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.One man who had worked for the Coalition Provisional Authority described the conditions on arriving in Baghdad in 2003 as “the worst imaginable.” The administrative hit squad flown in from Washington to establish a postwar Iraq found themselves huddled around a single light in a vast, empty palace.Their computers had been left on the airport runway and had melted into the asphalt.They had no means of communication.While most of the room gasped at these tales from the front, Nico put up his hand and asked if the former CPA guy thought the invasion was the inspiration of American oil companies.He was given a very cold shoulder for this, but he didn’t seem to mind and stayed for the rest of the talk, leaning against a column at the front of the classroom.I thought his question was poorly timed, but I quite admired his cool.We were trying to find a bar where the trek organizers had arranged a mixer for HBS and Stanford MBAs, but we had become hopelessly lost in the suburban twilight, driving back and forth between the elegant streets surrounding Stanford and the Hispanic edge of Palo Alto, searching for our destination amid the taco stands, gas stations, and sprawling bungalows.Nico told me he had left his friends and family in Romania to give himself a few years in America to earn his MBA and work for a big American firm, either in technology or finance.Then he would go back home.He had found HBS to be a mostly ludicrous experience.“The Americans just talk even when they have nothing to say,” he said.“I feel like I’m paying all this money just so that these American kids can have an audience and say they know this Romanian guy.”Like many of the foreigners, Nico had found HBS’s claim to be an international school bogus.Many of the purported international students had spent so much of their lives in the United States that they brought very little international flavor.There were Japanese students who had lived in the United States since they were ten, Nigerians who had moved to Texas in their teens, Princeton-educated Indians.These students may have dressed up for International Week, but they were culturally close enough to the Americans as to be indistinguishable from them.By the time we found the mixer, it was almost over.There were three forlorn-looking HBS-ers perched around a small table.None of the Stanford students had shown up.Nico and I thought about buying a beer, but it was too sad.We got back in our car, drove away, and got lost again.Chapter NineInsecure OverachieversYou thought we were going to be the intellectual elite.Well, we’re not.We’re not the hereditary elite, and we’re certainly not the artistic or creative elite.What we’re being groomed as is the competent elite.Get used to it.we’re being trained to be the guys who stay sober at the party.We’re being handed the tools to get out there and run things.The Big Time: The Harvard Business School’s Most Successful Class And How It Shaped America, By Laurence ShamesJust before returning for the second half of the RC, I met Justin, my friend from Analytics, for breakfast in New York.We went to a Cuban café on the Upper West Side.Soon we would have to find jobs for the summer, and he was trying to figure out how deep into business he wanted to go.The same people who had encouraged him to go to business school were now advising him to spend a couple of years in investment banking.People in New York took you seriously if you had spent a couple of years on Wall Street, they said.If nothing else, it showed you could work hard and survive.Justin was not so sure.“I don’t know if I can do it,” he told me, sipping his Cuban coffee.“You’ve seen me doing finance.It’s just not my core competence.Listen to me.I never said ‘core competence’ before HBS.”“Do you want to make a career in finance?”“Not really.”“Then why do it?”“Because it might be useful.I feel like everyone else at that friggin’ HBS has done two years in banking or consulting, and if you haven’t, companies just won’t take you seriously.”“Fine, then go ahead.Climb into the belly of the beast.”“Don’t just say that.Why don’t you climb into the belly, too?”“Sometimes I want to.I think it would do me good.But then I hear about what it involves and I just know that I can’t.What’s the point in hearing everyone say ‘put your family first,’ ‘be around for your kids while they’re growing up,’ and then taking a job when you know you’ll be working nonstop? I’d like to do it for my career, and I think it might be interesting, but I know I’d hate the demands [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]