Book Review: What They Teach You at Harvard Business School

It is not often that I have felt compelled to email the author of a book after reading it, but that was the case today: a compulsion to connect with someone who spoke tons of truth and wisdom into an environment that contains so much folly.

Philip Delves Broughton worked as a journalist for most of his life, before deciding to uproot with his wife and child to study his MBA at Harvard full time. Reading a business book written by a writer was like lifting the cup to my lips expecting water and getting Grapetizer. How refreshing to have someone skilled with the pen using well crafed words to keep you excited and interested in what the numbers were saying.

In addition to this, I loved Philip's very balanced view on what it means to be weathly. Graduating as a 2% minority in his final year as graduates not going to pre-placed jobs, you get wrapped up in the turmoil that became his own: Do you get sucked into the Capitalist system, though you know better than most it's inner workings and the strain you will put on all other factors of your life, or do you place your faith in your ability to carve the future you design for yourself?

Along Philip's journey, the reader gets exposed to so much economic and financial insight and wisdom, but these lessons are so perfectly wrapped into a meta-narative that you hardly feel like you are learning much. For this reason I read the book slowly, and used a pen to underline the juice that I will re-read many times in the next few years.

If business and enreprenurship is your thing too, then don't hesitate to give this one a read. I found it quite novel.