What They Teach You At Harvard Business School

With a title like that, how could I not buy the book?

And to whom may we credit with that piece of wit that induced the Hatter to part with three hundred and ninety five of the best Indian Government coinage? Philip Delves Broughton, impeccably English and the former Paris bureau chief of the Daily Telegraph, veteran of 9/11 reporting, innumerable interviews of French Government officials (which one presumes was harder), and now of HBS - having received one the venerable institution's degrees of 2006 vintage - is the man.

And the book? It's not half bad, being a quite interesting outsider's perspective on one of the pillars of the American business system - playing-fields-of-Eton equivalents for the battles of Wall Street one might say. Unfortunately, as we now know, Wall Street wasn't playing with a straight bat.

Reading the book, one is tempted to say one kind of realizes why. Almost in boot-camp style, the future Masters of the Universe are loaded up with stress up to the point where they're, quite conveniently, at their most mentally vulnerable. In addition to providing HBS 'products' with a formidable analytical toolkit for addressing business problems, it would seem that the experience feeds them with more than a little bit of groupthink and celebration of the trivial while demagnetizing their moral compass just that little bit.

You could do much worse than read this book, so pick it up when you need some entertaining and interesting fare.

Link to the book on amazon.co.uk. It seems the book is called, "Ahead of the Curve" in the US of A. Copyright issues or stereotypical humour issues? Probably the former.