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Title details for Ahead of the Curve by Philip Delves Broughton - Available

Ahead of the Curve

Two Years at Harvard Business School

by Philip Delves Broughton
Simon Vance
Audiobook
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In the century since its founding, Harvard Business School has become the single most influential institution in global business. Twenty percent of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are HBS graduates, as are many of our savviest entrepreneurs (e.g., Michael Bloomberg) and canniest felons (e.g., Jeffrey Skilling). The top investment banks and brokerage houses routinely send their brightest young stars to HBS to groom them for future power. To these people and many others, a Harvard MBA is a golden ticket to the Olympian heights of American business.


In 2004, Philip Delves Broughton abandoned a post as Paris bureau chief of the London Daily Telegraph to join 900 other would-be tycoons on HBS's plush campus. Over the next two years, he and his classmates would be inundated with the best—and the rest—of American business culture, which HBS epitomizes. The core of the school's curriculum is the "case"—an analysis of a real business situation, from which the students must, with a professor's guidance, tease lessons. Broughton studied over 500 cases and recounts the most revelatory ones here. He also learns the surprising pleasures of accounting, the allure of "beta," the ingenious chicanery of leveraging, and innumerable other hidden workings of the business world, all of which he limns with a wry clarity reminiscent of Liar's Poker. He also exposes the less savory trappings of business school culture, from the "booze luge" to the pandemic obsession with PowerPoint to the specter of depression, which stalks too many overburdened students. With acute and often uproarious candor, he assesses the school's success at teaching the traits it extols as most important in business—leadership, decisiveness, ethical behavior, and work/life balance.


Published during the 100th anniversary of Harvard Business School, Ahead of the Curve offers a richly detailed and revealing you-are-there account of the institution that has, for good or ill, made American business what it is today.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    September 1, 2008

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781400127139
      • File size: 291541 KB
      • Duration: 10:07:22

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Author Philip Delves Broughton is a good writer who does not appear to have enjoyed and was not very successful at his two years at Harvard Business School. As narrator, Simon Vance takes on the persona of a very English interloper, who left his post as Paris editor for the DAILY TELEGRAPH to earn his MBA at what could be considered the most prestigious of American business schools. Using American twangs and a mishmash of accents for the international students, Vance depicts Brougham as alternately overwhelmed and smug, never quite leaving his Englishness behind. The strongest moments are the nuggets from courses on competitive strategy, marketing, finance, and even accounting, which offer the listener highlights of the business curriculum. R.M. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 12, 2008
      This debut by a former journalist at the Daily Telegraph
      of London chronicles the author's love-hate relationship with the Harvard Business School, where he spent two years getting his M.B.A. Beginning with a confessional account of his disillusionment with journalism and conflicted desire to make money, Broughton provides an account of his experiences in and out of the classroom as he struggles to survive the academic rigor and find a suitably principled yet lucrative path. Simultaneously repelled by his aggressive fellow capitalists in training—their stress-fueled partying and obsession with wealth—and dazzled by his classes, visiting professors and the surprising beauty of business concepts, Broughton vacillates between cautious critique and faint praise. Although cleverly narrated and marked by a professional journalist's polish and remarkable attention to detail, this book flounders; it provides neither enough color nor damning dirt on the school to entertain in the manner of true tell-alls. The true heart of the story is less “b-school” confidential than a memoir of Broughton's quest to understand the business world and find his place in it.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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