Margret, whom I had met eighteen months earlier, and I were married just before we moved. Marriage and Paris distracted me again from thoughts of upending my career. There was a rambunctious presidential election to report on and all of France to discover, and one year after we were married, our first son, Augustus, was born. But the questions kept nagging at me.

  A diplomat at the British embassy in Paris told me that whenever the ambassador invited the local British press over for lunch, he referred to it as feeding time at the trough. At the next embassy lunch, I looked around the table at the hacks who had stayed in Paris long after their staff jobs expired. Each month, they seemed to descend ever farther down the freelance ladder, their clothes deteriorating, their lips stained darker with cheap red wine. There was one who only ever asked one question, but he applied it to any topic: “Ambassador, what does all this mean for Europe?” The ambassador would pull at his cuffs and reply politely across the elaborately set table, but you could feel the ghost of the Duke of Wellington, a former occupant of the residence, cringing at this unseemly rabble. After long evenings of red wine and conversation with friends, I would lie in bed staring at the ceiling, my mind churning with ill-defined fears and desires. I looked up the totem pole at my newspaper and saw middle-aged men complaining about their salaries and the mediocrity of their managers and harking back to their days reporting from the road. I dreaded being called back to work at a desk in London. So I wrote a letter to myself describing my feelings. I wrote that it was exhausting to feel like this, constantly thinking about change. I was thirty-one years old and had one of the most coveted jobs in my profession and yet all I could think of was what would happen next. I was whipsawed between feeling self-indulgent and feeling sensible, worrying that if I let my next career change happen to me rather than making it happen myself, I would deeply regret it. I wrote about Daw Ma Ma and how the memory of what she built magnified my family’s sense of loss, wielding a nostalgic grip on us some fifty years later. Business had been her salvation, and business, I felt after avoiding it for so long, might also be mine.

  The Harvard Business School website was cluttered with inspiring bait. Theodore Roosevelt’s challenge to “Dare Mighty Things” stood out in large crimson letters. Words like passion and leadership were sprinkled about like punctuation. There were photographs of eager-looking students and bespectacled professors, their hands poised in explanatory poses, exuding wisdom and energy. There on the banks of the Charles River people were daring, leading, imagining, and pursuing. I was drawn to Harvard for two main reasons. The first, I confess, was the name. However famous Harvard is in the United States, it is even more so overseas. It remains, for better or worse, by far the best-known university in America. The second reason was the particular education the business school promised. Even though most business schools teach much the same stuff, the approach and emphasis vary. Among the top schools, Stanford is known as a place for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Kellogg, at Northwestern University, is famous for marketing. If your dream is to build or manage a great American brand, Kellogg is the place. Wharton, at the University of Pennsylvania, is for financiers, those with their eyes fixed on Wall Street. Columbia is similarly plugged into all that happens in New York. The Sloan School, at MIT, is for engineers and scientists wanting to turn their ideas into businesses. And
Harvard is about general management. It prepares you to manage and lead all the parts of a business without any particular specialization. These descriptions doubtless do all of these schools a disservice, but they are repeated so often that an applicant, forced to choose, can scarcely ignore them.

  Over the Christmas holiday of 2003, I wrote application essays for four schools: Harvard, Kellogg, Stanford, and the Haas School at Berkeley. With no sense of what any of them would make of me, I hoped at least one would take me in. I cranked the essays out blind, as honestly as I could. I had no template to work from, no friendly advisers telling me what the admissions offices wanted to hear. The questions were of three kinds: Why do you want to come to business school? Why do you want to come to this business school? And what have you done in your life up to now that makes you think a business education at this school would be worth your time and ours? As an example of my leadership experience, I wrote about running a newspaper bureau on September 11, 2001. To illustrate an ethical quandary, I described the difficulty of staying impartial as a reporter when writing about the victims and supporters of General Pinochet in Chile. My intention in coming to business school, I wrote, was to be able to build and manage my own media company one day, creating and distributing the kind of news and entertainment I could be proud of.

  My English referees were baffled by the forms they were required to fill out. “You have to help me with this, Philip,” my editor pleaded on the telephone from his home in rural England on Christmas Eve “Where on this scale of one to five am I supposed to rank your leadership qualities?”

  The next stage in the process was to be interviewed by alumni. My Harvard alumnus was a Frenchman of formidable girth who had once been the publisher of a business magazine. He hobbled to the door of his apartment on Place Vauban to greet me, his leg in a cast. It was early evening and the spotlights shining on Les Invalides reflected off the ceiling. He had pulled out a chair embossed with the Harvard insignia and the year of his graduation. He invited me to sit on it and then retreated behind his enormous desk.

  “So, why Harvard?” His rich voice seemed to emanate from deep beneath layers of gleefully devoured cheese and terrine.

  “It’s supposed to be the best one, isn’t it?”

  “I see you read Classics at Oxford. Who was your favorite author?”

  “Any of the golden age Latin poets. Virgil, Catullus, Horace.”

  “What is your favorite work by Virgil?”

  “The Georgics.”

  “Hmm. Most people say The Aeneid. I had a man a few years ago who claimed to have gone to the Lycée Louis le Grand here in Paris, the same school I went to. But I spotted that he spelled le Grand as one word on his résumé. We all had to learn Latin, so I asked him something about Latin and he couldn’t answer. It turned out he was a fraud. So I like to check these things.”

  He asked me one more question about why I wanted to move on from journalism, and we then spent a pleasant half hour talking about the teaching of classics in English schools and his affection for English books about the French. He must have given a favorable account of me because in April I received an e-mail from Harvard offering me a place.

  It was a warm spring day and I took our dog, Scarlett, out for a walk around Les Invalides. We passed the usual gaggle of lost tourists looking for the entrance to Napoleon’s tomb, and the restaurants where waiters were unwinding their awnings. I asked myself why it was that all this beauty, this civilization was not enough. Why did I feel the need to toss everything in the air again and start afresh?

  Soon after I was accepted, I received a book called The HBS Survival Guide, Class of 2006, compiled by the student association. One lunchtime, I found a bench in the Tuileries and cracked it open. “Welcome to the Harvard Business School,” it read, “to a rich and diverse community made up of impressive people challenging themselves and each other . . . and to some of the best years of your life!” There followed a list of the book’s corporate sponsors. They included five management consulting firms, the Gillette Company, and Wachovia Securities, a bank based in North Carolina. In a chapter called “What to Bring,” two students had written: “Don’t bring that guitar or piano you were planning on picking up again. Do bring those skis and golf clubs that you will pick up again . . . Don’t bring the deal toy you received after ‘leading’ that hot tech IPO in 1999. Do bring the offer letter you secured after actually leading that dull bond offering in 2003 . . . Don’t bring any books from literature or history classes you took in college. I get it. You’re smarter than me. You don’t need to quote Keats every time I see you in the Aldrich bathroom . . . Don’t bring ‘I’ll never.’ Do bring ‘I’ll try.’ Don’t bring your cynicism. Do bring all the diverse rest of you. We can’t wait to share the experience.”

  Who were these people? And why did they talk like this? Why can’t I bring my cynicism? Or my books? Aren’t they part of the “diverse rest of me”? And what in God’s name is a deal toy? On another page titled “What to Expect and How to Prepare,” I read, “Your calendar will be jam-packed with amazing, fun things to do, and not enough hours in the day to do them all. It will be as if someone dropped you into a Disneyland for future CEOs . . . You can put networking on the bottom of your to-do list, and you’ll still end up with a stellar network of friends. That’s the real power behind the famous HBS network—international, multi-industry friendships that last.” The associate director of MBA Support Services had contributed a long piece that included a two-by-two table describing the physical, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral signals of stress. These ranged from sweaty palms and nausea to crying a lot and wanting to throw things or hit people.

  On almost every page was a grainy black-and-white photograph of students with their arms slung around one another, on mountaintops, in bars, in tuxedos, clutching surfboards, or just sitting in a dorm room. A chapter called “Nightlife in Boston” showed two students drinking from a single outsize cocktail. It read, “When you look back at your HBS experience 20 years from now, you won’t remember TOM or Finance, but you will remember dancing drunk with friends on that table in Pravda with a bottle of Vodka in each hand!” The HBS archetype was now forming in my head as a wide-eyed, stress-addled philistine with a drinking problem and a future in management consulting.

  This was at odds with what I read of Harvard’s newly created Leadership and Values Initiative. It had taken me the previous two and a half years to familiarize myself with the peculiar locutions of Le Monde. Suddenly, here was another, even stranger language. The Leadership and Values Initiative, I read, would “challenge students to access their moral compass and to apply rigorous ethical standards to their business and leadership decisions such that this process becomes instinctual.” Professor Lynn Paine was quoted as saying the school needed to “develop a comprehensive approach to ‘leadership and values’ that goes beyond the often punitive legal compliance stance” and “foster ‘[integrity] strategies that can help prevent damaging ethical lapses while tapping into powerful human impulses for moral thought and action.’ ” It took me several readings to unravel all this. Integrity strategies? Access my moral compass? Did this mean they were going to teach me how not to be a crook? And what if this process of not behaving like a crook was not yet instinctual? What if I had no moral compass to access? Or if it began malfunctioning after two bottles of vodka in Pravda? Was Lynn Paine the problem or the solution?

  On our last night in Paris, Margret and I went for dinner at Maceo, a restaurant just behind the Palais Royal. We toasted each other with champagne, shared a bottle of white wine, and ate grilled snapper and chilled tomato soup. Cigarette smoke drifted across the tables along with the sound of people clattering out of the theater and into the streets around us. The reality of returning to America struck us with full force. Like most foreigners who live in France, we had had a mixed experience. But tonight, Paris was as old-fashioned and romantic as the poets and songwriters had promised. We asked each other what we had lea
rned from living there.

  “Patience,” I told her. There was absolutely no point trying to hurry a Frenchman. The revolutionary spirit lives on and they do what they want in their own time. If it’s pas possible, only charm, never muscle, can win the day.

  “I’ve learned what I need to be happy,” said Margret, by which she meant not material things, but friends, a support network, some kind of professional fulfillment.

  “I realized how much I love my own culture,” I said. Learning about France by living there had given me only so much satisfaction. I missed the Anglo-American media, the newspapers, television, and films, the burbling radio programs, the sense of humor I always took for granted, the banal obsession with sport. Despite our gripes, Paris had been wonderful to us. We had arrived in February 2002 after our wedding and honeymoon. It was one of those gray, drizzly days we would get to know well. The cobbles round the Place Wagram glistened as we drove in from the airport. Thin, smoking men and women walked briskly to work. From the Telegraph’s office on the rue de Rivoli, we stared in dumb fascination as two of the city’s gardeners trimmed the trees in the Tuileries to an even height so that in spring they would bloom to form a canopy as flat and green as a Ping-Pong table.

  We saw three of those wonderful Paris springs. I had immersed myself in the local politics and interviewed a series of French actresses, each one wearing a tighter sweater than the last. In my final months, I had been blacklisted by the French foreign ministry for asking impertinent questions of the imperious foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin. We had taken the train from Paris to Milan to see Rigoletto at La Scala, and eaten the greatest lunch of our lives at Le Grand Véfour, a restaurant founded before the Revolution and tucked into a corner of the Palais Royal. A few weeks before our departure, I had sat beside President Chirac’s chief diplomatic adviser at the state dinner for the Queen at the Elysée Palace and drunk wines from great vineyards while discussing France’s place in the world. I had a great job. But as I stared into the future, I knew I needed a change. I needed to go back to school and study accounting.