Ahead of the Curve (17 page)

In between these classes and final exams, I had lunch with Luis, a half-French, half-Argentine entrepreneur and the striker on the HBS soccer team. He was one of the older members of the section and a Pied Piper for many of the international students. You could find him on campus chattering away in English, Spanish, French, or German or leading a gaggle of Latin American students to a bar in Boston. Before HBS, he had worked in consulting in Madrid and then cofounded an online shopping company. He had opened offices all around Europe in the late 1990s, before being forced to close them again when the Internet bubble collapsed in 2001. I often wondered why people like him, with so much business experience already, came to HBS.

“I’d gone through the whole process of starting a company, but I had a feeling that I needed to go back to the basics,” he told me, speaking quickly and intensely. “I’d learned by a trial of fire. In consulting, I’d learned a lot at the beginning, but then you start to repeat things again and again. At the start-up it had been crazy; I’d been on a steep learning curve, but there were a lot of things I felt I needed to sit back and learn properly.”

Once he had decided to go to business school, he knew it had to be a top school, because the network was vital for him. His brother-in-law had been to HBS and loved it. After what he thought was a poor interview with a “typical Spanish investment banker with cement in his hair,” Luis was elated to be accepted. Arriving on campus, he was surprised by the diversity of people but also by how young they seemed. “There are lots of people who are young. They are analytically and technically very sharp, but I can recognize the skills people have, and it was surprising to me that there was so little experience in the class. People spoke like they had experience, but often I’d be sitting in class thinking ‘practically, what you’re saying would never work.’ ” This had happened most often in LEAD. “People would often say, just fire the guy. But if you’ve never fired someone, you don’t know what it’s like and you can’t just imagine it. We should have a course on just that, hiring and firing. We all took the Myers-Briggs, but we’re not being taught how to use it in hiring people. I think there are some very pragmatic things missing from the course.”

I also met up with Vera, a Chinese woman who had emigrated with her husband to Silicon Valley and had worked for a large technology firm. During the semester, Bob had organized a “section buddy” system, whereby each of us monitored a classmate’s in-class comments and told that person how he or she was doing. Vera was my buddy. She spoke excellent English but with a heavy Chinese accent, and had to force herself to speak in class. It had been exasperating. “I hate all this stuff about the network and relationshipsand being able to bullshit in front of other people,” she said. “That’s what we’re being trained to do. That’s not what Chinese immigrants think business is. We think it’s about good ideas and hard work.” It was hard for her to accept that 50 percent of her grade was based on what she said in class, not just because she found public speaking so awkward but also because much of what she heard seemed so mediocre. She had resigned herself to taking what she could from the classes and filtering out the rest.

The term ended with written exams in each of the five subjects we had studied. The exams were open-book, but I spent a couple of days going over my notes from each course, trying to boil them down to just a few pages so I could work more quickly. The professors told us that if you showed up to class and prepared the cases, the exams held few surprises. They were simply reviews of the concepts we had encountered so far. Doing well in them, of course, was no proof you might be good at business, only that you were good at business school.

We were split into two classrooms for the exams, so we could each have a couple of desks’ worth of space. Some students wore headphones to block out the noise. Others arrived with piles of gum and candy as if about to go on a hike. Some came bleary-eyed, wearing their sweats, looking as if they had been studying all night. We all plugged in our laptops and waited until our exam supervisor said go. I felt the greatest trepidation with Finance, but when I turned over the exam sheet, I suddenly felt very calm. I began systematically working through the problem.

A cinema owner was trying to figure out whether or not to acquire new digital projectors. Was it worth it? I forecast the free cash flows and calculated the cost of capital. I found a present value for the investment. I made a recommendation and finally, after four and a half hours, printed out my spreadsheets and write-up and turned them in. It felt deeply satisfying. In FRC, TOM, Marketing, and LEAD, this sense of achievement was the same. After so much work, I felt I was finally speaking this new language. I was still far from fluent, but at least I was communicating. My grades were better than I had hoped that first night of Analytics: ones in TOM and LEAD, and twos in FIN 1, Marketing, and FRC. Academically, at least, I knew I could cut it.

Finishing the exams, I realized how much I had learned about business and myself during those first five months. It was strange no longer to have a professional identity. I had become used to thinking of myself as a journalist, and abandoning that had been harder than I had imagined. It also felt odd always to be one of the older people in the room. I worried when people said HBS was all about the network, and I spent so little time socializing. But then I had gotten to know people in the classroom, or over lunches or coffee, instead of standing in a room watching someone frozen to the booze luge, and this, overall, had led to some richer relationships.

During the vacations, HBS students set off around the world on treks to glamorous destinations such as India, China, Turkey, or Brazil, and more humdrum ones such as Chicago or Washington, D.C. Besides sightseeing, they met CEOs of companies, presidents, and prime ministers. At HBS you felt you were never more than two degrees of separation from the most powerful people in the world. There was always a classmate who knew the prime minister of India or who worked for the president of Mexico or whose father ran the largest construction business in Latin America. No one was out of reach. But the reports that came back from these treks tended to focus on other things. In India, there were murmurs of displeasure at students who wore dispensers of hand cleanser on their belts. Every time they boarded the buses ferrying them around, they would purify their hands, disinfecting themselves and antagonizing their hosts. The China trek was oversubscribed and ended up taking more than two hundred MBAs. The following account appeared in the the student newspaper,
The Harbus:

“Drunken shrimp, midnight karaoke, rows of empty glasses of Chivas & green tea and venture capitalists—what do these all have in common? These were just a few of the highlights of this year’s China Trek.” The party had started in Beijing and moved on to Hong Kong and Shanghai. The trekkers were “treated like imperial royalty” and given access to the “hottest nightspots” and “senior corporate executives.” In Beijing, they ate drunken shrimp—“you thought MBAs were the only drunk ones on this trip!”—observed preparations for the 2008 Olympics, toured Lenovo’s manufacturing plant, and were courted by “executives from Motorola, real estate developers and local investment banks.” Finally they reached Hong Kong, “the land of Louis Vuitton stores and bright psychedelic neon lights.”

Reading stories like this, I felt two things. The first was how privileged we were to see the world as Harvard MBAs. The brand was stronger than I had ever imagined. The second was how weird this perspective was. To go to China and focus entirely on the clubs, booze, shops, and corporate entertainment seemed inane. The trekkers need not have spent all their time hearing tales of woe from displaced peasant farmers or women wrenched from their families to work in garment factories supplying Western clothing, or human rights activists harassed for posting their thoughts on Yahoo! But it did feel like the pursuit of business goals allowed, or even required, a self-imposed ignorance. Instead of being part of society, the MBA überclass seemed to exist apart from the rest of the world, with its own set of standards. You needed to yank hard to get its attention.

Ben Esty, our section chair, had told us that when it came to these treks, we should take on more loans and seize the opportunities. The costs, running into thousands of dollars per trek, would be nothing but a “rounding error” on our future net worth. Bob and I, who were both supporting families on financial aid, agreed that while this might be true, it was also obnoxious.

The one exception I made was the Westrek to Silicon Valley at the end of the Christmas vacation. As a newspaper reporter, I had felt the gusts of change brought on by the Internet and had witnessed my colleagues and management flailing in the face of them. I knew the media would always be a part of my professional life, and I wanted to become literate in the language and business models of the technology companies now looming over the industry. Westrek promised access to the very biggest names in the valley: Google, eBay, Yahoo!, and the fabled venture capitalists at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers (KPCB).

About eighty of us, two thirds of whom were Chinese or Indian, checked into a hotel in the middle of a business park next to the headquarters of Oracle. I took a drive around the surrounding streets, past the glass-fronted buildings and rows of one-story homes stacked up against each other behind high wooden fences. I wondered why people at HBS kept harping on about the Silicon Valley lifestyle and the beauty of the Bay Area. Around here, it looked dreadful, like an engineering school campus squashed flat over several square miles. I turned onto Route 101, the drain of Silicon Valley, full of cheap restaurants, car repair shops, strip malls, and laundries. Up in the hills were towns such as Palo Alto, Woodside, and Atherton, where those with the real money lived and worked and rose early to go bicycling with one another.

At eight thirty the following morning, one of the most famous venture capitalists in Silicon Valley loped into the hotel’s conference room to open Westrek. He was a tall, athletic man with dark floppy hair, a craggy face offset by a goofy grin, and the sloping shoulders of an aging prep school sports star. His hair was still wet, suggesting he may already have played a couple of sets of tennis. Tim Draper was a third-generation venture capitalist who graduated from Stanford with a degree in electrical engineering and from Harvard with his MBA. He had boosted the family fortune with investments in technology start-ups such as Hotmail and Skype. We were eager to hear from him how we could horn in on the next multibillion-dollar technology business.

Venture capital, said Draper, was much easier than trying to climb the corporate ladder. All you needed to be set for life was one success. After that, you just had to sit there while hundreds of people pitched you their ideas and you picked the best of them. It was a no-brainer! He grinned, and we sat there dumbstruck. Beside me was Gurinder, from my section. He had graduated from the finest engineering school in India and had already earned the Indian version of an MBA. Before coming to HBS, he had been an executive at one of India’s top technology firms. All he wanted from Harvard was the opportunity to become a West Coast venture capitalist. On snowbound days in Boston, you could find him in the corner of Spangler rhapsodizing about the beauty of the Bay Area and bemoaning the stupidity of his HBS classmates. He regarded the academic content of the HBS MBA and many of the professors with bare contempt. He always had heavy bags under his eyes from spending his nights on Skype talking to India, where he was setting up an online travel company.

As people asked Draper questions, I could feel Gurinder growing uneasy. When someone asked Draper how they could be in his shoes one day, he flicked off his large penny loafers and invited his questioner to step into them. No one laughed. Gurinder began rubbing his temples. Impatient at the best of times, he now felt he was being taunted by this big white fraternity boy.

Draper then told us he had written a song that had been set to music and performed by a famous rock star whom he could not name. The song was called “The Risk Master.” He passed around CDs on which he had printed a photograph of himself in a white floppy-brimmed hat sitting astride an elephant holding up his right hand in triumph. Then he popped a copy into a player and asked us to listen closely. The song began with a long, low strum of a guitar, a bass joined in and a steady rhythmic beat. The lyrics then appeared on a screen behind Draper, who cleared his throat. His song told the story of a man who had spent fifteen years struggling to bring his company to an initial public offering on the stock market, the dream of every venture capitalist. He had invested everything he had. His wife had lost patience and divorced him. He had been abused by his investors and bankers, but he remained convinced the big payday would come. When the song reached the chorus, Draper began waving his arms and shouting, “All together. Come on. Sing!” Gurinder had now dropped his notebook and thrust his head down deep between his knees.

We went quiet again, leaving Draper to sing the verses. The hero of his song was fearless, with the soul of an artist. He had weathered a recession, flirted with bankruptcy, and fired his best friend. But then, with one dramatic sale, everything had turned around. The sky, Draper sang, “opened astronautic.”

“Come on, you guys, you’re so quiet!” Draper shouted, reveling in the awkwardness. “Come
on
!” We mumbled through the chorus. “Again, again,” he urged. Again we mumbled. Finally, the song’s hero was deluged with money, but instead of being happy, he found he was hounded by the press and the courts as everyone assumed “anyone this rich must have lied.” Finally, after two more renditions of the chorus, the song wound down. We sat there in silence. Draper wrapped up his remarks and we wandered out into the lobby.