Ahead of the Curve (34 page)

So after three semesters diligently studying the way of the capitalist, I was persuaded by Felix’s course that I needed a fresh dose of anarchy. I found it in a small village in Maine, so small in fact that I missed it twice while driving through it.

Arthur Harvey’s house was a rickety-looking construction that seemed held together with spit and chicken wire. It was two hours northwest of Portland, tucked away in the woods of rural Maine. Two old Volvos with logs strapped to their roofs squatted close to Harvey’s front door. Rust-colored paint was chipping away from the walls and door frames, and an unsteady wooden banister led up a set of rough stone steps to the entrance. A single solar panel provided enough electricity to power a laptop computer and a telephone. Any more electricity, Harvey said, would open a Pandora’s box of convenience leading to idleness and disconnection from the world. Light came from oil lamps, heat from a wood-burning stove. The only way to get hot water for a bath was to heat it, saucepan by saucepan, on the stove.

Harvey lived here with his wife and a cat, whose likeness he had printed onto a gray sweatshirt. Harvey had a thick white beard, a bald head, and wore wire-rimmed glasses. With some padding round the belly, he would have made a passable department store Santa Claus. For several months a year, he farmed nearly twenty-five acres of local blueberry fields, which he had acquired in pieces over the past thirty years. When he was not farming, he was visiting other organic farms as an inspector for a certifying agency and challenging the government in court.

As the parents of two young children, Margret and I had become aggressive buyers of organic milk and vegetables. But our knowledge of what exactly
organic
meant was vague. The more I investigated, the more I found that this was in large part intentional on the part of food manufacturers. If you could persuade consumers to pay more for foods marked “organic,” why fuss too much over specifics? Arthur Harvey, I had discovered, was a stickler. With no legal education, beyond the training he received as a member of his town’s planning board, he had launched a case against the U.S. Department of Agriculture, accusing it of breaking the law and ignoring key precepts of the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990. He had won a number of court victories, but these were reversed by Congress under pressure from the major food companies. But his fight I found inspiring.

Harvey had been challenging authority for as long as he could remember. He was born in Hackensack, New Jersey, where his mother worked in the cooperative movement and his father, a mathematician by training, handled tax-delinquent properties for a real estate company. He almost failed to graduate from high school after refusing to sign a loyalty oath to the laws and Constitution of the United States. “I could support the Constitution,” he said, “but I certainly wasn’t going to support all the laws. They told me I was failing the rest of the students in my home room. But I didn’t have much loyalty to my home room.” Eventually the school gave him his diploma anyway.

“When I asked my mother why I should go to college, she didn’t have many answers,” he said, so he set off instead for Michigan, to work on cooperative farms and later to join the peace movement. In Michigan, a man who had recently returned from India lent him a book by Gandhi. He was immediately struck by Gandhi’s arguments in favor of self-reliance and against excessive consumption. In the late 1950s, Harvey spent six months in prison in Sandstone, Minnesota, for invading a missile base in Nebraska with a group of fellow peace activists. “Prison was a blast. I was in there with one of my very best friends and we played horseshoes and Scrabble and spent lots of time in the library.” His tenure as library clerk ended when he refused to compile a list for the prison authorities of the books each prisoner was borrowing. After prison, he traveled to New Hampshire, where he took shelter in a dilapidated chicken coop and tried to live as lightly off the land as he could. He bought a mimeograph machine and printed
The Greenleaf,
a newsletter in which he wrote about peace and self-reliance. He soon became a magnet for young people who had refused the draft, spent time in prison, or yearned for a simple life close to the land.

By 1975, Harvey was overseeing four picking crews, fifty-five people, working in apple orchards in New England. He imposed strict rules on his crews, including no alcohol, drugs, or nonmarital sex. “That was pretty tough on some people,” he says, “but I just happen to think that’s the way people should behave. As for alcohol and drugs, that’s an open-and-shut case. They are harmful to people. As far as sex goes, well, it just seems to me that the raising of children and the relations between a man and a woman are fundamental to everybody.” In 1976, Harvey married one of his crew supervisors and they moved to Maine, where they acquired their house “virtually for free” and began farming blueberry fields for local landowners. It was around this time that Harvey had what he calls “some enlightening experiences.” On one farm, he found blueberries covered with white dust. It turned out the farmer was spraying his fields with DDT to kill birds. “That sure gave me food for thought. I wasn’t anti-pesticides then. But I did notice that wild blueberries weren’t inferior and did not require expensive chemicals.”

Whenever government inspectors visited the blueberry farms, Harvey said they all told him that for blueberries to be sold legally they could not contain more than five maggots per quart. It seemed an arbitrary number to him, so he decided to investigate. He went to the library in Portland and looked up “blueberry” in the USDA book of regulations. He could not find it. So he telephoned the USDA and asked them about the five-maggot rule. After months of inquiry, he was told that inspectors were permitted to make on-the-spot decisions with regard to tolerable maggot quantities. But why, then, did they all agree on five? He never received a satisfactory answer and concluded that the inspectors were intentionally frightening farmers into buying expensive and unnecessary chemical treatments. Harvey’s suspicion of the USDA had taken root. He began what became a lifelong effort to keep the USDA honest.

During the winter, Harvey continued his work trying to safeguard organic standards. When I visited him, he was trying to organize a network of students in every state to write to their congressmen to defend the standards. On his solar-powered computer, he went to
Amazon.com
to find the most popular books about organic food production. He then ordered copies of the books directly from their publishers and offered them for sale. When the orders came in, he sent out the book along with a letter explaining his efforts and asking for support.

He was rueful about the final outcome of his legal campaign against the government. “A lot of my fellow inspectors are aware of the imperfections of the organic regulations but they continue to work because they say these are the growing pains and that eventually they will restore integrity. That’s true to a certain extent. But the dominance of the manufacturers at a legislative level complicates the picture. The next two years will tell us whether or not we’re on our way to a complete dismantling of the standard or not.”

Harvey, I felt, had been caught in the maw of business and politics and emerged with his dignity. He represented something missing from HBS: the unmanageable, unembraceable, unsackable, incorruptible quixotic. He did not use quotes from Gandhi, as Gompers had done, to spice up an entrepreneurship class. He lived what Gandhi preached. He did not seek profit or competitive advantage, but he had managed to scare multibillion-dollar companies and the U.S. government. He was as far from the HBS formula for success as one could imagine, which was why I had sought him out.

The search for the formula for success was a theme of a course called Professional Services. Our professor, Ashish Nanda, was a tremendously enthusiastic Indian who thundered around the classroom like a bee-stung elephant, pushing along rows, pounding on tables, and urging us to consider the implications of a merger of accounting firms or the ethical dilemmas faced by management consultants. For most in the class, this was jaw-dropping stuff. Such issues lay in their immediate future. I had signed up for the course because it had terrific reviews and I felt I had spent too much time considering finance and corporate strategy. I wanted to try something more human resource-y. The course certainly provided that, but not nearly in the way I had imagined.

Early in the semester we were presented with this equation:

It meant that the amount of change you were able to effect in either a company or your own life was a function of your current level of dissatisfaction (d), the new model being put in place (m), and the process by which this new model is being implemented (p). Plus E (error), or all the other stuff that might come into play. My first thought was this was not very useful. In fact, more than just not useful. It was actively designed to confuse the issue. It was taking something so obvious—that you would change something only if you were unhappy with it, and the unhappier you were, the more change you would want—and overcomplicating it so that MBAs could charge a fee for offering it in a consulting presentation. Quantification had overstepped its limits.

Nanda was evidently a brilliant man, a graduate of India’s finest colleges, a popular professor. Early in his academic career, he had chosen to specialize in the practices of professional service firms. He was an authority on hiring practices at consultancies, staffing at investment banks, growth strategies for law firms. During his class, we studied the role of accountants and consultants in the Enron debacle and how they had betrayed their professional standards to gorge on fees. We learned everything you could ever want to know about McKinsey. We studied a fictional HBS MBA who became a successful investment banker only to work murderous hours and lose touch with his children. Most of the students in the class had already signed up for jobs in finance and consulting, so for them this class was a long exercise in trying to feel better about their decision. Once again, the national differences were blindingly apparent. The Americans seemed resigned to a fate of endless hours and slavish toil, their only hope being to find a suitable mentor who might lead them through Hades. The Europeans and Latin Americans felt that at worst, these jobs were a temporary fix and that soon enough they would be heading back to civilization. During one class, the senior partner of an American accounting firm that had merged with a French rival explained the difficulty of negotiating with Europeans. “It’s like the difference between American football and soccer. In American football, you drive down the field, play by play, until you score a touchdown. In soccer, you flick the ball around from player to player until you see an opening, and then you strike.” He was clearly very pleased with his comparison. But immediately, Xavier, a Frenchman, and one of the older students in the class, raised his hand.

“Yes, you say this about the different sports,” he said, “but a game of American football takes three or four hours, while a game of soccer is over in ninety minutes.” Touché. The Europeans laughed while the consultant looked shifty and cross.

Whenever Nanda organized a speaker, he also arranged a breakfast so we could meet the speaker in a more informal setting. One gray morning, I found myself sitting next to a management consultant called Sherif Mityas. He had grown up in Wisconsin, the son of Egyptian immigrants, both scientists. Mityas trained as an aerospace engineer but soon found that knowing engineering alone would not take him to the top of his industry. He needed to know something about business. So he went to Kellogg, Northwestern University’s business school, in Evanston, Illinois. Upon graduating in 1994, he decided to become a consultant and had remained one ever since, rising to the top of his profession. Mityas spoke of the intellectual thrill of his work, descending on a company, figuring out a problem, and proposing a solution. He enjoyed the variety of moving from industry to industry, problem to problem, and never spending more than a few months gnashing over the same issues. But then he mentioned the snow globes.

Someone had asked him how he made the best of the relentless travel involved in consulting. How did he maintain his morale? A woman who had left HBS the previous year to become a consultant told us in an earlier class that the two most important things for a new consultant were a good suitcase and a dependable dry cleaner. It was not a pretty picture. Mityas said he would keep his team buoyed up by every so often letting them off an evening working session and taking them to a good restaurant. In order to stave off hotel fatigue, he might go to a local grocery store and buy some fresh fruit, anything to reconnect him with the world beyond the conference room. And each time he went somewhere new, he would buy his daughter a snow globe. She now had quite a collection. I immediately started thinking of my own son and the idea of returning home on a Thursday night in a crumpled suit, wheeling in my case and handing him a snow globe of the Woonsocket skyline. The thing was, Mityas seemed to be very happy with his lot. His work had its issues, but whose didn’t? He was excellent at what he did. He liked his colleagues. He had provided a more-than-comfortable life for his family. Why was I getting so hung up on the snow globe?