Ahead of the Curve

Ahead of the Curve is a book that is about the author’s experience at HBS. He left a stable, prestigious job of a foreign correspondent in Paris for a British newspaper to do a MBA and understand how the business world works and operates. The idea behind picking up this book was to read and know about the experience of going to such a prestigious school - a sharp contrast than the sugary, dreamy vlogs put out by Youtubers. 

The book did provide me good insights into how students feel, experience and evolve over their time at HBS.

A few standouts - 

• Most students start with different viewpoints i.e detest investment banking and consulting jobs but by the end of the course most of them are trying to snag the jobs with the highest pay package.
  
  
• This is in spite of almost every other dignitary/personality visiting the school and commenting how grueling their schedule is/how little time they have to spend with their spouse and kids. The book is based in 2006-08 and the author mentioned at a few points that, at least then, the consulting job required traveling i.e fly out on Sunday and come back home on Thursday.
  
  The author references a 2006 New Yorker article by Calvin Trillin that says bluntly - in life there cannot be multiple centers. Centers as in areas of focus. Either kids/family is the center of your life or not. That is an interesting viewpoint to think about it!
  
  
• It was interesting to read the author's anecdotes of interactions in the classroom combined with personality descriptions and spot the undertones of tension between European and American students on topics of work-life balance and worldviews.
  
  
• HBS claimed to give students a fresh start in their careers but very few people were actually able to succeed. The path of least resistance was to do banking and consulting. But to get out of those fields was very hard. If you didn’t have experience in an industry, then they didn’t want you. So you ended up going back to the industries they had experience in.
  
  
• The author refers to a profile HBS did of its 1985 class : 65 graduates were prosecuted for SEC violations. Even ENRON CEO was a HBS alumni proving that the school produced its share of crooks even after a rigorous entrance process.
  Similarly, in the class of 1976 - every 10 years a profile was done for 6 students. 5 out of 6 admitted to having wretched personal lives but successful from a societal perspective. Only one of them reported to be content and that was because he chose to stay with the same firm and his main career objective in his own words was “making it through the day”.
  
  

The author remarked that for Harvard MBAs who are so used to being applauded, the idea of a private discreet life of fulfillment was nearly impossible to grasp.

In the book, the author stops and highlights the major things he learned during his courses. Like, -

• Serious investors place a greater importance on risk than an average investor. Sophisticated investors place way more weight to tail risks i.e small chance of disaster = moderate risk of something quite bad.
  
  
• Accounting gimmicks!
  
  Ads can be an asset or an expense. When the benefit of the ad is uncertain, it can be an expense. But when the revenue from the ad is measurable - it can be treated as an asset and then depreciate the cost over time.
  
  
• Strategy != Operating Efficiency. You can run the best laundry in the world, but if what I was doing was quite simple and 1000s could do it - no money was to be made. Good products alone won’t get you there!
  
  
• In a career - Be a principal or decision maker. Not a service provider.
  
  
• It was interesting to find out that prior to 2008 there was a loophole in the HBS admission process for granting financial aid. Students used to report their savings/bank statements but not report the type of the car they had. So, what a lot of them did was they used to buy an expensive car and then report their drawn-down/near-empty accounts only to be awarded financial aid. HBS was buying students a car! Future CEOs/administrators supposed to be stewards of right business practices were exploiting the loophole.
  
  
  Ultimately, the author was one of a handful of the 900 students who were without job offers come graduation time. For him, since he placed importance on work-life balance and didn’t want to do a stereotypical job at investment banking/consulting - his options were limited. And in addition he said it aptly that he “seeked out the frailest shred of evidence to support my assumptions”.
  
  
  Good book that gives us an insight into the psyche of supposedly the smartest and most business savvy cohort of overachievers and their doubts and insecurities.