The U.S. government announced that it is changing the national symbol to a condom because it accurately reflects its current political stance. A condom allows for inflation, destroys the next generation, protects pricks, and gives a sense of security while you’re being screwed.

Utterly spent from ranting and raving these past two weeks—as fatigued as I imagine you are, dear audience, from the reading of same—I must re-condition my sensibilities with a dose of humor (in the business context, naturally).

As much as the current economic crisis will exert performance pressure on our next president, so too will it influence new academic thinking on corporate leadership and accountability. Regular readers will know that I oft rely on professorial knowledge and insights from Wharton Business School, and sometimes HBS, on this page. But what are the students up to at these august institutions?

A 24-year old ex-Lehmanite guzzling vodka from a “booze luge” may not be the preferred image of life at HBS, but it’s just one scene from ex-Daily Telegraph Paris bureau chief Philip Delves Broughton’s revealing book, “What They Teach You At Harvard Business School: My Two Years Inside the Cauldron of Capitalism”.

Broughton, “like an anthroplogist (who) goes to live with an obscure jungle tribe” as described by one reviewer, gave us his job to spend two years at HBS. As he notes, at least 30 of the world’s top 100 companies are run by MBA-holders (e.g. Citigroup’s Vikram Pandit, GE’s Jeffrey Immelt), with even greater domination in the hedgie world.

He finds much to skewer in that amorphous space between learning business integrity and figuring out how to make buckets of money. Another reviewer writes, “'A telling portrait of an elite every bit as hidebound as that of Victorian Britain, paralysed by protocol, terrified of whimsy, shorn of invention yet infinitely more selfish and unhappy than the Victorians ever were. No applicant to business school should ignore this important book.”

This takeaway, from one of Broughton’s classmates, got my attention: “The big thing I got from HBS is that the supply of money always exceeds the supply of good ideas. So if you’ve got a good one, the money will come.”

How about the booze luge?

Jeff Heilman

10/6/08