Ahead of the Curve (37 page)

He urged us not to be “career engineers” but simply to learn and grow at every opportunity. “The only thing you cannot afford not to do is learn.” On the second point, he said that today everyone he met seemed to believe they came out of their mothers’ wombs to invest or trade large private pools of capital. But not everyone was suited for this, and there were plenty of other worthwhile careers to pursue. Professional happiness, he said, would come from being very good at something difficult.

Concerning the moral compass, he said it was important both to do the right thing and to be seen to be doing the right thing. He warned us of the dangers of groupthink and peer pressure in pushing otherwise good people to participate in bad things. Bad people doing bad things and good people doing good things were easy to understand, he said. It was more important to learn why good people did bad things and to avoid that fate ourselves.

On the question of balance, he said that as a young banker in Chicago, he had spent far too much time in the office when his children were young. Eventually, his wife ordered him to be home for their bedtime. He caught a train late in the afternoon to be home by six to read them stories. But he was so used to the pace of work, he would rattle off the stories as if reading a stock ticker. His wife told him to slow down, but his daughter told him not to listen to her mother. She liked him reading fast. No company, Paulson said, was going to help us with balance. We had to learn how to say no, how to juggle our schedules to make time for our families, friends, and private pursuits.

The following morning, at dawn, was the university’s commencement ceremony. I had planned to go, but it was raining and I woke up needing some time alone. Despite all the work I had done, all I had learned, the friends I had made, my uncertainty about my future left me feeling a failure. I knew how ridiculous this was. HBS was not about getting a job. It was about putting up the structure for a more interesting life. The statistics showed that a large number of graduates left the first job they took out of HBS within the first year. The crazy environment and tight parameters of a business school forced people to make bad decisions, which they quickly rectified once back in the real world. But this was no help. I thought that by this point in my life I would have more answers and that by continuing to drift and agonize and wonder I was letting a lot of people down.

Early that morning, while the rest of the class prepared to go to Harvard Square, I dressed Augie and the two of us drove over to Boston’s North End. We often came here on Saturday mornings for cannoli while Margret and Hugo slept. We took our usual table in Caffe dello Sport, beneath a giant TV screen that showed soccer matches from Italy. I read the newspaper while Augie slurped and crunched through his cannoli. Then we went for a walk in the drizzle. We turned up Paul Revere Mall, past a statue of Revere and up along a line of trees. The red brick was damp, the air heavy and quiet. We were the only ones there. We walked along to the fountain just below the Old North Church and sat down. While Augie played with a toy car, I walked over to the wall to read the plaques commemorating famous residents of the North End. There was Revere’s. “Paul Revere 1735-1818. Patriot. Master Craftsman. Good Citizen. Born on Hanover Street. Lived on North Street. Established his bell foundry on Foster Street and died on Charter Street.” He had lived a good life, an important life within a knot of narrow streets. I read the plaque again and again. Its simplicity galvanized me. He had not traveled to find his fortune. It reminded me of Lassiter’s advice to find a world-class tribe and stick with it. The North Enders at the time of the American Revolution had certainly been that. I thought of the friends Revere must have had, the deep family ties. And then I thought of my classmates, disappearing to the ends of the earth in search of opportunity, worrying about work and life, and I felt better not to be among them. Not to have committed myself to something I knew I would not enjoy. After so much wandering, I coveted the life summed up in that plaque. I realized that if I kept searching, with the education I had, it was well within my grasp.

“Do you know what the margins are on popcorn?” It was a year since we had graduated, and Oleg was calling from St. Petersburg, where he was running a chain of multiplex cinemas for a private equity firm. “Two thousand percent. Can you fucking believe that? Two thousand percent! You think running a cinema is about movies, but then you find out it’s about popcorn.”

He said he had just spoken to a classmate of ours whose family owned cinemas in the Middle East. “In their cinemas, they have breaks during the film so people can go and buy more popcorn and drinks. So I’m trying to figure out a way to have breaks here. The problem is that in Russia, if you put on the lights during a film, everyone starts shouting and throwing things because they think the projector’s broken.” Oleg sounded ebullient. He was delighted to be back in Russia, his wife was delighted, and he was loving his work. I asked him what he remembered from HBS.

“I remember it was like a fucking boot camp. It was really tough in terms of the workload. I remember when I went there thinking, this should be a walk in the park. But I wasn’t even a little bit aware of what I was letting myself in for. But then, today, I download an HBS case nearly every week and read it for inspiration. And I would gladly talk to anyone who was there with me. I think really highly of the people there, and generally I’d be very happy to see anyone from the school, which makes me think they did a good job.”

He said that the most important thing he had learned was that “you never should consider yourself the smartest guy in the room. I was surprised how valuable the input during the class discussions was.” It wasn’t that all the comments were brilliant, though a few were. It was more the range of perspectives that surprised him. “Now I never make a decision without asking what the other guys think. Although people can be annoying, it’s still worth listening. I was a pretty reasonable guy before going to HBS, but now I always have questions, I never make a statement.”

Now that he was running his own operation, he thought back again and again to the cases. “It was very valuable to see a lot of business situations. Now, being a CEO, I know that this shit happened to every other guy who was a protagonist in those cases. We saw a lot of businesses from the inside, so business doesn’t seem like rocket science anymore. It’s just about finding the right approach. The veil has been removed. The practical knowledge, you forget most of that anyway. You can pick up the models from a textbook. But seeing all those situations and listening to other people’s opinions, that was the thing.”

Soon after returning to Russia, he was put in charge of a small amusement park. One of the rides, he discovered, was structurally weak. Despite the financial pressure, he ordered it to be shut down. “I kept thinking of the Tylenol case in Leadership and Corporate Accountability. When that guy at Johnson and Johnson had to ignore the immediate financial implications and pull the drug because it might be unsafe. He had to do the right thing. I thought about that a lot, and it helped me make my decision. I stopped the ride. I said, I’m not going to run this thing until I’m sure it’s safe for the people.” Another case that stood out in his mind was the introduction of the Mercedes Benz A-Class, which we studied with Felix in Strategies Beyond the Market. Mercedes had invested a fortune in its first small car only to find just before its launch that it failed a certain safety test. The executives at the company had to decide what to do. “You remember that guy who had to make a hard decision by himself and stick to his guns? I liked that shit.”

Oleg had found his calling, but it had taken a few months. Straight out of HBS, he had taken a consulting job in London. “If you’re not sure what you want to do, or if you want to win some time to get some options, consulting opens some doors. I spent five months, and even after such a short time, I was getting a lot of calls from headhunters. It’s like a continued job search. Especially when you change countries. They treat you very nicely. They find you an apartment, transfer all your stuff, they give you a signing bonus, they give you time to look for a better job. For people who are afraid to make choices, it’s a safe place.”

I met Cedric for lunch in a noodle bar close to his office in Manhattan. He had gotten the job he wanted, at the investment bank, and would soon be off to Africa. The moment we came in from the cold street, we were engulfed by warm steam. We took a small table in a corner by a window covered with a bamboo shade. The last time we had seen each other was during the France-Brazil semifinal in the soccer World Cup, which we had watched amid packing boxes in a room on campus. We began talking about everyone in our class and how they were getting along. Several had already left the jobs they had taken upon graduating, while others were seriously considering doing so. Why, I asked Cedric, had they taken these jobs in the first place? It’s not as though we didn’t know what they would involve.

“HBS,” he said, hoisting a ball of noodles to his mouth, “is a factory for unhappy people. We have so many choices, and yet so few people seem happy about that. It just makes them anxious. And more anxious. And then they make terrible decisions about their lives. But,” he added, “these are mostly very good people. People from good families with good values. I can’t figure out what happens. I think they just get desperate.”

I called Nate, a member of Section A who had lived in the same building as we did during the second year. He was now working for a biotech firm in the Pacific Northwest. He had joined his company when the stock price was over seventy dollars and now it was around seven dollars. He had witnessed rounds of layoffs and serious business reversals. But he was as sanguine and upbeat as ever. “It has been difficult here, but I’ve learned a ton.” The single biggest thing he had taken from HBS, he said, was confidence. “At conventions, I’ll just go up to CEOs of other companies and just start talking. HBS gave me the confidence that I have a right to be wherever I am. In a meeting, speaking up, talking to a CEO. Maybe that right’s not justified, but I definitely feel it. Just don’t ask me to do a discounted cash flow or tell you the three
P
s of marketing. Or were there four
P
s?”

Looking back, the thing Nate enjoyed the most was “the quintessential Cambridge educational experience. I loved just waking up in the morning knowing I was at Harvard, seeing people rowing sculls on the river, the first snow of winter.” Having experienced academic hysteria firsthand as an undergraduate at Stanford, he made sure not to get caught up in it at HBS. But he was disappointed to find a different kind of hysteria, a herd mentality focused on financial rewards. “It is like if you play ice hockey, the trick is to skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it is. I felt at HBS, everyone was skating to where the puck, or the money, was—private equity, hedge funds, real estate—without thinking where it was going. Lots of people seemed more interested in a number, the amount they would earn, than the life or future that would entail.

“And yet, when I think back to every case we studied and every protagonist who came to class, every visiting speaker, it seemed like all of them said ‘I was a bad spouse’ or ‘I was a bad parent.’ Not one of them could say, ‘my family was a smashing success.’ I remember going to hear this panel of HBS alumni in the second year. One said her husband had had a brain seizure, the other spoke about how his daughter didn’t remember his name. And then there was this top Goldman Sachs executive who came to talk about leadership and values, and I just remember this look of total defeat on his face when he said how he had four ex-wives. But then when you saw how our class made choices, you saw they would do what these people do, not what they say. We didn’t want to hear about their lives. You can measure who is the second wealthiest person in the world, but not who is a good husband. It’s like
Death of a Salesman.
Who appreciates the average family guy?

“It was a surprise to me how making the right choices coming out of HBS would require real intestinal fortitude, a real functioning moral compass, because the forces pushing you to pursue success in a very specific way were overwhelming.”

I met Annette for a drink near Central Park, close to her Midtown office. She was still at the fashion company she had joined upon graduation. She still thought of the Wall Street money she had passed up to take this job, but she was happy about her choice. She was learning and could see a number of different paths open to her. Every day she used something she had learned at HBS, whether it was calculating the correct batch size for an order or digging into a financial projection.

“After doing this job for a year, I feel I’m on my way to being able to run my own business. I could advise other brands. I could acquire a business. I feel like I can manage people in a way I never would have had the chance to on Wall Street. But then I look at my little brother, who is really into his music, and he keeps telling me he’s going to make it big, and I think that for all my HBS education, he’s more of an entrepreneur than I am. You have to be kind of risk-averse to go to HBS. The whole thing about the network and the transformation, it’s for people who want to minimize the risk in their lives when they go after opportunities.”

Luis, the Franco-Argentine, had returned to Madrid, where his wife was from, and was now working with a group of investors identifying and acquiring underperforming businesses. He was back in his element and delighted to be so. He said that any negative feelings he had about the school had quickly evaporated. He had loved the case discussions and found himself thinking back to them almost every day.

“I learned to think in a very different way. The way I explain things and break down an argument is different. In the beginning, when we first had thirty seconds to make a point in class, you didn’t get anywhere. By the end, you know how to say things quickly and you learn to think before you talk. But now my friends tell me to stop speaking like I’m in business school, always saying ‘there are two or three ways to look at this,’ even when we’re deciding where to go for dinner. It’s a very structured way of thinking. Maybe overstructured.”