Revisited: ‘The Class The Dollars Fell On’

The guys I most admired were the self-made men who didn’t necessarily come from wealthy backgrounds, who had served in the military and had this broader perspective, and even after graduating Harvard with an MBA realized they were going to have to get their hands dirty. There was a guy named Ned Dewey who ended up being a major investment guy. He started working for Gulf Oil. Well, he started working at a gas station in Harlem, Harvard MBA or no Harvard MBA. I think there is value for kids now to realize there is no shame in getting your hands dirty and there is value in learning a business from the ground up.

And wasn’t Dewey the member of the class who famously told you that he would “just as soon sleep with a python than hire an MBA in the 80s who he said would suck your Rolodex out of you?”

Yes, that was Ned. He was a very gruff guy. That’s an interesting point you raise because one of the pieces of advice that I would offer to younger people and MBA candidates is that you really need to have an understanding that there are trends in MBAs as there are trends in everything else. I think it can be a very, very expensive crap shoot to gear your education to a trendy thing at the time because inevitably it’s going to change. When the ‘49ers graduated, I think there were 653 graduates. Only six guys went to Wall Street–less than one percent of the class. It just wasn’t considered where the action was or considered a place where you could make a meaningful difference.

Zero guys became management consultants. Zero. Not one. By the eighties, when the book came out, management consulting was the hot industry. Finance and going to Wall Street was getting hot. That has obviously changed several times since then. Part of the reason I wanted to reissue the book and part of what I hope the book will have to say to the next generation of readers is to pay attention to the things that don’t change about business, the things that don’t change about human beings, the things that don’t change about human nature and motivation and what people really want and value and what you’ll feel good about at the end of your career.

How conscious were the men that there were no women in the class? Did they believe that was unfair and wrong?

There was a range of opinion about that. Some of the guys were very old fashioned, men’s club guys and thought this is a man’s club. But I think particularly later in their lives, most of the men thought, ‘Well of course it was unfair.’ Some of the men had daughters who wanted to go to Harvard for an MBA. I think by and large they were a pretty enlightened group. Similarly, there were no blacks in the class. And certainly, by the time I was writing the book, everybody felt there should be blacks in the school. Everybody felt there should be more international kids, too. So except for a few real crusty old diehards, I think they were totally fine and in favor of admitting women.

Larry, I remember reading and very much enjoying the book when it first came out in 1986. I picked it up thinking it could be just an entertaining read, but found it had more depth and meaning than I thought possible.

I wanted to do more than just tell entertaining stories about a bunch of rich guys. I wanted to say something. I wanted to examine how a certain group of fortunate characters had chosen to live their lives, and what those choices revealed about our culture.

How did the ‘49ers define personal success? What did they see as the proper balance between ambition and responsibility? If business was a game, what were the implications of playing it the way it was played in mid-twentieth century America? Were we rewarding leaders or only managers, creators or mere shufflers of assets? Had we, in 1986, already grown too comfortable, too smugly secure in our prosperity? Had our business leaders noticed that the world was changing, or were we in some early stage of coasting toward decline?

These were the sorts of questions I was trying to address in The Big Time, and I believe they are even more pressing now than on the day of the book’s original appearance.

DON’T MISS: WHEN WOMEN WERE ONLY 4% OF A HARVARD CLASS or HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL’S ORIGINAL POETS