HBS Alum Disses Recent MBA Changes

Arguably Harvard Business School’s least favorite MBA alum, Philip Delves Broughton is back again with still more scathing criticism of his alma mater. In a new interview with the BBC, Broughton says that recent curriculum changes requiring Harvard students to do global immersion trips and start micro-businesses are more like “playing dress up” than preparing MBAs for the real world of competition.

“When a real entrepreneur looks at (what Harvard has done), it’s like the Fisher-Price version of entrepreneurship,” claims Broughton, who is a member of Harvard’s Class of 2006. “You sit in a lavishly endowed glass building and play with blocks and claim to be an entrepreneur. That’s nothing close to what being a real entrepreneur is like. And i think when real entrepreneurs look at this, that’s exactly what they think. That’s the flaw in this. Is it just window dressing?”

Broughton, a former Daily Telegraph writer who went to Harvard for an MBA and documented his experience in a highly critical 2008 book called “Ahead of the Curve,” was interviewed by BBC correspondent Peter Day. In “Battle of the Business Schools,” Day traveled to Boston to hear first hand about the changes being made in management education at two of the world’s top teaching institutions. HBS and the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology. He reports on the growing rivalry between the schools for top students and teachers and contends that the rivalry is having an impact on the way management and entrepreneurship is taught.

Day’s critique of business education is a familiar one, more of a tired cliche’ that is not all that convincing. He claims that business schools teach graduates to be overly confident and cocky, and he notes that many outsiders have put at least some of the blame for the 2008 financial crisis “on the slickness and self-confidence exuded by the MBA graduates with a top business school education.”

HARVARD TEACHES A ‘VERY DAMAGING’ TRAIT: SELF-CONFIDENCE, CLAIMS DAY

Still, the most compelling parts of the report are Broughton’s criticism and an interview with HBS Dean Nitin Nohria in which Nohria strongly disagrees with an assertion by Day that the Harvard experience teaches students a “very damaging” trait: self-confidence. “I don’t believe that, retorts Nohria. “I actually think there is a big difference between self-confidence and hubris.

“You always want people to have self-confidence but there’s nothing incompatible between having self-confidence and having humility. one of the things we’re trying to do for our students are all examples of saying, ‘Look, in the case method, you can put yourself in the shoes of the CEO and say if I was CEO this is what I would do. And it’s easy to believe that just because you said it you could do it. Now we want to put you back into the world and teach you a little bit more of that humility.”

Broughton is trotted out by the BBC to pooh-pooh the changes at Harvard brought about under Nohria’s leadership and questions the value of an MBA education today.

‘THE OLD FASHIONED MBA JOBS CAN BE DONE FOR MUCH LESS MONEY ELSEWHERE’

“The nature of general management is changing,” says Broughton. “Outsourcing is inching ever farther upwards, eating away at white collar jobs that were once thought untouchable. The old fashioned MBA jobs can be done for much less money elsewhere.

“This isn’t just about HBS,” he continues. “Fundamentally, if you were a smart 23 or 24 year old wondering do I go get an MBA, there are a few issues that leap out at you:

One is that this is an enormously expensive degree, and it just seems to be getting more expensive at a rate faster than inflation and that doesn’t even include the opportunity costs of a forgone salary.

AN MBA EDUCATION IS REALLY ABOUT NETWORKS AND CLUBS,’ JUST PURE ELITISM’

“A lot of MBA students, perhaps not at Harvard or Stanford, are really struggling to find jobs. Salaries aren’t increasing at a rapid rate so the debt burdens are going up and the rewards at the end of it are going down so why would you go? (MBA degrees) are too expensive. They are not particularly useful in the way they were. All you are left with is these kind of nebulous things like networks and clubs and who you meet and that’s just pure elitism.”

In the feature, the BBC also interviews MIT Sloan Dean David Schmittlein as well as current students at both Harvard and MIT who speak favorably about their MBA experiences.

But it is Broughton’s criticism that rings louder. “If you ask older business people they say, ‘If I was starting out today, i would head straight to Shanghai or Mumbai. I would head east because that’s where all the growth is. Then the question is why wouldn’t you go there for business school?”

What is his advice? He quotes Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg in saying that “the best thing you can do is learn to code. The vast majority of new businesses have a huge technology component. I would want to learn about technology first before accounting. You can put together a really first rate business education for yourself at a fraction of the cost. Get to know the right people and move to the right place. That is what i advise any smart person to do.”

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