Ahead of the Curve (7 page)

“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?”

“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 learned 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.

The Harvard Business School of 2004, when I arrived to begin my MBA, was a very different place from the scrappy little outfit founded in 1908. Just fifty-nine graduate students enrolled for that first year of an as-yet-unproven curriculum regarded with suspicion by most of the university. Other universities taught business to undergraduates at the time, but Harvard was the first to try a graduate course. The rationale for the new school was articulated by the president of Harvard, Charles W. Eliot, in a speech to the Harvard Club of Connecticut on February 21, 1908. “Business in the upper walks has become a highly intellectual calling, requiring knowledge of languages, economics, industrial organization and commercial law and wide reading concerning the resources and habits of the different nations. In all these directions we propose to give professional instruction.” The goal of the school was to educate not only future businessmen but also senior diplomats and government officials, who increasingly needed knowledge of business and organizations to do their work.

In its early years, the school struggled to define its purpose and place at Harvard and within the broader business class. In June 1909, Edwin Gay, the first dean of the school, wrote to a friend:

Gay resolved to adopt the case teaching method from the law school. Rather than hearing lectures, students would learn business by analyzing real situations and discussing them in class. From this, they would derive general principles applicable throughout their careers. The method was known as “learning by doing,” and it has persisted to this day. When the first designs for the school were commissioned, Gay’s successor, Wallace Donham, said he wanted the business school’s architecture to support a “life of plain living and high thinking in surroundings of quiet good taste.” He emphasized that it was important for the buildings to help students socialize and become “something more than money-makers.” It was one of the great money-makers of his time, however, who put up the money for these buildings. George F. Baker, the president of the First National Bank, had been a towering figure on Wall Street for sixty years by the time the business school’s fund-raisers came knocking. Along with J. P. Morgan, he had financed the Gilded Age boom of the late nineteenth century and acted as the de facto U.S. Treasury at a time when Washington’s financial expertise was negligible. He was also famously taciturn, hence his nickname The Sphinx. Baker once said, “[B]usiness men of America should reduce their talk two-thirds . . . There is rarely ever a reason good enough for anybody to talk.” This barrel of laughs hemmed and hawed about Harvard’s request for $1 million of the $5 million needed to build the business school before offering the entire $5 million, if he could have “the privilege of building the whole school.” In 1925, in a rare torrent of words, he told a gathering of the Harvard Business School Club that he hoped the school would “graduate some of the greatest men in the world” and “teach them so to conduct themselves as to gain the respect of their fellows and also to keep up their standards of integrity, for thereby they may gain for themselves the greatest happiness that life can bestow.”

The first dormitories at the school were named after former U.S. Treasury secretaries Mellon, Dillon, and Gallatin, while the faculty and administration were housed in Morgan, named after J.P. The majestic heart of the campus was Baker Library, with its soaring silent reading room. By 2004, Baker’s original campus had expanded to cover over forty-four lavishly appointed acres. The endowment of the business school was edging toward $2 billion. Aside from the nine hundred MBA students enrolled each year, hundreds more businesspeople were cycled through the executive education program. Harvard Business School Publishing was a $100-million-a-year business all by itself. The school employed two hundred faculty members and maintained research offices in Hong Kong, Paris, Tokyo, Mumbai, and Buenos Aires. Graduate business schools had sprouted at universities across the world, churning out tens of thousands of MBAs each year. But year after year, Harvard Business School sat atop or close to the top of the media’s business school rankings. It was a behemoth, a global brand. The HBS MBA, I heard it said, was the “union card of the global financial elite.”

HBS sits on the opposite bank of the Charles River from the rest of Harvard. Surrounding it is the Boston suburb of Allston, which consists largely of collision repair shops, freeways, and decaying housing stock. It is a brisk ten-minute walk to the charming chaos of Harvard Square, the center of the university, but the psychological gulf is wider. HBS refers to the larger university as “across the river,” as in “across the river, they wear tweed jackets, read Marx, and haven’t a clue about how the world really works. Here at HBS we know better.” In Harvard Square—really more of a pedestrian-choked triangle—you find the usual college town throng of studentsin khaki shorts and flip-flops, bums, crazies, and panhandlers with Ph.D.s. In one corner of the square you can pay two dollars to play chess with a taciturn Ukrainian. In another you can buy coffee in the same store frequented by John F. Kennedy when he was an undergraduate. The lamp-posts are encrusted with flyers inviting you to watch a play, buy a bike, or donate sperm at the local hospital. There is a newsstand in the middle of the square where you can buy newspapers and magazines from around the world, or join the desultory group of antiwar protesters who seem to have taken up permanent residence there. The streets are lined with bookstores and secondhand record shops, burger and pizza joints, and of course a place to buy Tibetan artifacts and yoga mats.