I often get the feeling that all roads lead to Harvard Business School. Such is the institution’s gravitational pull that even an idea for a column that starts on quite a different trajectory gets dragged back into its orbit. Research leads inexorably to an HBS faculty member; a blog post hosted by the Harvard Business Review; a book by Harvard Business Publishing; or — most likely — an executive, banker or consultant with a Harvard MBA.
By the late 1970s, one in five of the top three officers of Fortune 500 companies was an HBS graduate. The crimson-tinted tide of HBS-educated business leaders has receded a little since then, or been diluted by the rise of other schools. Yet when the Financial Times counted MBAs among the chief executives of the world’s 500 largest companies last year, HBS alumni topped the list.
A qualification from Harvard Business School is a “golden passport” to “life in the upper class”, The New York Times wrote in 1978. That is the title of a powerful new book by Duff McDonald, which takes aim at the fat target presented by the school and hits it — repeatedly.