Ahead of the Curve (39 page)

Fourth, I would commission cases and courses on the proper scope of business practice. I would begin with Jack Welch’s claim that business was more important than government and would require professors and students to argue this out. The HBS mission, to educate leaders who make a difference in the world, supposes that business leadership is the kind the world needs. And after two years there, I was not convinced. Democratic societies tend to allocate resources to business and government based on which they believe will do a better job. At its simplest, business is considered more efficient, government, fairer. Voters and consumers are constantly adjusting the dial, one day preferring efficiency, the next, fairness. But at HBS there was a belief that if only everything was run by business and businesspeople, the world would be a better place. It was the duty of businesspeople not only to manage businesses but also to take over nonprofits and cultural institutions, to bring their leadership to bear on every area of society. Michael Bloomberg was often cited as an HBS alumnus who had successfully transferred his leadership talents from business to New York’s City Hall. President George W. Bush, however, was rarely mentioned. Though I often asked professors and my fellow students why this was so, I never received a satisfactory answer. Some said it was purely political. Harvard was historically Democratic. Others said, look at his record. Was it anything for HBS to brag about? Still, I thought, he is the president in a time of war, and he had written favorably of the school in his autobiography, saying the MBA had been a “vocational training exercise in capitalism.” At an institution that said its goal is to “educate leaders who make a difference in the world,” should Bush not have been invoked more frequently? I began to think that the school’s unease with Bush had nothing to do with his politics or his record. It was that here was the first HBS alumnus to enter the White House, and he had never been much of a businessman. Through family connections, he had been able to make a small fortune as a part-owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team. But it was as a politician, albeit starting with those same family connections, that he had achieved the most powerful job in the world. I believe HBS would have much preferred it if its first president had been a Bloomberg or a Mitt Romney, someone who could point to their business record, their swollen personal accounts, and walk into the Oval Office and say “I’m going to run this country like a business.” That would be the apotheosis of the HBS way, the triumph of business leadership. Instead Bush’s success seemed to have come in spite of the school. He appealed to a constituency the school did not much care for. He disdained the Northeast and the quantitative method. However, certain HBS traits had never left him. He saw his main role as making decisions. He was “the decider.” And as the general manager, he focused on strategy, the big goals of his presidency, leaving the tactical minutiae to others. But he was not of the business class. He was not of HBS.

I often thought back to Warren Buffett’s visit, when student after student rose to ask him how he would resolve the situation in Iraq or global warming. We all knew there were bigger issues in the world than the current stock price of Berkshire Hathaway, and we yearned for Buffett to apply his mind to them. The idea of Bill Gates, mandated by his wealth, diverting his personal billions to healthcare issues was more exciting to us than the prospect of using what we had learned at HBS to improve the process of delivering AIDS vaccines. This was evident during the final semester, when I attended the school’s Social Enterprise conference. There were ecoconscious coffee growers and World Health Organization physicians, the CEO of Timberland shoes and drug company executives—just not many of my classmates. The large audience came instead from the rest of the university, from the law school, the Kennedy School, the undergraduate college, and from the broader Cambridge community. At the end of the day, I bumped into Justin.

“You’d think after all the talk in class, there would have been more of us here,” I said.

“If you want to change the world, get on a plane to fucking Darfur,” he said tersely. “HBS is about making money. There are going to be a small handful of terrific people in our class who actually do this good stuff, but most of us are like everyone else in business. We talk about it because it makes us feel better. How many people in our class wrote in their applications that they wanted an MBA so they could do micro-finance in Uganda and are now going into investment banking?”

Which brings me to the fifth, and perhaps most important change I would make during my day as dean of HBS. I would change the mission statement. HBS does not need to promise to “educate leaders who make a difference in the world.” It suggests that business, with its priorities and decision-making approach, has a right to impose its will on the world. But business needs to relearn its limits, and if the Harvard Business School let some air out of its own balloon, business would listen. HBS need only promise to educate students in the processes and management of business. It would be a noble and accommodating goal and would dilute the perception of the school and its graduates as a megalomaniacal, self-sustaining elite. For the school’s graduates, past and future, the effect would be refreshing. We could end the charade that each of us is a representative of a hallowed brand. HBS can stop saying it “transforms” its students, as if it then had a lifelong claim on them.

Harvard taught that the most admirable lives were those lived in two parts. The first consisted of accumulating resources, the second in distributing them, or “giving back.” The first part might involve being rapacious and pushy, the classic HBS elbow-thrower. During the second part you could be gracious and statesmanlike, have your name carved in stone and give speeches about the importance of philanthropy and sharing. Andrew Carnegie articulated this view in his book
The Gospel of Wealth.
He wrote that it was “the duty of the man of Wealth” to live modestly, to provide for the “legitimate wants of those dependent upon him” and then to distribute the rest of his money “to produce the most beneficial result for the community—the man of wealth thus becoming the sole agent and trustee for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer—doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves.” Even while he wrote these words, Carnegie was squeezing his employees with lower wages and poorer working conditions. His philanthropy was justification for the very worst business practices. Carnegie’s assumption that “the man of wealth” makes for a better trustee of the common good than any elected government or private individual is shared by the HBS mission. It is the moral justification for the concentration of capital in ever fewer hands. Unfortunately, I do not think this makes for an admirable society. It venerates those who have amassed the most resources, whether money or power, almost regardless of how they did so, and diminishes those who have not. It places too much emphasis on that which can be counted, the quantifiable sum of those resources, rather than that which cannot, the unquantifiable sacrifices made by thousands of people so the few can accept their laurels of praise. It was disingenuous of Hank Paulson to say that it was up to individuals to make time in their life for their family, having been chief executive of a company, Goldman Sachs, that famously drives its employees to work endless hours. The MBAs who run these big companies are responsible for more than profits and losses, their own compensation and returns to shareholders. They set a cultural tone that affects everyone. Their disrespect for people’s time and personal lives has enormous consequences. The world is not simply the apparatus to be used by MBAs to buff up their personal brands. It is not just a stage for them to display their decision-making prowess or leadership skills.

Business today clearly aspires to something more than it is. It wishes to be recognized as a force more powerful than any government, nation, or individual society, and a good force at that. And the job of Harvard Business School is to provide its leaders. But just as governments and politicians can be undone by the different requirements of achieving power and wielding it, so businesses and businesspeople will forever face the conundrum of how to survive in a capitalist market while doing the right thing. At HBS, you add to this a very American twist: How do you manage to remain the most powerful, the richest and most successful, and also the most morally good? As consumers, citizens, even potential employees, we have the right to be both cynical of the profit motive underlying the piety we hear from business leaders, the talk of sustainability and “doing well by doing good,” and yet also grateful that the capitalist supertanker can be diverted toward the greater good.

One of the most famous alumni of Harvard’s MBA program is Robert McNamara, the U.S. secretary of defense during the Vietnam War, and member of the class of 1939. In his book
In Retrospect
, reflecting on the war, he wrote that while at Harvard he had developed “an approach to organizing human activities.” There were three steps: “Define a clear objective . . . develop a plan to achieve that objective, and systematically monitor progress against the plan.” This was still the essence of the HBS method: strategy, planning, and measurement. Of course, McNamara’s methods came to seem macabre when he applied them to counting bodies in Vietnam. When asked about McNamara, a South Vietnamese officer replied, “Ah,
les statistiques
. Your secretary of defense loves statistics. We Vietnamese can give him all he wants. If you want them to go up, they will go up. If you want them to go down, they will go down.” It was a line that often passed through my mind during my time at HBS, whenever I felt our calculations were missing the point.
Ah, les statistiques.

The journalist David Halberstam wrote that McNamara mistrusted people who did not speak his language of statistics and hard data. If it ever came down to one person saying something “just didn’t feel right” or that it “smelled wrong,” McNamara would always go with his facts over their feeling. Fatally, in the case of Vietnam, the data he received were not accurate, and yet he trusted more in the illusion of reality generated by the faulty data—the clean, impersonal, objective facts—than in the messy yet accurate eyewitness reports brought home by journalists and soldiers. Interviewed later in life about the tension between his private reputation as an honorable, modest man devoted to public service and his professional reputation as a ruthless, data-driven boss, he said, “there is no contradiction between a soft heart and hard head.”

When you see how businesses function today, it is hard not to feel that McNamara was wrong. When you see the allocation of financial rewards in a system nurtured and sustained by MBAs, you see there is nothing soft about it. Is this just capitalism at work? Or has society allotted too much authority to a single, narcissistic class of spreadsheet makers and PowerPoint presenters? What is interesting when you read about HBS over the years is that these questions have always been on the minds of those who have passed through the school. How can I succeed financially without losing my soul? How can I work at a company without becoming a corporate stiff? Raise a family given the hours demanded of me? Can I be good and successful in business? Can I live decently, honorably, and completely in a world which makes that so difficult? You know these are vital questions because companies themselves make a lot of noise about them, pretending to have answers, which they don’t. Until business and the MBA class resolve them, or at least demonstrate a fuller understanding of the problems they cause, they should drop their claim to leadership in society. And when incoming classes arrive at HBS, McNamara, not Coburg and his serfs, should be the first case they study.

Thanks first of all to the Harvard Business School for letting me through the door, to the faculty, staff, and Section A, class of 2006, especially those who relived their experiences with me while I wrote this book. They are an epic vintage. To Stephen Robinson, Alec Russell, and Charles Moore, my editors at
The Daily Telegraph,
for writing my references, and to Quentin Letts, who first showed me how journalism was done and, ten years on, contributed to my reflected best-self exercise. To Richard Perry for his encouragement and advice. To the friends who read and commented on my drafts: Christopher Coleridge, Barnes Martin, Harry Mount, Andrew Stuttaford, John Brodie, Mungo Wilson, Daisuke Iwase, Mark Kahn, Guy Paisner, Paul Hardart, and Pauline Piechota. To the Bombay Club club, Oakes, Osgood and Steinberg, and, of course, to Bo Fishback.

To Svetlana Katz for reading the novel I wrote during the summer when I should have been interning on Wall Street, and passing it on to the incomparable Tina Bennett, who became my agent. To Scott Moyers and Ann Godoff for seeing enough in the proposal to pay me an advance, and to Eamon Dolan for his provocative editing. To Laura Stickney and everyone at Penguin who ushered the book into print.

To my parents for their love and patience and for not dropping the ball. To Cindy for defying every mother-in-law stereotype. To Augie and Hugo for being such delightful company and efficient alarm clocks throughout graduate school. And most of all, to Margret, a beautiful, brilliant, warm-hearted woman who puts up with my nonsense.

Philip Delves Broughton was born in Bangladesh and grew up in England. He graduated from New College, Oxford, in 1994 and received his MBA from the Harvard Business School in 2006. From 1998 to 2004 he served, successively, as the New York and Paris bureau chief for
The Daily Telegraph
of London and reported widely from North and South America, Europe, and Africa. His work has also appeared in the
Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Times
of London,
The Spectator, Fortune,
and
Monocle
. He lives in New York with his wife and two sons.