Book: Harvard Business School opens high-powered doors
— -- By simply being accepted into Harvard Business School, Philip Delves Broughton and his 900 fellow MBA candidates entered an überclass. For HBS is a brand as much as it is a school, Delves Broughton writes in Ahead of the Curve, his absorbing firsthand account of the intense two-year MBA program. And by attending, he says, they were associating themselves with one of the greatest brands in business.
It's hard to argue. Delves Broughton entered HBS during heady times. It was 2004, and the school's influential alumni list included the president of the United States, the mayor of New York City, the president of the World Bank and the CEOs of Procter & Gamble and General Electric. Alumni also held about 20% of the three top jobs at Fortune 500 companies.
Two years and hundreds of case studies later, many graduates hoped to land lucrative private-equity and hedge-fund jobs with cash-laden firms such as Blackstone or Bain Capital, where they could expect to earn about $400,000 their first year on the job. A rung or two down the ladder were the investment banking and consulting jobs, typically with lesser salaries but at $200,000, nothing to sneeze at.
Though he didn't come to Harvard with a business background — had never so much as created an Excel spreadsheet — Delves Broughton was no stranger to career success. Born in Bangladesh and raised in England, he was in charge of the New York bureau for the Daily Telegraph of London during the 9/11 attacks and later became the newspaper's Paris bureau chief before deciding an MBA would give him more control of his finances and his time.
What becomes clear to Delves Broughton is that the high-paying jobs come at a price, demanding dues-paying long hours at the expense of family and personal life. More than once during his stay at HBS, visiting business royalty and dignitaries would speak with regret about lost family time, including HBS alumnus Henry Paulson, who had recently left his job as CEO of Goldman Sachs to become Treasury secretary.
