Ahead of the Curve Read online

  Riedl liked to start his classes with an anecdote about his three-year-old daughter. “I got a call this morning from my wife, at seven thirty. I was in the office. ‘Good news and bad news,’ she says. ‘Good news, your daughter said Dada this morning. Bad news, she was looking at a can of prunes.’” Despite his best efforts to keep us amused, I dreaded the work for his class. It required hours of head scratching, and Margret became used to the sound of me screaming and hurling my FRC cases against the wall.

  In LEAD, we continued to break down human dynamics into groupings and flow charts. At times it seemed like an academic discipline in search of a subject rather than the other way round. We studied a woman called Taran Swan, who had set up Nickelodeon Latin America. She was team-focused, supportive, a great leader. But the case closed with her pregnant and ordered to take bed rest. A Brazilian movieplex manager, who sat in the front row, said of course she should rest. She was a pregnant woman. What was she even thinking trying to cling onto her job? Everyone laughed at his machismo. Then Misty raised her hand. “I mean what’s bed rest, right? Is it like when you stay in bed asleep? Or are you, like, actually working from bed? Because sometimes I, like, do my cases in bed. But not all the time, you know. But she could work from bed, make telephone calls and stuff.” She seemed oblivious to the eye-rolling all around her. The case concluded with Swan returning to her home in New York and reportedly working sixty-five-hour weeks—from bed.

  In another LEAD class, a young American who used to work in freight shipping in the Florida Panhandle was asked to play a factory manager in a simulation negotiation with one of his workers. He hammered away at the worker and threatened his health benefits to get his way. A Frenchman who used to market gin and only ever wore black pointed out to me afterward that a negotiation like that would have prompted a strike in France. Our classmate, on the other hand, was cheered.

  Halfway through the second week, three second-years burst into our classroom after our final class of the day and handed out a copy of a letter they said had been sent to our section chair. The letter purported to be from someone in the section complaining that everyone was drinking too much and thus not fully prepared for class. The second-years initiated a discussion and invited contributions from the class. But after a few nervous comments, the doors to the classroom flew open and the whole of last year’s Section A, “Old A,” came rushing in. It was a prank. They presented a slide show, pulling information from our class cards to make fun of us. They compared a former advertising executive with crazy curly hair to an evil genius, a former World Banker to Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, and mocked a dashing West African financier for his interests in tribal dance and handicrafts. They then played recordings of spoof telephone calls to three people in our section, two to men who were lured into sexually tinged conversations and one to a woman, in which someone pretended to be an angry Indian food delivery man. Everyone seemed to be having a hoot. The head of Old A told us we needed to “fuckin’ lighten up our shit.” After a month of pious lecturing, the suddenly sophomoric invasion felt quite schizophrenic. Sitting beside me, Bob was gripping his pencil and staring straight ahead. I did not know what to make of it, either. It felt as though HBS had two modes, deadly serious and frat boy, with little in between.

  At the Club Fair, that afternoon, an event in which we were invited to join the various clubs on campus, we found long lines in front of the Food and Wine Club, while the Texan and Republican Clubs looked dejected. I bumped into Laurie, the Alaskan biochemist from Analytics. She said she had been the victim of her section’s prank because she was the oldest in the class. The pranksters had made the whole class stand up and then said that only whoever was alive on such-and-such a date should stay standing. As they got closer and closer to Laurie’s birthday, the intervals between dates became smaller and smaller, to humiliate her. She was not amused.

  After class on Friday, we had our first skydecks, in which the students who sat in the back row of class, known as the skydeck, gave their humorous take on the week in class. This was an HBS tradition and was supposed to lighten the mood of the section and defuse brewing conflicts. Five students from the skydeck row gathered around the overhead projector. First came awards. The Arctic Winter Survivor Award went to a student who had survived two cold calls in the same day. The Lifesaver, the student with a knack for intervening in class when others were floundering, was Brian, a Canadian. The Great Strides Award went to Victoria, a shy Austrian, who had just made her first comment. The Statue of Liberty Award was given to two students who held their hands up throughout every class, begging to speak. The Jedi Mind Trick Award, for those who were called on by the professor whenever they wanted, went to a Palestinian student. Sexy Beast was the prank victim who had confessed that he’d had sex in a car at Exit 14 on I-95 in Connecticut. The Days of Our Lives Award for Drama went to Emma, whose life seemed ripped from a daytime soap opera. She dressed more fashionably than most students, and during a marketing case about the customer buying process, she told of a friend who had bought a BMW 7-Series because it was “fast and strong,” a “big cat.” The Wave Maker was a student who talked, then paused, then talked, prompting everyone to put their hands up and down. Gordon Gekko was Chad, a hot-shot financier, whose every contribution included the phrase “basically, case closed.” Jun, a fabulously unengaged Chinese woman who came in late and left her cell phone on, was dubbed the Smooth Operator.

  The final slide read, “And lastly it’s all about fun and Section A love!!!!”

  Section love remained outside my emotional range, but I had at least made a new friend, a seven-foot man from Augusta, Georgia, called Bo. He alone was worth the price of the HBS education. We became friends once we discovered we both lived on the same street in West Cambridge. There were few other MBA students in the area, and soon we were bumping into each other in the local grocery store and sharing rides to and from school. Bo was also married and had two dogs, so we would often walk our dogs together in a local park. He was five years younger than I and had studied engineering at college before working at a medical services company in Kansas City. His father had owned his own medical device business, which he had sold for a good amount of money, and retired quite young. Unlike me, Bo had come to Harvard with a very specific mission. He knew that he was going back to the South or the Midwest where, he said, the opportunities to become rich were more abundant than in places where thousands of MBAs jostled for attention.

  “No point going to New York or Los Angeles,” he said one day, leaning back in the driver’s seat of his colossal SUV. “You’ll just be a commodity. In Nebraska, Missouri, Georgia, people kill for Harvard MBAs. Maybe not you, because you’re this weird English dude, but most Harvard MBAs.” Bo wanted to make a very large fortune in health care or biotechnology and then buy an NBA team. He even had his dream house sketched out in his mind, a place with high ceilings so he would not have to stoop and a full-size indoor basketball court where he could play with friends and host tournaments for the local community. I was envious of his certainty, but his sunny disposition made him impossible not to like. He took the academic work seriously but never freaked out about it and always seemed to have time to watch hours of basketball on ESPN. He was an antidote to the HBS bubble and seemed less interested in the section and more in the welfare of his wife, a trainee doctor going through her grueling residency, which included spending night after night in a local emergency room. One autumn day, on the dog walk, as I complained about yet another torturous accounting case, he stopped me and made an excellent point: “Everything we do is squat compared to what my wife’s going through.”

  Chapter Five

  WHO AM I?

  Before arriving at Harvard, we were required to take two personality tests. The first was the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the second was called CareerLeader.

  The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is intended to help one think about one’s own psychological type and consequently how to use that understanding
in everyday life. It is used on the employees of most of the Fortune 100 companies and some 2.5 million Americans each year, and is the closest business gets to issuing bar codes to personalities.

  Myers-Briggs is based on an interpretation of the work of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung by a turn-of-the-twentieth-century Washington, D.C., housewife and her daughter. Jung believed that healthy people use their minds in different ways, which accounts for different forms of behavior. For Katharine Briggs, Jung’s theory explained why her creative, bold, beloved daughter Isabel had married a boring, pragmatic stiff named Clarence Myers. Jung wrote that people’s active minds are always perceiving, taking in information, or judging, processing that information. He further identified two different ways of perceiving, sensation and intuition. Sensing is about practicalities, the immediate, the facts staring one in the face. Intuition is about imagination, inspiration, the wild blue yonder. Judging could also come in two forms, thinking, a rational approach, and feeling, acting on hunches. Jung then went on to state that people also tend to be energized either by the external world of people and experience, or the internal world of thought, memory, and emotion. He labeled these two tendencies extraversion and introversion. Each person, he argued, was either extroverted or introverted and was characterized by one of the perception or judging functions, one of which would be dominant, the other auxiliary. This led him to conclude that there are sixteen basic personality types.

  Jung, however, added a crucial caveat. “Every individual is an exception to the rule,” and to “stick labels on people at first sight” was “nothing but a childish parlor game.” The handbook that explains the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator offers a diluted version of Jung’s caveat: “Type does not explain everything. Human personality is much more complex.” So why then do so many organizations insist people take the test?

  The answer, I think, is that to most companies, the idea of people as individuals is terrifying. Of course they talk a great deal about allowing individual expression and letting creativity flower. But what could be more frightening than trying to get thousands of different personalities through each working day without revolts, strikes, criminal subterfuge, and assault, let alone corralling their energies toward a money-making enterprise? What makes this even harder is that every other aspect of business is so susceptible to measurement. You can measure the efficiency of your machines, the accuracy of your accounting, and the returns on your investment. But then along comes your work force. Who among them, you wonder, grew up longing to be in product management or marketing research? Who lay in the summer grass aged ten staring up at the sky thinking how magical it would be one day to sit in a glass box beside a freeway running pivot tables? Or revising contracts? No one. Instead, you know that beneath their suits and khakis your employees are an army of militants. Lepidopterists, poets, chess wizards, baritones, fantasists, whittlers, spankers, and Sudoku nuts. Animal lovers, gamblers, knitters, Episcopalians, Satanists, gluttons, and cheats.

  So you try to control them with the tools at your disposal: salaries, perks, promotions, sackings, ethical codes, mission statements, team-building exercises. And then someone comes along with a test that says every individualcan be put into one of sixteen boxes and given a four-letter code that tells you what he is like, the kinds of tasks he will do well, and the kinds of people he will work best with. Well, Hallelujah!

  The MBTI is owned and administered by a Californian company called CPP—formerly Consulting Psychologists Press—whose vision is “to be a positive agent for change by advancing the cause of individuals by enabling them to achieve their goals.” In the brochure delivered to test-takers, CPP suggests that we think of a dominant personality function much in the same way we think about which hand we write with. Writing with one hand feels natural and easy. The moment we switch hands, we can probably still write, but it is far more of a struggle. Likewise, if we happen to be extroverted sensing types, it can be a shock to work with an introverted thinker.

  The directions to the six-page test say, “There are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers to these questions. Your answers will help show how you like to look at things and how you like to go about deciding things. Knowing your own preferences and learning about other people’s can help you understand where your special strengths are, what kinds of work you might enjoy and be successful doing, and how people with different preferences can relate to each other and be valuable to society.” The test-taker is advised not to think too long about the questions and to skip difficult ones.

  The first question is “When you go somewhere for the day, would you rather A) plan what you will do and when, or B) just go?” The penultimate question is “Which mistake would be more natural for you, A) to drift from one thing to another all your life, or B) to stay in a rut that didn’t suit you?” The final question is “Would you have liked to argue the meaning of A) a lot of these questions, or B) only a few?” The truth, of course, is that to most of the questions, the right answer would be “well, it depends.” Regarding new fashions and trends, the test asks, are you usually “one of the first to try it or not much interested?” It depends what the trend involves. Is it worse to be unsympathetic or unreasonable? Am I dealing with my four-year-old son or Idi Amin? Is it more important to be able to “see the possibilities in a situation or to adjust to the facts as they are?” How about both? It is only by forcing the test-taker to make these false choices that Myers-Briggs can reduce human character to its sixteen brackets. If you let people tell you what they honestly feel about choosing between a kind boss and a fair boss, that tidy matrix would end up looking like a Jackson Pollock painting.

  Before we showed up at the HBS campus, we were given a long to-do list, from taking an online accounting course to buying a laptop computer. Myers-Briggs was on there, and I zealously followed the directions not to linger over my answers. I was diagnosed as an ENTJ. The characteristics of an ENTJ were: “Frank, decisive, assume leadership readily. Quickly see illogical and inefficient procedures and policies, develop and implement comprehensive systems to solve organizational problems. Enjoy long-term planning and goal-setting. Usually well informed, well read, enjoy expanding their knowledge and passing it on to others. Forceful in presenting their ideas.”

  It sounded pretty good, validating even, as though I had actually performed well on the thing. Until I read the characteristics of other types. ENTP—“quick, ingenious, stimulating, alert and outspoken.” ISFJ— “quiet, friendly, responsible and conscientious.” It was like reading horoscopes beside my own. I could just as easily have been Sagittarius or Cancer as Leo.

  Critics of the test say it is an example of the Forer principle. In 1948, the psychologist Bertram Forer created a personality test for a group of students and then gave them an analysis based on its results. He asked the students to rate the accuracy of the analysis on a scale of zero to five, with five being a first-rate description of their personality. The average rating was 4.26. But Forer had played a trick on the students. He had given each one exactly the same analysis, one he had cobbled together from various horoscopes. It read:

  You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself. While you have some personality weaknesses you are generally able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self- controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You also pride yourself as an independent thinker; and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof. But you have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be rather unrealistic.
/>   His test demonstrated the truth that people are more likely to accept positive things said about them than negative things. Is someone likely to pay more attention when you say “I love the way you work” or “Hey, ass-hole, stop that”?

  My own pitfalls, Myers-Briggs advised me, would be overlooking other people’s needs, ignoring practical considerations and constraints, and suppressing my feelings. I wished they had just said, “Dear Philip Delves Broughton: when you’re not busy taking an action-oriented, energetic approach, taking charge and forcing your ideas on others, you can be a selfish, thoughtless, uptight fantasist. Just try to be nicer sometimes, would you? Please?”

  The other test, CareerLeader, promised a “unique profile of interests, abilities and motivations.” I would learn about my “core interests and what they mean for your career and happiness,” the organizational structure I would most enjoy, the rewards that motivated me, my strengths and weaknesses, and the characteristics likely to limit my success. Consequently, I would be able to “find the careers that are most likely to bring you success and satisfaction, along with suggested actions to take to work toward your career goals.” The test asks a series of very similar questions that iteratively home in on these actions, goals, and interests. Do you value financial rewards more highly than interesting work? Do you value financial rewards more highly than having more time to yourself ? Do you value having time to yourself more highly than interesting work? On and on until the test can conclude how exactly your motivations are prioritized. The questions are so repetitive and niggling that the temptation is to blitz through them without much thought. To let your instincts take control.

  My interests, it turned out, were “creative production, theory development and conceptual thinking.” I would probably enjoy activities such as “designing new products, developing marketing concepts, creating visual and verbal advertising ideas, planning events, creating innovative approaches to business-service delivery and managing public relations.” I would also be happiest in a “work culture marked by a spirit of cooperation, interpersonal sensitivity, a tendency to assume the best of people, and perhaps a degree of altruism in the organization’s mission.” I could certainly imagine being unhappy in the opposite kind of environment, one marked by a spirit of dictatorial behavior, thoughtlessness, suspicion, and selfishness.