Ahead of the Curve (13 page)

Shortly afterward, the underlying disquiet about the turn the section had taken became explicit. Ted Fallows, a serious finance wizard from Louisiana who acted as our liaison with the professors, asked us all to stay back after class. He was perfect for his role as he displayed the same empathy and rigor whatever nonsense crossed his path. There had been several complaints, he said, about buzzword bingo. The game had been proposed during a skydecks session the previous week. The idea was to offer a prize to whoever could drop certain phrases into their classroom remarks. The phrases chosen were “as my father used to say” and “as future business leaders.” The game was goofy but harmless. It was supposed to break up the monotony of classes a little. Sure enough, it did. In the days before Ted called his meeting, several students had managed to use the phrases. Every time someone did, all round the class, heads jerked up and grins had to be checked. Even the professors seemed to sense the flutter in the class. Unfortunately, a number of students had told Ted they were worried that we were risking academic sanction. He explained that since we had received so many warnings about our academic performance and the importance of respecting the learning environment, everyone was a little jumpy. If we were going to get into trouble at HBS and jeopardize our academic records, buzzword bingo hardly seemed worth it. He invited comments. The skydeck came thundering in.

Rodger, one of the older students, who was still running his own technology business between classes, said that we needed to be able to strike a balance between joking among ourselves and being responsible. Annette, an African American ex-investment banker from Chicago, exploded. “Why are we being treated like kids with all these rules and regulations?” she exclaimed. “I feel like I’m being like a teenager. Why do professors have to stop talking and stare at someone if they arrive late? And then just cold call them for the hell of it? We are grown people.”

Eric, a former advertising executive, pointed out that evidently the classroom was not the safe environment we thought it was if we hadn’t heard from whoever had complained about buzzword bingo. Finally a twenty-three-year-old Arkansan, one of the youngest in the class, spoke up. He said he was not so much worried about an official sanction, but he found the game distracting. He often missed thirty seconds or so of what was said after the buzzword was used as conspiratorial smirks went round the room.

Since we were on the subject of rules, Misty had to raise her hand. She was unhappy with the number of people arriving late to class and getting up to go to the bathroom. Gurinder, an ornery Indian software engineer, said we were all adults and if people were late, that was their problem. Ted added that the professors had noticed the number of times people were going to the bathroom during class, and told Gurinder it was out of control. Misty beamed. Earlier in the year, Ben Esty had told us that every time someone went to the bathroom they took ninety minutes of classroom time away from their section. He had reached this number by adding the thirty seconds it took to leave the classroom and the thirty seconds it took to return and multiplying it by the number of students in the section. He assumed that none of us would be able to concentrate if one of us went for a pee. “If you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go,” Gurinder growled. “We can’t be setting up rules for this.” Bob intervened: “We’re all percolating. But where I come from, you show up on time and you go to the bathroom beforehand.” Gurinder shot back, “We’re not all in the army here.” The military folk bridled, and an angry frown usurped Misty’s smile.

Afterward, I bumped into Shelly, the former Home Depot employee cold-called by Ruback. She had been elected our Leadership and Values Initiative rep. Her job involved communicating news from the school’s Leadership and Values Initiative and proposing ways in which leadership and values could be encouraged in the section. In her pre-MBA job, she said, groups went through four phases: “formin’, stormin’, normin’, and performin’.” “We’re clearly still stormin’,” she said. Riding home that day with Bo, we concluded that it must have been difficult to go from the military, with its unified chain of command—where every point of order and discipline was codified and, if challenged, could be referred to a higher authority—to this loosey-goosey world of business school, full of truculent Indian software engineers and sarcastic English journalists. Misty, for one, hated it.

Soon afterward, I opened my mailbox to find a single piece of paper. It was just after lunch, and there were lots of students in Spangler doing the same thing. We stood there along the basement corridor, engrossed by what we had found. The letter was from a member of the class of 2005, addressed to the entire student body. It began with some generalities about the transformational experience of HBS and how the author had learned the importance of responsibility. Before HBS, he wrote, most of us had not assumed much responsibility beyond taking care of ourselves and our immediate circle. (This was not the case with many of the people I had met so far, but I let that pass.) As business leaders, he wrote, the scope of our responsibility would be far wider. “No longer will we be the most junior person at XYZ investment bank or consulting firm,” he wrote. “No longer will we assume a series of two-year jobs with business school to look forward to as a safe zone. Real life for HBS graduates entails power, leadership and success.” HBS had given him “heightened self-awareness.” Liberated from hundred-hour work weeks, he had been able to focus on the big questions, what mattered most to him and what he was going to do with his life. On he went, talking about how his moral compass had been reset by the school, until finally we got to the meat of the letter. Just before Christmas the previous year, he wrote, he had drunk too much at the end-of-semester party, Holidazzle, and been involved in a “regrettable property damage incident” in one of the campus apartment buildings. His moral compass had gone haywire that night and he was deeply sorry. The experience had forced him to reconsider the value of discussing moral situations at HBS. If he could fall off the rails so easily, perhaps he should not be so cynical about having to spend time discussing values. His behavior had made him realize he still had work to do figuring out who exactly he was.

The school had evidently required the author to write this letter and distribute it to the entire MBA class as a punishment. I felt bad for him. The letter reminded me of one of those videotaped statements made by kidnap victims. You know, the ones where the victims sit between a peeling radiator and a wilting potted plant, wearing an ugly sweat suit and read from a prepared statement. They thank their captors for treating them so well and say that fundamentalist terrorist organizations get an unfair rap, while all the while you can see a shadow of a Kalashnikov hovering against the wall above them. The author’s crime, Bo later told me, was coming back drunk from Holidazzle and peeing on the door of his neighbor’s apartment. Two months earlier I would have howled with laughter at this kind of thing. But now my cynical reflexes were in spasm. It didn’t feel right to laugh at this stuff anymore. It was serious, right? Leadership. Core values. Transformation. Not peeing on other people’s property. Being true to oneself.

I took the letter back to Margret, who read it standing at the kitchen counter. She didn’t flinch until she got to the phrase “regrettable property damage incident.”

“What did he do?”

“Bo says he peed on his neighbor’s door.”

She kept on reading. When she had finished, she set the letter down on the counter and looked me in the eye. “You know, these people are freaks. Why do they think they’re all going to be leaders anyway? Who wants them leading anything?”

“I know, I know,” I said. “I’m just worried that if I stop recognizing the freaks, I’ll become one of them.”

“That’s something worth worrying about.”

Our first midterms, in TOM and FRC, were fast upon us, and the challenge for HBS was to persuade nine hundred people incapable of
not
taking an exam
very
seriously not to take this one too seriously. It was almost impossible to fail out of Harvard Business School. If you showed up and said nothing, professors would eventually pick you out and make you talk so you could get some credit. If you kept coming in the bottom 10 percent in every subject, you would be given warnings, help, and every kind of supportto keep you there. To fail out, you basically had to stop showing up to class. And be mean to everyone who tried to help you.

Yet as the midterms approached, the section swung into action, delegating students who understood the course content to help those who didn’t. Our in-boxes were swamped with PowerPoint presentations of the “key takeaways,” summaries, anything and everything to try to get us through the multiple-choice quizzes, which would represent 20 percent of our final grade. Zeynep tried telling us not to get too worked up, but to no avail. Eddie Riedl drew a bell curve to show the distribution of students at business schools. HBS students, he said, were at the far right of the curve, the very smartest and likeliest to succeed. Even if we came last in our HBS class, he said, we would still be way ahead of most other MBAs. But then again, he said with a resigned shrug, “these are exams, there’s going to be pressure, what can you do?”

The night before our TOM midterm, I received via e-mail a six-page summary of the course from a student in another section. There were dozens of names in the recipient box, but almost none from Section A. Without even hesitating, I sent the summary to the entire section, receiving various messages of thanks or “I had this already.” Within five minutes, however, an e-mail came back, addressed to us all, from Misty.

I hadn’t even considered the possibility that my action had violated community standards. I was just trying to be fair. The next morning, before class, a man I had never spoken to in the section, a former hedge fund analyst, came over to my desk to reassure me: “Thanks for sending out the note. That woman is insane.” As promised, there were no surprises in the midterms. There were twenty multiple-choice questions. I came in the top 20 percent in TOM and the middle 60 percent in FRC. It was satisfying to know that my struggles with the numbers were paying off.

To blow off the mid-semester blues, the Australia and New Zealand Club organized one of the biggest events on campus, the Priscilla Ball. The men were to dress as women and the women as sluts. The cost was $120 per person. Since we were living on loans and not that into cross-dressing, Margret and I decided to pass. But we took Augie along to the pre-ball party hosted by the section. One man looked like Virginia Woolf in a white boa and black wig. Another was dressed in Gothic black leather, nose rings, and studded bracelets, while another wore a skimpy Heidi outfit and women’s underwear, which failed to contain his errant balls. A Frenchman, Vincent, had vowed to me that afternoon that he would be “the most beautiful woman” at the ball, and sure enough he arrived as an impeccable Marilyn Monroe.

I am standing on the edge of the Efficient Frontier. Somewhere out in the darkness, I see the winking light of extreme risk and extreme reward. And beneath me lies a Milky Way of ill-judged investments. The Efficient Frontier drops away in an arc like Sagittarius’s bow, but I am clinging to a sharply sloping tangent, my heels pressed deep into the ice. Far behind me lies the clean, breathable air of the risk-free investment. But I have chosen to don the oxygen mask and climb ever higher, my feet and lungs aching, my nerves fraying, driven by faith in a religion called diversification and a hope that I can bring my risks and rewards into perfect balance.

“We call this OCRA. It’s my favorite vegetable.” My reverie was snapped by Ruback’s piercing voice. He was a nice man and an eminent professor. But for me, a financial
ingénu,
he was death. Death on a bad day, with a chill in his bones and an itch in his cape. He made me desperate for something other than the case method. There were elementary, practical things to learn in finance, and I wanted a simple lecture to help me understand them. For those in the section who had studied finance as undergraduates and then worked in the field, the subject matter in FIN 1 was elementary. For those of us new to the subject, it felt like learning physics starting at E = mc
²
while having to figure out the basic laws of motion on the fly.

Ruback spent several minutes at the beginning of each class eulogizing the Boston Red Sox, who were on their way to winning their first World Series in eighty-six years. This meant nothing to at least a third of the students, who did not come from the United States. But it made more sense than when we moved on to the numbers. For Ruback, the theories and squiggles of finance must have glimmered in a kind of crystalline state, pure, uncomplicated, and perfectly logical. How could anyone not get it? When he was asked a question, he stood in the middle of the room looking dumbstruck and disappointed. A few souls bold enough to venture an answer would raise their hands. But the discussions drifted. We groped around in the fog, searching for something recognizable, a tree stump, a boulder, something to give us a sense of place out here on the Efficient Frontier. Some notes, a problem set. No such luck.

It was barely 9:30 A.M. and I was lost again. In fact, since Butler Lumber, I was not sure I ever quite knew where I was. Six weeks into Harvard Business School, and Ruback was talking in dog whistles. Others heard him, but not me. I felt like a grizzly bear standing over a mountain stream watching a school of fish go by. I plunged my paw into the water to grab one but came up with nothing. I plunged and plunged again. Every so often, I managed to seize hold of something—discounted cash flow!—but missed ten others.