Deconstructing Harvard

I started my MBA in Harvard since three weeks ago. So I thought it would be interesting to gather some write-ups that people have about Harvard Business School and Harvard University here. I only pasted some snippets, so you should go to the individual links to read more. I am not going to give my own reflection yet. I will let the experiences soak inside me for now. Hopefully in a few months, or by graduation, I will give my own take.

In the meantime, subscribe to this new newsletter. I intend to share whatever that I have learned across many topics in a weekly(ish) basis

Experiences and reflections

A couple of testimonies from recent Harvard Business School students / graduates below.

Dealing with HBS as a country club

One question I was asked by a 2+2 who never ended up at HBS was ‘Do people at HBS think big?’. I found this was a classic SF/Tech question, that was always optimizing for large outcomes to change the world.

The mentality was overwhelmingly of individuals who have optimized for staying on the path. This can be seen in the difficulty of many to deprioritize clearly defined goals like academics. At the same time, HBS is a turning point for some people who are looking to test their professional risk appetite and willingness to take the road less travelled. Anecdotally, those who end up dropping out during HBS seem to be ~10%, which seems pretty high.

I felt that people in HBS were far more likely to optimize for happiness (both professional and emotional), as opposed to a grand concept of ‘changing the world’. To be clear, I think this is a far more holistic and healthier view of the world. The vast majority of people in HBS would be extremely successful professionally in ways that are far broader than any individual will fully appreciate. Success can be found in inheriting and successfully managing a large traditional conglomerate with family politics, running for local politics and doing good for local communities, managing regional, profitable businesseses.

An extremely common thread was that a lot of people, even if they were roughly sure of the career they would likely end up in, was to ask questions around what they really wanted to achieve in life, and where they should go. Questions that I heard a lot of included:

• How do I know if I am adequately happy in the career that I have?

• Am I achieving enough? Am I as driven as I should be?

• How do others define what a fulfilling life is?

One thing I respected tremendously about HBS was the emphasis on personal vulnerability. With a genuine desire to understand more about oneselves, and a desire to find common-folks within HBS, there is an overwhelming desire by many people to share personal traumas, experiences, biases about themselves to the Class and Section, through MyTakes (sessions focused around sharing personal experiences/stories from your background) and other sharing sessions. On some level, HBS generates a difficult to replicate feeling that everyone is a peer, and that we are all collectively going through something unique and rare

Harvard Business School: A Veteran in Tech's Reflection

This chaotic period set the expectation bar high. Like wow. Was everyone I would meet going to be this incredible?

Well actually no. I mean. Technically yes, but no. Like.

Everyone was GOOD. Perfect scores on standardized tests, extraordinarily gilded resumes, and amazing life experiences abounded, but I could also feel a visceral, emergent phenomenon.

I got bucketed.

Like, I watched something strange happen in real time through repeated trials of meeting hundreds of people for about 20 minutes each as people heard my story. I got to see how competent strangers thin-sliced me into their brain over and over again.

I felt the exact moments when people stopped paying attention to what I was saying because they decided this whatever military guy from Georgia couldn’t help them get their next private equity internship or job or something.

I saw the instant the light of focus fade in their eyes as conversational autopilot took over and they subtly searched for another person to chat up.

It was a masterclass in identifying narcissitic utilitarianism and a great lesson for me.

The military has these people too (so does everywhere else so start paying attention), yet there is usually at least a veneer of a group mission that keeps everyone working (mostly) in the same direction. I had never been exposed to the raw, unadulterated version of that person. It was also a neat foreshadowing of how military veterans and other career switchers experience a fundamentally different MBA program than those “on the path”.

For the uninitiated, there is an almost direct career racing line in the global economy to HBS.

Let’s assume you’re one of the #blessed ones. You’ll often start your life with a prep school like Andover, Roxbury Latin, or Hotchkiss. Through these streamlined academic and extracurricular powerhouses you’ve now secured a ~40% chance to get into an Ivy League school (even higher if it’s a “near Ivy” - as the not quite as prestigiousclass of “2nd tier” colleges are sometimes called). So you get in somewhere good.

Once an Ivy or “near Ivy” admission spot is locked up, you’re now in a position to convert this dazzling collegiate experience into a series of blue chip, pre-approved internships summer after summer. Don’t worry about the details, your peer groups will let you know where to apply (Goldman and McKinsey and maybe Google for rounding out the resume). With these in hand - you’re well on your way to a money printing career path in Consulting or Banking (and then eventually Private Equity or Venture Capital).

Some people get “on the path” even earlier while others merge onto the career success superhighway after their non-target undergrad. There’s naturally a bit of internal hierarchy of relative “on the path”-ness based on your entry point, but for the most part once you’re on, you’re on.

If you made it “on the path”, congratulations! You’ve statistically maximized your chances of getting into a top MBA program.

Don’t believe me? Fair. HBS does a good job inconspicuously omitting statisticsbreaking out the career [update September 2022 - looks like they added these] and academic backgrounds [not this though] of its admits (note the list of pre-career fields without actual % numbers), but the “niche” industry of MBA admissions consulting (which is big enough that there is an additionally niche(r) industry that ranks MBA Admissions Consultants) cracked this case wide open with some open source intelligence gathering and compiled a comprehensive history of the HBS Class of 2020.

Here’s the 2020 data:

• About 1 in 5 HBS students went to Harvard, Penn, Stanford, Yale, or Princeton for their undergrad

• 24 similar undergraduate schools degreed about half the student body

• 38% of the class had worked in Consulting or Banking before HBS

• 21% of the class worked at one of three top Consulting companies - McKinsey, BCG, and Bain - before school

• MIT, Wharton, and Stanford MBA’s are in about the same boat at 43%, 51%, and 40% Banking/Financial Services + Consulting respectively.

If you were unaware of this Konami code to phenomenally influential seats in business and government (like I was), you’re not alone.

Normal people have no clue

Reflections below might be interesting for the long term view: Reflections from the Class of 1963 (it’s a book on its own, so you can go read it directly in the link)

Some observations on class profile / institutional decisions

Creators and Rulers

The comment below on EY's post (not written by me) is, in my judgement, a more accurate description of the business (and political) elite as a whole. It describes the Rulers -- people who run the world on a day to day basis. (I doubt EY would have been nearly as impressed by these people -- they fit his original stereotype of business executives.) The Creators and the Rulers are two partially disjoint groups within the elite.

I went to Harvard Business School, a self-styled pantheon for the business elite.

The average person was:
- top decile intellect (though probably not higher)
- top decile emotional intelligence (broadly construed - socially aware, self-aware, persuasion skills, etc.)
- highly conscientious / motivated

Few were truly brilliant intellectually. Few were academically distinguished (plenty of good ivy league degrees, but very few brilliant mathematical minds, etc.).

A good number will be at Davos in 20 years time.

Performance beyond a certain level in the vast majority of fields (and business is certainly one of them) is principally a function of having no cognitive and personal qualities which fall below a (high, but not insanely high) hygene threshold -- and then multiplied by determination, of course.

Conscientiousness, in fact, is the best single stable predictor of job success for complex jobs (well established in personality psychometrics).

Very high intelligence actually negatively correlates with career success (Kotter), probably because smart people enjoy solving problems, rather than making money selling things -- which outside of quant trading, show business and sport is really the only way of being really successful.

There are some extremely intelligent people in business (by which I mean high IQ, not just wise or experienced), but you tend to find them in the corners of the business landscape with the richest intellectual pastures: some areas of law, venture capital, some cutting edge technology fields.

Steve Ballmer - for instance - might deafen you, but he would not dazzle you.

To be precise, the Rulers are not just the most driven among the group described above, but also the luckiest. The Creators are actually drawn from a smaller population than the Rulers. In the world of Creators the ability threshold is higher and the volatility, although significant, is not as large as for HBS types trying to claw / smarm / cheat their way to the top.

In response to comments, further clarification:

Success in the Creator segment of the elite is more highly correlated with specific, observable capabilities like brainpower or creativity. A startup founder (or entrepreneur) has to have actually had (or at least recognized) a good idea and then, perhaps with help of team, implemented it. There is noise (luck), but signal to noise is not hopelessly small.

In comparison, I think the selection of Rulers from the population of people who, e.g., are admitted to HBS, has a significantly larger stochastic component, so that, when you actually meet one of the Rulers, they tend to resemble the HBS population as a whole (they are the subset who won the lottery), as opposed to a sub-population that has been further selected for ability (e.g., the smartest or most charming or most determined HBS people). If the stochastic component dominates, the most successful ones will resemble the average (you can't directly detect that they are actually the "most lucky" HBS people), not a particular tail. I am more familiar with the Creator population, but have met plenty of Rulers (typically, MBAs who have climbed the ladder within a big organization and are now at or near the top), and my impressions seem to confirm the model I described above -- there are more supermen among the Creators, and more boring suits among the Rulers. However, as the commenter above notes, there ARE areas in business where you tend to find higher concentrations of supermen. Perhaps you could say that those are areas of business where there is a well-functioning meritocracy, or special abilities really matter.

Although the claim on intellectual horsepower was challenged here (on the comment section) - Competent Elites

The average person was: top decile intellect (though probably not higher)

Notes:

1) HBS's latest incoming class has a median GMAT score of 730 (http://www.hbs.edu/mba/admissi... )

2) Mensa, which is supposed to represent the top 2% of the population, accepts a GMAT score above the 95th %-ile as qualification for membership (http://www.us.mensa.org/join/t... )

3) A GMAT score of 730 is at the 96th %-ile (http://www.testmasters.net/Gma... )

Putting it all together, the median HBS student is at about the 98th %-ile in IQ. So the 'top decile' estimate is off by a factor of 5.

I didn’t know that GMAT can be used as substitute for Mensa’s IQ test.

Defining Merit - (this is a bit geared towards Harvard College, the undergraduate program instead)

... Brinton, a former Rhodes Scholar with a broad historic and comparative perspective on higher education, posed a sharp question to clarify the issue at hand: "Do we want an Ecole Normale Superieure, a 'cerebral school' aimed solely at preparing students for the academic professions?" Bender's answer was a resounding no. But to Wilson the matter was not so clear: the basic issue was which students "could take advantage of the unique intellectual opportunity which Harvard has to offer." In a barb clearly aimed at Bender, Wilson proclaimed that "he just did not accept potential financial return ... as the basis for showing favoritism to Harvard sons who were less well qualified academically than other admission candidates."

Having been under assault by segments of the faculty for almost two years, at first by Holton, then by Kistiakowsky, and now by Wilson, Bender apparently decided that he had had enough. In a meeting of the committee a month after this testy exchange, he announced his resignation as dean of Admissions and Financial Aids, and stated that he would prefer neither to affix his signature to the final report of the subcommittee nor to withhold his vote of approval. His departure was set for July 1, 1960, and he agreed to continue to meet with the subcommittee until it completed its mission.

It is interesting thatEcole Normale Superieure(ENS) features so prominently in Harvard's internal discussions. Along with Ecole Polytechnique, ENS is at the pinnacle of the strictly meritocratic French system of higher education. (See earlier post:Les Grandes Ecoles.)

The University of Chicago is an example of a school that followed the rigorous, meritocratic path, and suffered a consequential decline in social cachet and financial standing. Idealism damaged Chicago's position in the competition against Harvard and others. As one realistic Harvard commenter noted, one needs to "admit the bottom 10 percent to continue to attract the top 10 percent" -- even the intelligentsia value the social cachet of their alma mater.

Harvard much prefers that its graduates ascend to positions of power, in place of graduates of Stanford or Berkeley. But do the differences between these schools have any effect on the actual quality of leadership? Does it matter to the Nation? Whose interests are at stake?

Typology used for all applicants, at least as late as 1988:

1. S First-rate scholar in Harvard departmental terms.

2. D Candidate's primary strength is his academic strength, but it doesn't look strong enough to quality as an S (above).

3. A All-Amercan‚ healthy, uncomplicated athletic strengths and style, perhaps some extracurricular participation, but not combined with top academic credentials.

4. W Mr. School‚ significant extracurricular and perhaps (but not necessarily) athletic participation plus excellent academic record.

5. X Cross-country style‚ steady man who plugs and plugs and plugs, won't quit when most others would. Gets results largely through stamina and consistent effort.

6. P PBH [Phillips Brooks House] style: in activities and personal concerns.

7. C Creative in music, art, writing.

8. B Boondocker‚ unsophisticated rural background.

9. T Taconic, culturally depressed background, low income.

10. K Krunch‚ main strength is athletic, prospective varsity athlete. [ Sometimes also "H Horse" :-) ]

11. L Lineage‚ candidate probably couldn't be admitted without the extra plus of being a Harvard son, a faculty son, or a local boy with ties to the university community.

12. O Other‚ use when none of the above are applicable.

The next two year will be interesting.